Each day we encounter or enact dozens of apparently banal and unimportant events and objects.  We brush our teeth; we flip channels (if we have a TV); we participate in bull sessions with roommates and friends; we find a school newspaper in the classroom, pick it up, read it, and leave it where we found it; we work out; we wear baseball caps.  None seems to deserve comment; we have too many other "important" things to attend to. 

However, anthropologists make a living by minutely examining everyday lives in cultures other than their own.  What may seem relatively unimportant to those being observed often holds intense interest for anthropologists.  They look closely at religious and political structures, of course, but they also discuss what we might call "popular cultures" for clues about the way people think about themselves and the world they live in and create.  Often, such ethnographers shed light on their own culture by showing that there is no universal type of social system.

This type of anthropological analysis has a great deal to tell us about race, ethnicity, and, more generally, difference.  For this assignment, I want you to play the anthropologist.  Beginning today, keep a daily journal of your "anthropological" observations.  Focus your observations on the ways in which people negotiate human difference.  If you choose, you can focus specifically on questions of race and ethnicity.  If these areas don't interest you, feel free to imagine difference more broadly: for example, differences of class, gender, sexual orientation, age, bodies, dress, and so forth. Look around you and pay close attention to the ways other people behave in particular situations; think about why people behave in such ways.  Does anyone derive personal benefit from these behaviors?  Who participates?  Who is excluded?  What can you deduce about our larger culture—the ways we have been socialized to think, respond, and act—from these observations?  Nothing is too insignificant for you to think about.  Think hard, but be willing to play around and have fun.

I want you to write at least once a day—perhaps for fifteen minutes—on your observations.  You may, of course, write more.  Feel free to carry over ideas from day to day, but I hope that you will use this opportunity to examine as many different things as possible.  From these journal entries you will cull a topic that you will explore at greater length in a draft and revision.  I will collect your journal entries along with your drafts.  After spring break we will talk about this assignment in greater detail.  For now it is important that you begin to look around and ask questions where you usually do not.  Take nothing for granted.