This course explores the ways in which objects and material culture embody personal narrative. Moving back and forth from ephemeral traces of events and experiences to the culturally invested luxury goods that create legacy to the objects that facilitate daily life, this class will use, as its primary references, examples that draw from queer and African American cultures to underscore the potential of objects to tell the stories that not only reflect majority traditions and experiences but those of the disenfranchised, the details of whose lives are often obscured. In addition to readings that will provide background for class discussion, student will be asked to play the roles of detectives, archeologists, and curators at various sites around New York City. Each student will also be asked to create an annotated material record that reveals the public and private lives of one individual. That record may consist of texts, objects or any variety of media chosen or designed by the student. This blogs serves as an archive for the work done in the context of this course and related materials that become relevant to this exploration.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

If He Walks and Talks Like a Monk, but Has His Hand Out...Panhandlers Dressed as Monks Confound New Yorkers

If He Walks and Talks Like a Monk, but Has His Hand Out...Panhandlers Dressed as Monks Confound New Yorkers 
The article written by Joseph Goldstein and Jeffrey E. Singer is about a particular group of people found in the Times Square. These are the people of Chinese descent with shaved heads and dressed in orange, brown or gray robes. They offer good wishes and peace to the people, offer them a bracelet or a shiny amulet and ask for the donation of minimum 20 dollars. They have a notebook on which they write the name of people giving them the donations. There are women dressed in as Taoist nuns adopting the same tactics of begging and grabbing money. These people have been confronted many times, but they are always evasive of questions and telling their religion, temple and identity. Similar types of people are found in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong as well. Few of them have been arrested for aggressive begging as well. These fake monks are the source of defamation of Buddhism around the world.


Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/nyregion/panhandlers-dressed-as-monks-confound-new-yorkers.html

kun
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