I don't think this is the right word

?

should be

angry, when

courtship

While this is true, the main hypothesis of the piece isn't about kinship, which is how this makes it sound

These are true statements, but they're so general that I'm not sure they're really necessary here?

good

this makes it sound like they have one culture and everyone else has another, single culture

You need a comma here instead of a period

use his full first name here and put it first, as you do in the first sentence of your summary

excellent assessment of why the article is important

Very interesting point. Raising a new question the reading points us to is a great strategy for assessing its scholarly contribution.

avoid "I guess", "I think" etc. You can just say "a question this article raises is whether, knowing the brutal history..."

Great--your overview above of each of the situations is excellent, and here you concisely say what form the evidence takes and why it supports the overall argument.

he does mention Navajos at the end, but does he compare them thoroughly enough that this is really part of his argument in the article? not sure...

Excellent! (you might also mention that the uncertainty is related to people's social status)

Well phrased

Should have a period at the end following the page numbers.

comma goes before the closing quotes

I don't know if it's so much that they see it as "the best way to communicate" but rather that silence is appropriate and expected in some situations

don't need "page" here, just the number

Avoid "I think" and "I feel" etc. Just say "This example is easy to understand..."

what evidence does he use to support this argument?

this makes it sound like the author is reading the article...

You can remove "while reading this article" since it's fine to just say "the author shows..."

Yes, this is a good way to summarize the article's contribution

You don't so much need to define language for your reader. But in any case, if this is a direct quote you need a citation so the reader knows where it came from.

I believe in the article Basso outlines a different reason that Apaches use silence in this and other situations

Is this a point Basso makes in the article?

good concise summary of the main point

remove this period

it's not about what silence "truly" is, but rather how silence works in one culture, for one group of people

This is a summary, so it's not necessary to discuss what you know or don't know

Yes! Very good point.

Basso

don't capitalize these words

use a period instead of a comma here

Hmmm... I like the opening with the question. But is silence really an "innate" language? Yes, all people have the innate capacity to not speak, but not speaking doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, suggesting there are different codes/languages for using silence

yes...so if it's culturally variable, it's not innate

Basso

Why is this here?

cut this word out

why would it be interesting or important that there are similarities among cultural or linguistic practices that at first seem very different?

Good summary of the overall argument or hypothesis

yes, this is a crucial part of the argument

which hypothesis?

While language is a feature in this article and used to introduce the author's argument, the main point is not how Inuit language is different

A summary should address why the reading is important to any reader, rather than just you

Yes, precisely, this is one of her main conclusions. But she also addresses why this is important, once she draws this conclusion.

more specifically, it demonstrates how Inuit emotions are different

This comma should be a period. These are two complete sentences.

Good, this is clear way to tell your reader how Briggs is using evidence, and another good use of an example

when citing a page number for a direct quote, use the journal page number, not the PDF page number. So, this would be page 160

This is good, very helpful to offer an example of how she is making this association

In this kind of writing, you don't need to cite in parentheses with a page number unless it's a direct quote. Otherwise, we already know that you're referring to the article you're summarizing

who

this should be a comma

avoid language like this in a summary, since the goal is to summarize what the author said, rather than point out what you found interesting

Yes, this is definitely much closer to what she says she studied. Although the article says she came to be interested in this through her experience there, and your summary makes it sound like that's what she went there specifically to study.

I don't see anything in the article that suggests this was her goal...?

journal articles go in quotation marks, not italics

You can omit things like this. It's redundant, since given the fact that you're writing about this article, I know that you've chosen it.

Why is this an important implication? Which cultural factors is Gaudio specifically talking about here? Why should the reader care that what they think of as "casual" conversation is actually an effect of the "cultural-ideological processes of global capitalism" (659)?

Is this an instance of casualness?

pretty sure (but not certain) movie titles should be italicized, not in quotes

good use of direct quotation here, with page number citation at the end of the sentence

Another important point for his argument, and one that could also use a bit of clarification as to why it's important

I'm not sure what you mean by "intentionality" here. This might benefit from a little clarification, especially as to why or how this intentionality is important to the phenomenon and/or to his argument.

customers'

Yes, this is an important part of his argument. You might expand on why the scheduling part is relevant. Why does he take time to highlight this, in light of the fact that he's discussing something that's purported to be "casual"? And why is this important in relation to modern capitalism?

Good transition

minor distinction, but I think "economic" might be more precise than "financial"?

This paragraph is an excellent summary of what evidence the author uses to support his argument.

good point, and it underscores Gaudio's assertion that coffeetalk is a phenomenon that is rooted in certain class-differentiated assumptions about social interaction.

Excellent! You're right in that this is not what we'd typically consider "ethnographic" yet at the same time (imho) it's an example of the phenomenon he's talking about, it's easy to understand, and (at least for those who've seen the movie) it's easy to relate to.

good observation

Another great way to frame a summary, and again an excellent restatement of Gaudio's argument.

This is precisely the kind of thing you want to say in a summary, and in addition your paraphrase of his argument is spot-on.

Excellent, succinct restatement of Gaudio's argument.

Book titles should be in italics, without quotation marks. So, this would be "...the book Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, by Jonathan Rosa, the author..."

This sentence could use some rewording for clarity. Specifically, "the root of these students" is unclear. Also I'm not sure "invoke" is the right word here.

Good example of an assessment of the author's contribution to scholarly understanding--in other words, a good answer to the question "what is surprising" about the author's findings, i.e. how it advances our understanding of the particular phenomenon being studied (in this case, bilingualism)

Does Rosa (appear to) believe this, or does he state this explicitly?

This appears to be an ethical (i.e. a should or ought) statement...is this an assertion Rosa is making? Or is this an assertion you're making? If you're summarizing Rosa's argument, make that more clear. If this is an assertion you're making, it should be made less explicitly in the context of a reading summary (which isn't to say I disagree with you, just that the summary genre is not the place to make explicit statements about one's own beliefs).

This clause of this sentence doesn't seem to be grammatically correct...?

Is this what Rosa is saying?

Especially in summaries, avoid "I believe" or "I think" or "I would say". Just say, e.g. "the main points are…" or "It's vital that issues like these are discussed…"

Use single quotes if this is a direct quote that contains quotation marks--so, "The notion of a 'non-non' is an explicit example..."

excellent, concise restatement of Rosa's findings

great. This is a good restatement of Rosa's argument. However, I think this is the first time you've mentioned "raciolinguistic ideology" and that that ideology is what's doing the reconceptualization of bilingualism. Saying this sooner would have helped me understand this paragraph better.

be careful with statements like this... how do we know what "the original definition of bilingualism" is? wouldn't this vary depending on who, when, and for what purpose it was being "defined"?

perhaps, but Rosa is looking at the definition of bilingualism within a particular ideological system that he's identified, and an ideological system can't exactly be contested or evaluated as ignorant by comparing it with a different ideological system (e.g., neurolinguistics or whatever discipline Nacamulli is in--which isn't to say Nacamulli is incorrect, but rather that it's like comparing apples to organges).

To clarify, it seems Rosa is saying that within the ideology of languagelessness, an "inverted conceptualization of bilingualism" is created, and within this framework bilingualism becomes redefined as deficiency. So it would help to clarify this when you say that the definition became faulty "to people," because he's talking about a specific group of people here.

Excellent point. However, is this an argument the author is making, or is this your assertion? Typically in a summary we want to stick to summarizing what the author is saying and avoid advancing our own arguments (at least so explicitly, since in a way we're always approaching something from a certain viewpoint).

Parse this quote

I think these might be discussion questions, but you don't need these in an article summary.

Will, an

Yes!! Thank you for including the italicized How

It's important to note that this mode of understanding food habits is one the author does not agree with. This disagreement might be subtle to someone not accustomed to reading anthro stuff, but he totally disses this approach to understanding table manners

fulfill

Excellent. This is a very significant point of this article

not necessary. You can say

In "Chinese Table Manners..., Eugene Cooper discusses..."

you don't need to say "author" here since it's implied that he's writing.

comma not necessary here

italicize How in the title

this word should be italicized in the title

this should read

One very common point

technically Cooper isn't quoting here, you are. You might say

Cooper writes, "One..."

hahahah, yes this is definitely true :)

Again, is this a point the author is making? He is comparing customs to the US, but this first sentence sounds like you're saying that in the US you won't be considered disrespectful if you don't follow expected patterns of behavior. Also I"m not sure I agree that there's no taboo against being greedy when eating in groups in the US...?

In this kind of writing, you don't need to include parenthetical page number references unless it's a direct quote, since we assume that everything you're saying are the ideas presented by the author whose reading you're summarizing.

I appreciate your comparison here with the US, as comparison is a very important part of anthropology. However, since this is a reading summary, it should stick mainly to summarizing what the author has said. Did Cooper say this about US customs?

Also, to be a bit contrarian, is it really the case in the US that no one ever eats something they don't like? I can imagine a situation where someone would finish something even if they didn't love it "just to be polite"...

culture, no capital C

the western hemisphere? or the west?

Cooper

remove this hyphen

Meneley is not making an argument about olive oil's benefits. The article is about how people talk about olive oil, but again she's not presenting information that is meant to change people's perceptions or ideas about olive oil itself.

Based on what follows this quotation in the text, I would say it's less about what's involved in creating olive oil and more about how what people say about olive oil needs to be understood in terms of class and social hierarchy, which is not considered by many of the people who compare appreciating olive oil to appreciating wine.

See my comment above. And again, it's not necessarily about proving that people were wrong about olive oil being special, rather bringing up contradictions. But this doesn't mean she's saying she has the answer about what makes it "truly" good.

Yes, you're onto something here, especially with the idea of stigma. If natural-ness is seen as good in discourses about health, the fact that olive oil (all of it, not just artisanal) is a product that requires a fair amount of technology to produce would be stigmatizing, so people find different ways to distinguish their product, one of which is being "artisanal"... and yet even to do that they rely on lots of "technoscientifc" means, This suggests that if we think of "natural" as something that's not technological, how can anything be natural if even proving it's natural involves technology?

It's not accurate to say she's interested in showing how people are wrong and that she's presenting a right answer, and she's not making a claim about olive oil's health benefits. She is showing how other people make claims about olive oil's health benefits, and about other benefits, but she's not so much doing so to prove one side wrong and the other side right, but to show how they contradict each other, even if both might be true.

Again, not so much about people being victims of marketing strategies, especially if opposing that to some real reason that olive oil is truly good.

This makes it sound like the ideas in the first part of this sentence are a sort of mythology and the "true" story is scientific/nutritional evidence, but I don't think that's what Meneley is getting at in this article. It's not so much about opposing people's ideas about health to the facts of scientific nutrition, but rather about asking how either or both of these sets of ideas are used to make olive oil into a marketable commodity that's perceived in certain ways.

I think Meneley would say something more like this diet is constructed based on ideas of "health" and "purity" and the history and mythology of olive oil is made to fit into that construction. Rather than that olive oil's history makes it fit into this diet. The difference being that both of them are social constructs that are built around the confluence of notions of health, purity, and mythology.

cut this word

Good way to phrase this

I like the graph, but I don't see how it demonstrates anything about farmers' desires for more income.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Is this argument awkward because it contradicts traditional thought? If so, are you saying the evidence was unconvincing, and doesn't support the argument? That's fine if so, and you can say that explicitly if that's the case.

Good way to introduce a critique

This makes it sound like they're saying there's no exploitation. Are they saying that? Or are they saying it's not simply a matter of exploitation, and that the Mayan farmers also have agency within this whole system?

Again, well put. I like that you're telling the reader very clearly what it is you're attempting to tell the reader.

is "interact" the right word here? perhaps "understand" or "comprehend"?

I'm not sure what you mean by this

an example of these "other forces" would be helpful for the reader here

Again, great way to put this.

Yes, however your phrasing here doesn't make it as clear as it could be that the authors are also critiquing the traditional notion of desire as a purely economic phenomenon, specifically because desire is so much a product of local connections and global forces.

Yes--spot on. Excellent paraphrase.

This part of the sentence is unclear.

Again, this is an excellent way to phrase this

no need to cite again

no need for the year again here since this is only related to one reading

Again, well said. The relations here are a critical piece, as is the idea that both sides' desires play an important role.

Yes--well put again. Minor point: I'm not sure the authors would say these desires "control" market forces...maybe they are the market forces? Then again I'm not sure what "market forces" really are, and I think the authors might be trying to contest a notion that there are market forces that are somehow distinguishable from human forces...

Excellent way to say this: direct and to the point, and your reader knows exactly what to expect. However, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "improved habits of western culture." Are the authors making an assertion that these have improved? Also, is profit the only thing Mayan broccoli producers desire?

No need for citation here

this wording is a bit unclear

doesn't it go from Guatemala to Nashville?

use "and" instead of an ampersand (throughout the whole summary)

This is definitely part of what they're saying: both producer and consumer keep the whole thing going the way it is. But they're going further than that as well.

I'm going to quote the text below here, and underline the broader implications that they draw:

Our argument is that farmers such as Pablo and consumers such as Susan are mutually constituted as subjects through the process of desire enacted in material chains of production and consumption. ... Where consumers and producers see themselves as directly connected and mutually dependent, they become empowered to enact change on their own terms rather than having to work within the foreshortened alternatives mediated by commercial interests. If we as consumers see “our” desiring as interlaced with “their” desiring then the notion of rational economic behavior as natural, neutral, and universal breaks down and we may see the commodity chain as operating on an “ethical plateau” in which decisions arise between different worlds

Yes! Here you gesture toward the importance of the consumer! but isn't this a much bigger part of the argument than suggested by your summary, which talks almost exclusively about farmers?

I like the way you put this. It's a good way to introduce the scholarly contribution of the article. And you're right that broccoli is an interesting way to look at this because it's a food many people take for granted. I think you can go a little further with this, though, as the authors are doing more than this. (See my comments below.)

Yes, important point. This could use some expansion... What do the authors say about why farmers might do this?

technically, pp. is "pages"--you just need one p if it's only one page.

Tecpán (there should be a way to get accented characters to properly show up in these posts but I'm not sure exactly how)

Here you hint at the consumption side, but your reader wouldn't know from your summary that almost half the ethnography focuses on consumers and grocery stores, etc.

This is an excellent example of explaining the importance of a quotation from the reading.

I do think, however, that the authors are going even further than saying that desire is about going beyond basic needs to obtain wealth, legacy, or recognition. See p. 803, where they characterize desire as seeking "to make and remake the world around certain values". This suggests that desire is also a moral project--and thus not something that people eventually "succumb" to, as you suggest, but rather something people are always necessarily engaged in.

yes, great point, this is crucial to their notion of desire

see my comment below, but again I think the authors are trying to showcase, or demonstrate, a little more than this

they're only talking about a couple different "kinds" of people, right? maybe more accurate to say "...can leave people in very different contexts wanting..."

cut this word

Grammar/punctuation tip/correction: this is really two complete sentences. It needs more than a comma in the middle. And producers and consumers both need apostrophes because they're possessive. For example:

Readers often hear only one side; whether it’s the consumers' or the producers' side, of course, varies.

Is this what they're trying to show? My sense is that it's a bit more than that... For example, in the abstract they say "Such desires simultaneously subvert and sustain the hegemonic constellations that anchor crucial nodes in the international broccoli trade."

This seems to be different from just saying that people have desire in common and that's why they partake in the economy of broccoli

authors

This is an accurate assessment of the reading, but your summary doesn't quite give your reader a sense of what these two sides are.

This paragraph would benefit from some organizational work, in addition to the other more specific comments I've made. You switch back and forth between Pablo and Susan but the reader never gets a full picture of either one, nor how they relate to the connection you (rightly) say Benson and Fischer are making between desire and broccoli production.

What is it that Pablo is desiring here that makes this risky game worth playing?

I don't think this is correct. They do mention this way of "defining" desire, but the authors are saying it's incomplete (see p. 801). The way B&F are thinking of desire is more like being "engaged in projects that seek to make and remake the world around certain values" (803). So this is about more than needs vs. something additional...in fact, this ties into the moral theme, in that desire is about remaking the world according to values.

is it broccoli's lifestyle that is healthy?

Since these are short summaries (and readings), there's no need to give your reader a chronological overview of the paper. Just say something like "Benson and Fisher provide examples of people..."

Great follow-up. You bring up morals here, which is an important part of the article, but that could use a little expansion in your summary below.

Good attempt at a concise one-sentence summary. This sentence could be improved with a little rewording for clarity, and by omitting the and before "consumer advantages".

The words of the title should be capitalized (except the and of)

Not so much redefine. Anthropologists are typically less concerned with definitions than with asking readers to question their own assumptions and recognize the contradictions between assumptions and real-world actions.

I'm not sure you need to be this specific about the details of his argument, but if you mention this piece of evidence it should be explained more. Your reader won't necessarily know what he said about Clifton Spa Luncheonettes customers.

This is an interesting point and a real anthropological conundrum. On one hand, yes--he would probably agree that there is a lot that's unfair about the fact that big corporations make a lot of money from a situation that's fundamentally based on the unequal distribution of resources. But... anthropologists like to think of ourselves as observers more than prescribers, so I think rather than saying he's trying to convince readers of unfairness, it would be more accurate to say he's trying to demonstrate or highlight unfairness or inequality.

More importantly, however, I'm not sure whatever unfairness he's pointing out is really the main point of the article. The main point, as you say above, is to show that "casual" conversation is as we think of it is a product of political and economic forces, rather than a naturally occurring and unversal phenomenon.

I would say this is close, but not quite exactly what his purpose is. It's not so much what we think of as casual conversation that he's trying to get us to see, but perhaps how the things we think of as "casual" are actually very specific to a particular class position, in a particular place and time, and that what's seen as "casual" is actually highly constructed and socially regulated--so, anything but casual

avoid "I think," "I believe," etc.

As readers, we assume this is what you think, since if you didn't think that's what his argument was, you wouldn't be saying that's what it was...

This is an accurate restatement of Gaudio's argument, but it's not clear from what comes before in this paragraph how Gaudio is drawing that conclusion from the evidence you've outlined.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. In what ways does he measure political acceptance?

This is a good point. Your summary would benefit from elaborating a little on why or how the temporal, spatial and social contexts are important to Gaudio's argument.

conversation?

spatial

This is a good paraphrase of the author's argument. The only thing I would say is that Gaudio isn't so much "attempting to define" this idea...maybe "demonstrate" would be better than "define"? And by saying "attempt" like that, it sounds a little like you're implying he fails at the attempt. Perhaps something like "Gaudio argues that casual conversation is not a naturally occurring event..."

article, not passage

How in this title is actually italicized

Use an em-dash (—) rather than a hyphen (-) when you're doing this kind of separation between clauses or separation for effect. Alternatively, you could use a colon.

Yes, the role of morality is important in this article. It would be helpful to your reader to explain this in a little more depth, since we don't normally think of broccoli as a morally-inflected thing...

well

Just say "first," rather than "first off"

It's unclear from your summary thus far how the two examples connect desire with production.

Also, is it really broccoli that Susan and Pablo desire? Or is broccoli a means for them to realize some other desire?

The "while" here makes this a phrase that needs to be part of a larger sentence; if you remove "while", it would be a grammatical sentence. Alternatively, you could say "Susan chooses to eat broccoli because of its healthy lifestyle, having been persuaded by the market of how healthy this food is, while in the second example a Maya farmer named Pablo is showcased." (I would recommend the first option.)

The page number you cite to should be the page number of the actual journal article (not the PDF). So since this article goes from page 800-820, if you're citing the first page it would be (Benson and Fisher 800).

When there are only two authors, use both in the parenthetical citation: so, (Benson and Fisher 1) for example.

How does the evidence above demonstrate the "integration of rural Southern culture into urban African American consciousness" where foodways are a "natural vehicle for the expression...of freedom"?

How does the evidence presented above demonstrate the "complementary dualism of tastes lost and found"?

Find an example of the "modernist response" in the section below and summarize it in your own words.

Relating to Dani's question: Hill isn't talking about a boundary that's exactly the same as some people are/should be permitted to use certain words, while others shouldn't. But is there any similarity?

Hill is saying that such boundaries are "enforced" differently for Spanish speakers than they are for English speakers. Are the boundaries that preclude (or should preclude) people from using certain words based on who they are perhaps seen as more contestable depending on who is "allowed" to use those words and who isn't?

For example, a common argument made that it should be considered okay for white folks to use the n-word is that black folks say it. But, what if the situation were reversed? Would it be as commonly accepted to contest the limitation of the word to a certain group of people if the people "allowed" to use it were white?

Might it also be relevant that there doesn't seem to be any word that racializes whites in a way that's so offensive they demand others not use it?

Mock Spanish is "covertly" racist in that in order to "make sense," it relies on certain racist tropes. So even if Mock Spanish isn't overtly racist, it reproduces and reinforces racist ideas. (see discussion in last paragraph of p. 684).

"orderly disorder": Puerto Ricans' use of Spanish (or even perceptions of accent) is perceived as not living up to "standards of linguistic orderliness" (see above paragraph for contexts in which Spanish is seen as "acceptable"). On the other hand white English speakers are given considerable latitude to cross the boundaries between English and Spanish (even if their Spanish isn't even grammatically correct).

The author uses this term, romantic, several times, but doesn't specify what he means by it, although this section implies a little about what he seems to mean. Based on Wikipedia's entry on Romanticism, it refers to an intellectual and artistic movement starting in the late 1700s in Europe that emphasized "emotion and individualism" and glorified nature and the past. What's probably most relevant about this movement is that it originated during, and in response to, the industrial revolution.

There's a clear link between this definition and what Pratt is talking about in terms of glorifying (or even fetishizing?) certain places and practices as more directly related to traditional agricultural practices and placing higher value on food commodities that can be directly linked to the specific places or people that produced them.

Interestingly, authenticity seems to have been a feature of the Romantic movement as well. The Wikipedia article says that adherents of Romanticism "emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience" (no citation is given for this assertion, however).

What do the authors mean by "the process of...becoming Black"? Is "becoming Black" the same as "becoming well versed with Black American cultural signs..."? Or are they different, but related?

cf. Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me", where she says "I remember the very day that I became colored."

What does this imply about the meaning of "being" Black? And about race, or racialization, generally?