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OF CONTENTS
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Open Letter to Future Urban
Anthropologists
By John Overington
In
this section of the website I would like to outline just
a few of
the main overarching themes that have emerged for me personally
throughout this course. These ideas have been spurred on by
required readings and in port experiences that have effected the way
that I view any landscape or skyline. Unfortunately, never again
will I be able to naively gaze into the skyline of a city, and not
process the elements very critically. The most important element
of this class was the realization of the overwhelming power of
transnational companies, and their influence on societies.
Transnational actors are endlessly working to influence or change
socities into consuming more of their products. No matter how
much a company works to seem philanthropic, it is
inevitably only doing so to make a profit somewhere. In
most of the ports I had the privilege
to stop in, the vernacular
is eroding as modernity advances, and this is a sad
sight. Transnational actors have almost reached a point where
they are too powerful and influential to keep from engulfing everyone's
life. If there is anything that I learned from this class it's
that
consuming is not my goal in life, and that I must preserve all of the
vernacular parts of my life for myself, before transnational actors
package and sell that too.
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