Chelsea Krug
Professor Dustin Wax
Anthropology 101
2 February, 2015
Response #2 This week’s reading really made me think about all the different places I have lived and how the culture varied in every corner of the United States. My family could be seen as the stereotypical view of “gypsies” because we move so frequently due to being in Witness Protection for 18 years. We are nowhere near the degree of gypsies that the Romas are but when it comes to moving around and changing identities everywhere we went, we could be viewed as what people think is a gypsy. Since I recently turned eighteen, I am no longer in Witness Protection and I am able to talk about it. For years I have had to have a different last name every new place we moved. I have lived in five states migrating to different towns within the state and Florida was the biggest culture shock to me. The book defines culture as the whole of a society that includes the beliefs, knowledge, arts, morals and basically everything that makes up our day-to-day lives. Most of the time I have lived in big cities such as New York and Las Vegas and this exposed me to a bucket full of different cultures. Now being that Americans can be so closed minded about different cultures, I assume that the culture I did experience was formed into an Americanized version of that society but at least I had some exposure. When I moved to Florida it was very hard to find any other culture besides the southern, country style of living. I remember that one of my friends got into the NYU in Dubai and she wouldn’t go because she would have to where a covering over her face and they had more “visible” poverty there, then we had here. This was a total shock to me, how she only saw the things she disagreed with and didn’t see the beauty of getting to live in that culture and experience it fully. Reading about the Romas was very interesting because I actually watched a show on Netflix about how extravagant their weddings are. That culture definitely knows how to celebrate. Since the Romas are dispersed across the globe, you have to wonder if two different clans from two different countries would share the same beliefs and rituals. The book says that since the United States and Australia were settled by Englishmen, we shared the same language and common day-to-day rituals. Well the Romas might come from the same location but they have got to be different in many aspects depending on their placement in the world. I found it terrible that one of the reasons the Romas had to move around so frequently was due to poverty, slavery and discrimination against their race but is there ever a country that you’re not going to find greedy people that see others purely as a profit? Another thing