How is Cannery Row like a tidepool Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

How is Cannery Row like a tidepool - Essay Example When the tide comes in again, these creatures will scatter and forage for food elsewhere, but for the duration of the pool’s existence, they are close neighbors. John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row is a portrait of a place in a time, a collection of vignettes and subplots that gradually cohere into a rough narrative of local vagrants trying to do something nice for the local scientist. If it lacked even that fig leaf of a plot, though, it would still stand as a beautiful and moving evocation of Monterey, California in the early 1940s, when the Depression had declined elsewhere but that sweet wartime money had yet to wash up on Monterey’s shore. In this place, a motley collection of characters are thrown together, each of them making their way as best they can with what limited resources are available, living in a mutual web of dependence that lets them all continue to get by. Nobody in the story has a whole lot, but between them all, each person seems to manage to have just enough. Steinbeck’s moral stance on charity, kindness, and the necessity of doing right by one’s fellow man is firm enough that if you shelve one of his books next to one of Ayn Rand’s, they both explode. ... The wider world exists, but far away. Doc receives orders from distant cities and mails them out, Lee Chong hides out in San Francisco once in a while, the nearby town of New Monterey can be glimpsed here and there in the narrative, but for the most part the characters have no outside resources; in this tiny place called Monterey they are all in it together. The Monterey of the novel is a place where the tide went out a long time ago and has yet to come back in. The Great Depression has not yet ended for the characters, and even the relatively successful Lee Chong exists at the leading edge of a wave of unpaid debts that never quite breaks into bankruptcy. As the narration puts it, â€Å"maybe his wealth was entirely in unpaid bills.† Dora, who runs the local brothel called the Bear Flag, probably has the most pure liquid assets of anyone in the story, but she manages to retain surprisingly little of her substantial income, instead funneling it into the community via endless c harity. When the flu strikes Monterey in the middle of her busiest season on record, she and her girls become the nursing corps of the entire community, bringing soup and solace to the bedridden and ill all over town, including people who prefer to pretend her business doesn’t exist. The similarities between the community and the tidepool are many, but the central one is this: it is a very small ecosystem full of beings that did not ask to be clustered together like this. There is not a lot of anything to go around, and nobody can leave, at least not until the tide comes back in, and as observed, the tide has been out from Monterey for a long time. It is

How Far do they Critically Place the Issue of Marginalization and the Essay

How Far do they Critically Place the Issue of Marginalization and the Concept of Habitus and do the Examples Try to Universalize these Concepts - Essay Example In Uma Kothari's Power, Knowledge and Social Control in Participatory Development, she delves into the Foucaultian world of participatory power-play and limits of social-power and how the pattern of judgment and punishment becomes a strategic weapon that is supported by a said and unsaid network of sign systems everywhere. She begins by quoting Foucault and argues how the processes of canonization affect those individuals and who are often marginalized by their separation and isolation from the production of knowledge and the formulation of policies and practices, to be included in decisions that affect their lives. She focuses on participatory techniques as methods of knowledge accumulation and attempts to unravel the sorts of power that are reproduced at the micro-level through the use of these approaches, and how participants and participatory development practitioners are themselves conduits of power. The arguments she presents presented are how participatory development can enco urage a reassertion of control and power by dominant individuals and groups, that it can lead to the reification of social norms through self-surveillance and consensus-building, and that it 'purifies' knowledge and the spaces of participation through the codification, classification, and control of information, and its analysis and (re)presentation. The chapter also explores the limitations of participation in terms of how it demands certain kinds of performances to be enacted. It is suggested here that individuals and groups can and do subvert the methodology and, in doing so, gain control by shaping the form of their participation through their 'performances' on the PRA stage and in their selection of the information they conceal or choose to disclose. Kothari shows that an individual's behavior, actions, and perceptions are all shaped by the power embedded and embodied within society, something which Friedmann will call habitus. But, whereas, Friedmann offers a more detailed analysis of transnational migration and the corresponding effects on the loci of the migrants and the lands they are migrating to, Kothari tries to chart out the power structure of individuals and groups that are often selected for participation because of their disadvantaged position vis--vis, for example, their access to resources and services, or their control over decision-making. She upholds Foucault's idea that all individuals are most certainly affected by macro-structures of inequality (such as gender, ethnicity, class), and that even when individuals think that they are most free, they are in fact in the grip of more insidious forms of power, which operate not solely through direct forms of repression but often through less visible strategies of norm alization (Foucault 1977, 1980). Power is cappilary and difficult to locate as it runs through notions and practices, can be enacted by individuals who may even be opposed to it, and localized through its expression in everyday practices - through, for example, self-surveillance.