Prof. Fedorowicz, a belated but hearty congratulations on 20 years (!!!) of Visual Anthropology of Japan blogging!
I took your VAOJ course in fall 2008 and, although since then I clearly have not improved on being 3 weeks late for everything, two things from the course have stuck with me all along: (1) Your lesson on the ethics of visual documentation - especially on "portrait rights" in Japan - planted a really important seed in me about not losing sight of subjects as people with feelings and rights, and more generally about being consciously conscientious in real time. (Essentially, the Golden Rule as an applied concept for adult life..?) Every young person needs this seed planted at some point if they're going to, you know, *not* grow up to be a sociopath... But as wild as it sounds, your course was the only time in my formal education where someone did so. (2) In one of my Photo Journal Blog entries, I made some statements about Komeito which were very subjective, poorly-researched and hardly related to the mission at hand of documenting and understanding a campaign poster. In your comment, you very fairly called me out on this. Similarly to (1), this planted an important seed about approaching situations professionally and, when appropriate, maintaining a certain kind of detachment in the service of fact-finding.
Sometime long after my short 9 months at KGU had ended, I must have hit some invisible threshold of accumulated experiences which called for those ways of thinking, as the seeds started to put up shoots. However tall they've grown in the succeeding 18 years (!!!) is very much thanks to you. I didn't end up growing up to be a professional anthropologist, but these ways of thinking that you taught my classmates and I have proven to be universally applicable and universally essential.
Congratulations again, Professor, and all the best in the next 20!! ;)
2 comments:
Prof. Fedorowicz, a belated but hearty congratulations on 20 years (!!!) of Visual Anthropology of Japan blogging!
I took your VAOJ course in fall 2008 and, although since then I clearly have not improved on being 3 weeks late for everything, two things from the course have stuck with me all along:
(1) Your lesson on the ethics of visual documentation - especially on "portrait rights" in Japan - planted a really important seed in me about not losing sight of subjects as people with feelings and rights, and more generally about being consciously conscientious in real time. (Essentially, the Golden Rule as an applied concept for adult life..?) Every young person needs this seed planted at some point if they're going to, you know, *not* grow up to be a sociopath... But as wild as it sounds, your course was the only time in my formal education where someone did so.
(2) In one of my Photo Journal Blog entries, I made some statements about Komeito which were very subjective, poorly-researched and hardly related to the mission at hand of documenting and understanding a campaign poster. In your comment, you very fairly called me out on this. Similarly to (1), this planted an important seed about approaching situations professionally and, when appropriate, maintaining a certain kind of detachment in the service of fact-finding.
Sometime long after my short 9 months at KGU had ended, I must have hit some invisible threshold of accumulated experiences which called for those ways of thinking, as the seeds started to put up shoots. However tall they've grown in the succeeding 18 years (!!!) is very much thanks to you. I didn't end up growing up to be a professional anthropologist, but these ways of thinking that you taught my classmates and I have proven to be universally applicable and universally essential.
Congratulations again, Professor, and all the best in the next 20!! ;)
Joe Cochran
Sumida-ku, Tokyo
Whoops, would you look at that... I'm actually 6 months early. ;) https://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/2006/11/blog-post.html
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