Anthropological Exercise Pleasure of Interviewing Two People Interview Reflection

Anthropologist often are meeting people and learning about their lives in multiple ways. Often this is with strangers. For this exercise I would like you to explore what that might be like. What is it like to talk with people and try to learn about them.

For this assignment I want you to reach out to a one person you know and one stranger or a person you do not know very well and ask them to do an interview individually. The “stranger” might come from you extended family, your roommates parents, your parents co-worker, someone on your instagram feed, someone in a online group…

Please do this virtually NOT IN PERSON; unless you live with the individual I want you to do it with something like Zoom or another virtual video meeting application – not a text based application.

Ask the two individuals about how films inform them about the world.

1. Do a pre-self Reflection: How does it make you feel to talk with someone you don’t know well? How are you feeling going into the interviews? Why might you be feeling this way?

2. Plan a few questions that will keep a conversation going for 10 minutes or longer.

3. Conduct the interviews and take notes of everything you notice. This can include; the platform used to talk, how the person appeared, what they were wearing, what the room they were in looked like, what their background screen like, did they seem awkward, confused, kind, welcoming, interested, …by their body language…including what was said.

4. Afterwards do a self reflection again about how you feel and what you think about the person now.

5. Write a response about one page about what you found out about the two individuals; one page about the differences between the two conversations; and one about your reflection on how you felt talking with people. Was it comfortable, awkward, fun…?

This is inspired by the website https://www.humansofnewyork.com/ (Links to an external site.)

The creator uses his camera to take images of individuals and story tells about these individuals. This curates a anthology of humans of New York.

Here is a short clip of how he goes about it…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcm6kwWv09o&feature=emb_title