DoingEthnography@sta

When I was younger and anime came on the cartoon channels, I knew it was time to go to bed. One night, during the vacation, I sat down and watched an episode of a fantasy program of Japanese origin. I was enchanted with the magic, monsters, and overarching storyline I had never seen in an animated show before. As the years went by, and I watched more anime, first on t.v. and then on streaming platforms, I noticed a pattern in the skin color of the anime characters. I realized that this magical world was infused with the prejudices of the world in which I lived. For my mini-ethnographic project, I sought to understand the attitudes Caribbean youths have toward the profiting of racial and cultural stereotyping in some of their favorite anime shows. In the anime programs that I watched, I had made two casual observations that I wanted to explore for my mini-ethnographic project. The first, there were only a few dark-skinned characters and, the second was that the darker-skinned characters...

Growing up in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad, I was used to seeing street vendors. I regularly bought from them. Walking along Charlotte Street in downtown Port of Spain on an early Saturday morning meant seeing vendors unloading vegetables and fruits for sale – bananas, apples, lime, lettuce, tomatoes as well as toys, household items and basic electronics like phone accessories, cooking pots and pans – arranging them on tables or stalls, fixing their protection against the sun that would soon come out. Commuters catching transport to work or rushing to get to their workplaces on time weaved in and out of schoolchildren. For this mini-ethnography for my anthropology course, I wanted to explore street vendors’ experiences of buying and selling items, their primary means of income, especially as I used to see police arriving and also chasing vendors away. Then, I would see the vendors return, set up their stalls again and carefully arrange the produce in anticipation of sale...