Same culture, new perspective

For our next big assignment, I wanted the students to take a step back from their own world and look at mainstream American culture from the perspective of an outsider. We spent a few days thinking about issues related to cultural relativism and ethnocentrism, and learning what it means to do ethnography using the anthropological method of participant observation.
We were ready to go out into the field! Our fieldwork site: Walmart.

The students were given the following assignment:
You are from Jupiter. You have never been to Earth before, and you were sent by your government to find out about human life. Your government is very curious about humans in the US in particular, because they have determined the US to be a dominant player in Earth politics. Your government wants you to gather data about how typical Americans live. They want as much information as you can provide about what Americans eat and drink, wear, and entertain themselves with. They also want to know how Americans think and behave, what they believe in, and how they communicate.

Excerpts from student essays:
Upon entering [Walmart], one immediately notices that there are cages upon cages with metal grills constructing it, and no cover for the top. Presumably, people use them to put their offspring in if they are runts, misbehaving, or are weak or ill. I notice that some human children are indeed wailing as they are stuck inside the cage...
The rows and rows of towering, and short, columns of Walmart are lined with an enormous array of puzzling, confounding and seemingly purposeless items. To try to get a better understanding of what these things might be, I opted to follow a person entering Walmart, and follow them through out their visit.
The human I chose to follow was a female in her later years. She had no offspring but she took a cage anyway. At first she took her cage and started off purposefully, her cage rattling noisily in front of her. Presentely, after much glowering at people who were going along the same row as she (which made me wonder if the right direction to travel through Walmart was her way), she arrived at a row with shelves that were lineds with boxes that were made of a highly flammable material, something I learned when I touched a box, and the heat from my finger burn a hole through the box.
- Taro Ohta-Weir, 9th grade

In one of the sections [of Walmart] that I was most drawn to there were lots of tiny bottles and tubes of colored stuff. When I opened one of the bottles and smelled it, it had no smell, when I touched it, it left a small print of red on my finger. When I tasted it, it didn't taste like much but it wasn't good. Maybe they use it for war paint, or writing, or maybe it is a healing stick. Of the many rows that were filled with this stuff, I was confused that they had so much of the same things. And all of them seemed to be basically the same color.
Above the tubes and bottles that were pictures of what seemed to slightly resemble humans, but no one that I saw in Walmart looked like the people in those pictures. In fact, every picture in the store in all the sections looked the same way. They had smooth skin and white teeth. In the section with the colored sticks some of the smoothed skin people had bright colored lips and dark lines around their eyes and on eye hairs. A couple even had bright blue shimmering color behind their eyes like scales. Maybe this was what the humans used to look like or what they will look like, but I didn't like these smoothed skin people at all. Of the many bottles and tubes of colored sticks and liquids even some of the humans did not know whjat it was. The aged old wise woman was confused whereas a younger woman seemed to understand everything and had no trouble figuring out exactly where what she wanted was.
- Iris Rountree, 9th grade

There was a particular section that caught my eye, there were many different shapes that were hard and clear a substance which I had never seen before, and inside some of them were different colored powders, some of them even had a liquid skin inside them it was the same color as the humans. When I asked one of them what it was they replied that they did not know and that they would "call customer service." Not knowing what that was I left in search of more uself data.
- Delphi Fishbach-Waters, 8th Grade