Example Of Ethnography Essay

Words: 2214
Pages: 9

War is Graphic: Look After the Land, Look After the Young People In 2009 aboard the USNS Safeguard I was part of a mission of cooperation with the nation of Vietnam. We took the ship into the Mekong Delta and up the Saigon River into Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It was an ironic experience for me as I had only days before been given orders for Afghanistan, making Vietnam the last peacetime country that I would visit while in the Navy. While there I came across a small art dealer who specialized in propaganda art from the Vietnamese-American conflict of the 1960s and 1970s, created by the North Vietnamese communists. I purchased three posters with the intention of developing a broader understanding of the perspectives of warring nations. …show more content…
It was important for each countries government to attune the art they produced to the desired dimorphism of their people and to emphasize local infallibility over foreign inferiority. To each country the necessity to find a simple graphic nature that captured the idealism of its people was of great importance beyond that of promoting the progression of fine art technique. The weaponization of art as propaganda showed how global strategies were shared and exploited. Though propaganda can be perceived as toxic and lethal art, it can valued when contextually synthesized. If we share common delusion caused by propaganda inspiring us to a common cause such as war and we recognize that, then we must see that we can share a common reality caused by propaganda that is better than war. The romanticizing of the human figure, the North Vietnamese propaganda artists acted to harness the perspectives of the common class to give their lives collectively to a common goal, in this case war. The beauty of Look After the Land, Look After the Young People hangs now in my home as a symbol of a shared global humanity, an intellectual and physical reminder that propaganda art is not always at