My Personal Ethnography is what I created to describe my cultural identity, something that I have struggled with because I don’t really belong to one culture. But I belong to multiple cultural groups, because of how I perceived myself. Each cultural group I associated with is something that built my foundation of what made me.

Which became a problem in this assignment because what I ended up doing is giving the readers just a glance of everything that I believed to helped shape my identity. Rather than go in-depth with one of them and elaborate on that, which would have been more ideal. Due to the fact I jumped around often, for example when I talked about how the FDNY influenced my identity. It was the last paragraph and didn’t really transition properly it was just abrupt, and went

“Lastly, the culture of the New York City Fire Department is what shaped me into the individual I am today, that culture of brotherhood that my mentors taught me is what I go by.”

Then went vaguely into why the Fire Department influenced my identity. Which was again the main problem with the paper, as it derailed any momentum created.

Original Assignment With FeedBack

Faris Mahrouss

Professor Grove

FIQWS Composition 10103

4 September 2019

Personal Ethnography Paper

In 2001 I was born in Midtown Manhattan at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Even though I was born in New York City I proudly represent myself culturally as an Egyptian. My name, parents, my religion, and my culture represent Egypt. Even though I reside in Queens, New York my heart is centered towards my Egyptian roots and cores. Just because I only identify as being Egyptian culturally it doesn’t mean that I’m not culturally diverse, I still participate within cultures of great institutions such as the culture on campus, being a SEEK student itself comes within its own bracket; But looking at the larger picture of being a college student within the CUNY system means I’m part of a community and the culture of college. Even outside of school I participate with other people who share the common goal of becoming Emergency Medical Technicians for the New York City Fire Department, as we are part of a program with the initial goal of exposing us to the job. The program incoherently exposes us to the culture of the New York City Fire Department, their traditions, rituals, etc.

Being a New Yorker my entire life I couldn’t think of any other way I could’ve been raised without taking the subway everywhere. That itself is part of the culture when it comes to living in New York City, other things such as going to the deli to buy a bacon egg and cheese sandwich and an Arizona every morning before going to school, the iconic Yankee fitted hat from New Era and timberland boots. These are all iconic cultural symbols of New York City, these are things that everyone in my generation could relate too; it’s what we grew up on. Even the slang and the way we speak to each other is a representation of our identities as New Yorkers, it’s part of me. It’s what makes “ Faris” Faris.

Growing up in an Egyptian Household is only part of me, it’s what I see that sets me apart from everyone else. Many people don’t know an Egyptian in their life, it comes to them as a big shocker that I’m Egyptian in itself. My family a set of first-generation immigrants trying to make their way in this country, we haven’t abandoned our traditional cultural roots. Often I find myself eating Egyptian meals for breakfast eating the most common meal in an Egyptian diet, Ful; Fava beans cooked in oil and salt. Everyone makes it differently, my parents sometimes add dried sausage, while my aunt often times would add tomatoes. Even though the way everyone made it was different fava beans were still the core ingredient and to me, that is a cultural symbol of an Egyptian. My name is extracted from my culture meaning “Horseman” or “Knight,” that by itself is a reason why my culture as an Egyptian is part of me.

Lastly, the culture of the New York City Fire Department is what shaped me into the individual I am today, that culture of brotherhood that my mentors taught me is what I go by. It’s the mutual trust between them that allows them to do their job, if they don’t, it could cost them their life. But the culture of brotherhood in the fire department expands more than their family, it’s like their family because of the close proximity that they live together. Even though I and the other people in the program aren’t living together on a daily basis, the concept of brotherhood still applies to us as well as life and death. There has to be a mutual trust to let someone repel you off the roof of a six-story building.

 

Faris –

 

While you touch on a variety of cultural identities here, you actually never spend enough time with any one of them to tell us anything more than surface information.  The end result is a piece that gives us an overview of aspects of your identity, but little sense of any one aspect of that identity, or even of how these various cultural markers tie together to make you who you are.  As a rule, you’ll almost always be better off in this class focusing on a smaller number of examples in greater depth, omitting material from a piece in order to focus more intensely on a narrower set of details, so that you can discuss them more thoroughly.  Here, if you’d just focused on one of these aspects of your identity, you’d have likely aced the assignment, but as it stands, you jump around so much that you never actually have time to give a sense of how these elements relate to one another.

 

I’d recommend you take a stab at revising this assignment down the road, and that you keep an eye on focus and digression in your work in the future in general.  Sometimes even a small digression can undermine, or even completely derail, an otherwise excellent assignment.

 

4/5 – B/B-

 

– Professor Grove