The story behind Sriracha
With a distinctive bottle taste, Sriracha has gone from an unpronounceable challenge to a staple sauce for many Americans. In the U.S. alone, $60 million worth of the sauce was sold last year alone.
But it wasn’t always such a prevalent item on store shelves. David Tran, the man responsible for popularizing the hot sauce, had a long journey beforehand:
When North Vietnam’s communists took power in South Vietnam, Tran, a major in the South Vietnamese army, fled with his family to the U.S. After settling in Los Angeles, Tran couldn’t find a job — or a hot sauce to his liking.
So he made his own by hand in a bucket, bottled it and drove it to customers in a van. He named his company Huy Fong Foods after the Taiwanese freighter that carried him out of Vietnam.
Read more via our profile of Tran, and his beloved hot sauce.
Photos: Gina Ferazzi, Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
Has never spent $1 on advertising.
A short film about the Carpathian mountains; scenes of daily life, nature, and culture with a soundtrack of Ukrainian folk music.
Smile Because it Happened (more info here) is the latest from Michael Wesch.
Ten university students move into Meadowlark Hills, a retirement community that CBS News calls ‘a new kind of nursing home.’ Unlike traditional nursing homes built on the model of the hospital, Meadowlark is built on the model of community, complete with a ‘downtown’ central hallway that features a bar, theater, cafe, restaurant, and salon. Meadowlark is a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) and they gave the students a room in the Independent Living portion of the campus to live in for one semester. This is their story.
This is ethnography. This is learning by doing. This is engagement with the community. This is what school should be at all ages.
I was poking around the Tozzer library webpage this morning, and found this interesting list of “great books” chosen by Harvard anthropologists (both professors and former students).
Kau Faito’o: Traditional Healers of Tonga
Anonymous asked: Do you have any tips on writing creative ethnography? Or writing ethnography creatively? Or employing creative methods to produce ethnography? Thanks!
Creative ethnography usually boils down to truth and our representation of it; ethnography in general usually weaves a selective narrative by itself.
You as a writer just have to select the most useful bits of the story to draw a picture, emphasizing the details of exceptional circumstances whilst justifying the more banal details or vice versa. in this way you begin to construct the story.
I don’t know if that is sort of what you are looking for or if it helped at all.
Native American Occupation of Alcatraz 1969-1971.
The takeover of Alcatraz was one of the most successful American Indian protest actions of the 20th century, fueling the rise of modern Native American activism. In fact, many of the 74 Indian occupations of federal facilities that followed Alcatraz were either planned by or included people who had been involved in seizing the island. The occupation also brought Indian rights issues to the attention of the federal government and American public, changing forever the way Native people viewed themselves, their culture and their inherent right to self-determination.
The occupation also succeeded in getting the federal government to end its policy of termination and adopt an official policy of Indian self-determination. From 1970 to 1971, Congress passed 52 legislative proposals on behalf of American Indians to support tribal self-rule. President Nixon increased the BIA budget by 225 percent, doubled funds for Indian health care and established the Office of Indian Water Rights. Also during Nixon’s presidency, scholarship funds were increased by $848,000 for college students. The Office of Equal Opportunity provided more funds for economic development and drug and alcohol recovery programs and expanded housing, health care and other programs.
Turkey Is Waging an Invisible War on Its Dissidents
Above: A wall of Greek riot police. (Photo by Henry Langston)
For the past week, we’ve been watching scenes of mayhem unfold in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and other major Turkish cities. What started as a local initiative to stop a central Istanbul park being turned into a shopping center became a civilian street war against the rising authoritarianism of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s government.
As if to cement everything the protesters were already angry about, Erdoğan sent police in to quite literallycrack skulls and fire tear gas and pepper spray at the mostly peaceful crowd. But alongside the highly visible violence, an invisible war is taking place on those from Turkey who dare to stand up and speak out against the government.
Bulut YaylaThe story starts not in Turkey, but in downtown Athens, from where Turkish asylum seeker Bulut Yayladisappeared last Thursday. According to eyewitnesses, at around 9:30 PM Yayla was immobilized, beaten, and pushed into a car on Solomou Street in the neighborhood of Exarcheia. When support groups and lawyers looked up the car’s registration plate, the owner turned out to be none other than a member of the Greek police.
Shockingly, the Greek police force itself denies any knowledge of the incident. Yayla, a political activist who has been arrested and tortured in Turkey in the past, has been trying to apply for political refugee asylum in Greece for some time now. But given Greece’s famous bureaucracy, it probably won’t surprise you that Yayla hasn’t had much luck.
When he resurfaced after his kidnapping, Yayla was no longer in Athens, he was in Istanbul, being held by the Turkish counter-terrorism police. Since then, he has informed Greek support groups of what happened after his abduction. With a hood over his head, he was passed between three different groups of people, crossed the border to Turkey (under what he said felt like a wire fence in the middle of the night) and eventually found himself in Istanbul.
…then find out from the News source you trust.
