Discussing a sacred place, its underlying myths, and how historical processes and social power within this site’s culture play a role in the construction of its significance, in accordance with Johnathan Z. Smith’s ideas.

choose your topic and create a 3-5 minute video to share with your classmates, using a cloud server, in the appropriate discussion section. See additional tutorials for making, uploading and sharing a video here.

Then, you will post a short 2-3 sentence reply to 3 classmates’ proposals in the discussion forum.

Instructions

Choose an activity, place, cultural artifact or production (see below) whose underlying narratives you can study. Your choice should be a primary source, or something you can observe firsthand. For example, you can study a ritual, a sacred place, or a holiday festival you can attend or watch on video. You also could choose a work of art or an architectural site you can see in person, in photographs, or through an online tour. You can choose a community whose myths you want to study by interviewing someone from that culture. Please keep in mind that whatever you choose must have some links to mythology that you can explore, and it should be something you can observe in person, if possible. You will also need to do the observation during the current semester. You will not be permitted to talk about a past visit to a site, participation in a ritual, a previous conversation with someone, etc., for this assignment. 

Possible topics include the following: 

• Interview: Interview someone knowledgeable about the stories of a culture you are unfamiliar with but want to learn more about. Describe the person you plan to interview, what you hope to learn about from them, and why this topic interests you. For example, you might interview the director of a local Native American museum to learn about Indigenous myths or a Muslim imam to learn about narratives in the Qur’an.
• Observation of a Ritual: You can observe a rite, holiday, or worship service. This can be done by watching a series of at least 3-5 videos of the rite, holiday celebration, or worship service. (Remote worship has become more common since the COVID-19 pandemic.) Identify the observation you plan to make at this point, as well as the occasion and context of the observation and why it interests you. For example, you could view video records of a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, or you could view a series of videos on the Hindu celebration of Holi. 
• Sacred Place: Visit and observe a particular sacred place (this can include national monuments or memorials) either in person or virtually. For this approach, identify the place you plan to visit, briefly describe it, and explain your interest in it. Places you could visit include the 9/11 Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a sacred First People’s site (usually a natural phenomena), a basilica, a temple, or a pilgrimage site for any religion.
• Material Culture or Artifact: Choose a specific piece of material culture or artifact to explore that connects to myth. Identify the object and its cultural context, and explain your interest in it. For example, you could explore a Passover pillow, kolam, a Greek vase, an Egyptian ankh necklace, a rosary, a Dogon ceremonial mask, or a household shrine. 
• Cultural Production: Choose a work of art, literature, film, or a performance connected to myth. Identify the cultural production, its creator, and its cultural context, and explain your interest in it. For example, a specific interesting sculpture of Ganesh, the film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? or the painting The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli.

Try to choose something unique to share, perhaps from the area where you live, that your classmates might not know about. 

Once you have chosen your topic, create a 3-5 minute video describing your plan, why you are interested in the topic, and your thoughts about why it is an appropriate topic for a class on myth in the world. In your video, address the following questions, and feel free to include additional thoughts as appropriate.  

1. What are you planning to study?
2. If a place, where is it located?
3. Who, if anyone, will you interview?
4. Why is this topic interesting to you?
5. Why is it an appropriate topic for a class on myth in the world?

Format

Your video should be about 3-5 minutes long and formatted as an MP4, MOV, or WMV. If for any reason you cannot create a video, contact your instructor for an alternative way to fulfill this assignment’s requirements.

Please do not upload your video to the classroom. Instead, upload it to a cloud server (Google, OneDrive, etc.), set the permissions so that everyone with the link can see it, and cut and paste the link from your cloud server into the discussion forum.  

Sample Post

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoy viewing my project proposal. Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wFGdktizEK2qgXKu0jg1dYUS07Nqe5GGtQVbHRsLbHE/edit?usp=sharing

You can record your video with your smartphone, tablet, or computer. You can give us a glimpse of what you will talk about, such as making your video on-site if you plan to talk about specific sacred site, or you could edit in a photo of an artifact or set of artifacts you plan to discuss. Be creative!

The key to sharing with the class will be uploading your video to a cloud drive, making it viewable to anyone with the link, and providing the correct link in the classroom. Here are some useful tutorials for making, uploading, and sharing videos from a cloud drive using a link.  

If you need additional help, before you contact your professor, please search the internet for more tutorials or contact UMGC Technical Support by calling 855-655-8682 for student services, Monday–Friday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. ET or 888-360-8682 for technical support (24/7). 

Stage 2: Annotated Bibliography

For this assignment, you will gather information for your paper. Construct an annotated bibliography consisting of five sources. All of your sources should be from the UMGC library and be useful to your topic, reliable, and scholarly in nature. 

Your list of sources must include the following:

1. At least one primary source. This can be your interview, your field visit, your observation, etc. Some examples include an interview with someone knowledgeable about your topic, a painting or literary work you are examining, or an observation of the rite or holiday you are studying (depending on what you chose). Make sure you cite it correctly according to MLA style.
2. At least one secondary resource that addresses interpretative methods for comparative mythology, ritual, sacred place, material culture, or myth and history that you will use in your paper. This source can be from the Learning Resources, but you are encouraged to find additional resources from the thinkers covered in the entire course, including week 8.

For each of the five entries in your bibliography, your annotation should be about 4-5 sentences long and include:

1. A citation for the reference in MLA format.
2. A brief summary of the source, including at least two main points.
3. A comment on how the resource is useful to your project. 

Note: You must use your own words for the annotation. Do not use library summaries or auto-paraphrasing tools.

Sample Annotation

Andrew R. Bahlmann. The Mythology of the Superhero. McFarland, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1221891&site=eds-live&scope=site.

This book explores the heroic journey of superheroes in popular culture, loosely basing its framework for the superhero on the heroic monomyth and introducing a long list of common tropes for superheroes which includes things like agelessness, alter-egos, their no killing code, and orphan status. Chapters cover analyses of the Green Lantern, Buffy Summers, the Alphas and Beowulf. Bahlmann argues in his final chapter that superheroes are our modern mythology and that this modern mythology needs to be codified in order to understand the popular imagination. This book will be useful to my project because it offers some tools to interpret and discuss the connections between ancient myth and modern superheroes in film. 

Stage 3: Interpretation Paper

At this stage you will submit your complete paper. The final paper should address the relationship between your chosen topic and the narratives that relate to it and shape its meaning. Your paper should include the following: 

1. An introduction that introduces your topic (activity, place, artifact or cultural production) and your approach to analyzing its underlying narratives.
2. A summary of what you learned or observed about your topic and its underlying myths.
3. An analysis using one of the methodological approaches covered throughout the semester to show how myth and your topic interact and connect. Analysis may include the following:
   • Showing how an initiation ritual and its underlying myths connect within the cultural context of the ritual and then discuss how Victor Turner’s concept of communitas in that ritual helps uphold societal norms of that culture.
   • Examining a Greek statue of Venus, her myths, and how both can represent an archetype that expresses specific values about womanhood in Greek culture and womanhood in the collective unconscious, as per Carl Jung’s ideas.
   • Discussing a sacred place, its underlying myths, and how historical processes and social power within this site’s culture play a role in the construction of its significance, in accordance with Johnathan Z. Smith’s ideas.

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