Blog 8

In-Class Activity: Using a Cultural Artifact: An Interview



I started observing the artifacts that were on my interviewee and fellow classmate, Chase, and was immediately drawn to his baseball hat. The hat was a distressed black in the front and on the bill, which contained a frayed triangle. The back of the hat was a netted light beige color. He first had a grey knit tossel cap on to shield his head from the cold wind that entered through the netted part of the baseball hat. The characteristic that drawn me to the hat in the first place was a familiar looking mushroom icon with the numbers 1985 underneath it. When he removed the knit cap that is when I saw the word Nintendo.
When I first noticed that the hat and the mushroom icon was a representation of Nintendo I was taken back to a day many years ago when I used to play the first Nintendo video game. I started thinking of the different games, especially Super Mario Brothers because the mushroom icon is a huge part of that particular game. I also remembered playing the other games, like Duck Hunt. I was very curious to hear Chase's story behind the hat.
Chase explained that the hat was purchased 3 months ago at Walmart and when he bought the hat it was already a little distressed and it had gotten more worn in over the past months. We came to the conclusion that the frayed triangle was a way to draw attention to the mushroom icon and Nintendo stitching. The aspects that attracted him to the hat was the mushroom icon and the fact that it was a Nintendo hat and he had never seen it before. He was also a huge fan of the "old school" Nintendo, as we like to put it, and the mushroom icon reminded him of Super Mario Brothers too. It was a flashback to a period of our childhood when the biggest problem we had was choosing the game we wanted to play and having to beat the old grey box or blow into the old disks if they were not working properly. We both reminisced for a few minutes about a simpler time. Chase was and still is a big fan of video games, like recent game Mario Cart.
It was an amazing and refreshing experience to have a simple baseball hat bring me back to my childhood, a place i have not revisited for a long time. It was also nice to discuss it with a fellow classmate who remembered many of the same things I did. This assignment was also a great example and gave me a better understanding of what the main goal is for the entire ethnographic report.