While I was reading Mitchell this week, I found myself both thoroughly confused and yet simultaneously enlightened by his arguments on reality and representation. Last semester, I took a class in the anthropology department called museums, monuments, and memorials. In this class, we discussed the representation of certain cultures, people, and events in our histories and how they illustrate a particular narrative to their audience and the effect of that narrative on our perception of the world around us. I believe that this reading would have fit very nicely in with that class and its topics that centered around the untold narratives behind the representations of history. This further reminds me of our discussion of Kyle Rittenhouse and the Rodney King trial. In these two instances, people of authority (ie Trump and LAPD) have injected their own “perceptions” of the disputed media which we both have consumed. Because of the station of authority in which these narratives were delivered, many people are then unable to perceive the event in an objective manner and thus this representation becomes their reality. I find this dilemma to be rather frustrating and wonder where the role of the anthropologist plays into this “maze” of the reality of our society. On page 21, Geertz states that the anthropologist “confronts the same grand realities that others… confront in more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts them in contexts obscure enough… to take the capital letters off them.” While I am still confused by the implications of what I am trying to convey, I feel like this Geertz article helps me comprehend our role in this labyrinth of reality. We are not to find the overarching meaning of all of these “profundies” as Geertz calls them, but rather to create representations of realities that renounce each other and create further discourse and paradoxes. I am not sure if any of what I just wrote makes sense but I hope at least some of it does.