Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, as texts

My colleague Tom and I are going to talk about the Native American casinos. But one of the difficulties in encountering these texts is summoning the authority to critique what is essentially a representation of someone else's culture. I think is where the differences between critique and criticism becomes useful.

Simply describing what is in front of you is an underrated aspect of cultural criticism, and one I fail to do often enough in my own work that I have to ask myself these questions (among others):

1. Have I adequately described the text at hand?
2. Have I given enough context about the text to allow people to "see"the text at hand?
3. What are the values *implied* in my description?

We haven't finished our work yet, so posting our potential conclusions is premature. But we are eager to talk about these living cultural artifacts in a scholarly setting.

--Jonathan Silverman