Virtual Ethnography 101: My Manila Zoo Experience

This summer I asked my college students in Anthropology 1, aside from learning anthropological concepts and theories inside the classroom - to explore places, experience cultural happenings, and then apply their learning through writing ethnographic accounts using the method of participation-observation.

I am posting in my blog with the writer's consent selected ethnography penned creatively by my students to contribute to the emerging sub-discipline of anthropology called 'Virtual Ethnography'.

Basically, virtually ethnography is also referred to as Webnography. We cannot deny the fact that with increasing use of technology and the Internet, there is now a demand for online spaces on various ethnographic accounts.

Ethnography By Dyan Barrion

I went to Manila zoo with three of my classmates fro my Anthropology 1 class. To be honest, no matter how much I love to see animals, I never been in a zoo before. In my first year in college, I had attempted to go to Manila zoo. However, many of my blockmates said that I will just be disappointed if I go there since I won’t be seeing much anyway. And so last Friday, I finally got to go to Manila zoo.

Of course I expected the not so pleasant smell upon entering the zoo, after all it’s a zoo and many animals are living there. The first animal I saw upon entering the zoo is an elephant. It’s pretty cool for me to finally see a live elephant. Though that elephant for sure looked lonely since he is just alone in his huge territory. There were several horses and cows and even hippopotamus in the zoo. The hippo was probably sleeping since it was submerged in water and totally not moving. We then went to see the Philippines’ long-tailed monkeys. There were around 6-7 monkeys in the cage. They were playing with each other, I noticed that these monkeys were fond of playing with empty bottles of mineral water. At that moment, I started to wonder why their cages are not clean enough for these monkeys. I don’t think it’s conducive for animals to play with garbage.

Then we saw tigers. I have to admit I was elated to see big cats in action, though they behaved bored and inactive by the time we arrived before their cage. We saw tow other cages with a pair of tigers in them. Probably, it’s a male and a female in one cage. We continued exploring the zoo until re reached the cages of monkeys.

I saw one monkey trying to chew a peso coin. There were three other visitors in front of the cage but it looked like one of them threw another coin to the monkey. I got a bit irritated bout what they did. What if the monkey swallowed the coin? I thought better yet if they threw edible food instead of coins to the monkeys.

We went to see a Japanese red-faced monkey. There was a sign board with a description of the monkey written on it. It says that this certain monkey is a very human-like creature, has red face, and has expressive eyes. I have to admit that this monkey though acted also like human. One of my classmates even got the chance to play a little bit of hide and seek with this monkey. But I think the monkey prefers to engage with less number of visitors. It was quite hard to snap shot a picture with the Japanese red-faced monkey. He’s smart enough to know when someone steals a picture taking with him. (Photo Source: http://www.google.com.ph/ manila zoo / & flicker.com).

After seeing the smart Japanese red-faced monkey, we decided to end the day and head home to start writing our ethnography. But we were stopped from leaving when we caught the sight of beautiful and colorful birds from the Kinder Zoo. At first, we are doubtful to enter since we had to pay a bigger price to enter this part of the zoo. But minutes after debating among ourselves whether or not to explore the Kinder zoo, finally we entered the avian kingdom and had dozens of pictures with trained birds and with some other trained animals.