I'm done with straight-forward stuff. I finished my statistics homework for tomorrow, plus the practice test to prepare for the real one on Tuesday. I typed up some notes that a group member took about the native Apache and their perception of time and use of astronomy, as well as adding a few bits of my own and doing some editing and sent it back for approval before posting it to our group wiki.
Now, I have two papers to start on. One is shorter (about 1500 words) and addresses the bonds, tensions, kinships, and paradoxes in the Tamil family I'm reading an ethnography about. I'm intimidated by that; family dynamics are pretty different from those here in the US, and beyond that, I've never dealt a lot with family dynamics in the first place. But the lecture in class today about cross-cousin marriage and it's interrelations with a sort of 'underlying' matrilineal heritage that often gets broken by the overlying patrilineal structure really helped some of it make more sense. That's due on the 16th of November.
I also have a paper of double that length which will serve as my final project for my history class. I'm going to argue that there was a change in mode of consumption of popular culture in the first half of the 20th century from a more interactive and participant-constructed mode to a more solitary mode that was subject to an existing, institutionalized construction. Moreover, I'm going to argue that the evolution of cinema and the context of film exhibition was the primary cause of that transformation. I was led down that path by a really great article on movie palaces by Maria Slowinska that I mentioned before. I'm a little nervous, and am hoping that there's more evidence to support that reading of history in the pile of books I've requested via interlibrary loan. I think I can address this both head on, and kind of obliquely, in looking at the way members of different classes consumed entertainment and at the changing makeup of cinema audiences. That one's due November 29th.
I'll have a few other things to work on for other classes to, as they come up. A little more article analysis for research methods. More math homework for stats. And of course, getting ready for finals at the beginning of December. But tonight, for me, kind of marks my entry into the home stretch. I'm kind of amazed at how quickly it's all gone by this semester, and while there's a lot left to do, I think it's all narrowing down to that light at the end of the tunnel.
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