Tired Dog is Tired
Apr. 3rd, 2014 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogHere's where I'm at.
I have 17 pages of journal/field notes from the trip to go through. I was using a graphpaper composition book, and was using one row of boxes per line of text, so it's pretty dense, though one page is mostly a map I sketched of Jol Ja. I also have 23 audio files from my voice recorder to go through, ranging from thirty seconds to twenty minutes. The really long ones, though, are recordings of a couple of Zapatista musicians singing revolutionary songs at the kitchen fire, or the whole official presentation of the finished mural to the community, so they don't need major analysis or transcription. If I can figure out where to post an audio file, I'll share a recording of the howler monkeys at dawn, as heard from my hammock at the Maya Bell hotel near the ruins of Palenque. I was so enraptured by them. My companions on the trip were not as enthused.
I have about 3200 photos to process and do something with. A good chunk of them will get uploaded to the Schools for Chiapas Smugmug site, under a Creative Commons non-commercial license for the group to use them. I'll be uploading a lot to Flickr too, once they're processed. I need to split them up into categories. The mural, Jol Ja, Maya Bell, the ruins at Palenque, etcetera.
I think that when it comes to writing about the trip, I'm first going to write up kind of a general 'here's what happened day by day, what I was doing, how I felt' thing. After that, I might write about some of my questions about the Zapatista movement that I had going in to the trip, and what I learned. That's a lot of what will be in the reflection paper I'm working on, so I might just post an edited version of that. To be honest, most of my information is filtered through the two folks with Schools for Chiapas who organize these delegations; I don't have a lot of first-hand information from Zapatistas, let alone much observation of what they do and how their community works. If I was actually doing a real ethnography, I'd be just far enough along to confidently state that I don't know anything about anything. I can make some suppositions and talk about what people have told me, but I don't believe in taking anything at face value in trying to understand how a community or group really works. That's part of them idea behind anthropological participant observation; not just that people won't tell you what's really going on, but often they aren't even aware of certain aspects of what's really going on. All that said, I feel like I have a much better idea, first hand, of some of daily life in the autonomous zones, and a rather better idea, second hand, of how Zapatista governanace works. And I did get to meet the governing juntas of two different caracoles! Those were really memorable experiences.
I have a lot of other school stuff to do to. (Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you don't care to read at length about all my term projects.) I have a paper to write about this trip. I have a paper to write for my history class that I still feel is going to come out kind of half-assed due to difficult to access source material. I have a paper to write for my anthro theory class that's going to require some very deep thought. Starting with an ethnography of the Nuer, written from the perspective of British Structural Funcionalism (E.E. Evans-Pritchard's [EEEP] "The Nuer") we're reanalyzing all of the data that EEEP collected through the lens of a different theoretical perspective of our choice. I have not yet made that choice, but I'm kind of thinking of Marxist dialectical materialism. I like Durkheimian functionalism too, despite it's shortcomings, but I think maybe it's too close to EEEP's perspective already. I have a term project to complete for my GIS class; I need to create a website for a fictional two-day tour of somewhere of my choice, and create the maps that go along with that tour. (I'm going to do an architecture and odditities tour of New York City and use a bunch of my own photos for it, if the topic is approved.) And finally, I need to read an archaeological case study for my Intro to Archaeology class and and answer some directed reading questions. That shouldn't be too bad, but it will take some time.
Oh, and I'm supposedly going to an anthropology conference next weekend. It turns out I'm the only one going from the school other than my advisor, who I can't split a room with due to dumb societal gender-related perceptions of inappropriateness. So I'm really tempted to not go. But there are some really cool panels on urban topics. But those panels are on Thursday, meaning I'll miss another two days of classes to see them. Meh. I sent out one request via Couchsurfing, looking for a place to stay, but I may just suck it up and get the cheapest motel room I can find in Normal, which seems to be around $50 a night. I kind of want to just stay home and work.
I've got about six weeks to get all this stuff done, along with some smaller tasks. Then there's studying for finals.
Somehow, I keep thinking I've planned a lighter semester for myself, and somehow the load keeps getting heavier! But I still believe I can manage it.
I biked to school today for the first time since getting back home. It was awesome to be back in the routine, even if I was greeted in the evening by a flat, puncture-resistant tire with a very sharp bit of what looked like flint protruding from the tire.
I have 17 pages of journal/field notes from the trip to go through. I was using a graphpaper composition book, and was using one row of boxes per line of text, so it's pretty dense, though one page is mostly a map I sketched of Jol Ja. I also have 23 audio files from my voice recorder to go through, ranging from thirty seconds to twenty minutes. The really long ones, though, are recordings of a couple of Zapatista musicians singing revolutionary songs at the kitchen fire, or the whole official presentation of the finished mural to the community, so they don't need major analysis or transcription. If I can figure out where to post an audio file, I'll share a recording of the howler monkeys at dawn, as heard from my hammock at the Maya Bell hotel near the ruins of Palenque. I was so enraptured by them. My companions on the trip were not as enthused.
I have about 3200 photos to process and do something with. A good chunk of them will get uploaded to the Schools for Chiapas Smugmug site, under a Creative Commons non-commercial license for the group to use them. I'll be uploading a lot to Flickr too, once they're processed. I need to split them up into categories. The mural, Jol Ja, Maya Bell, the ruins at Palenque, etcetera.
I think that when it comes to writing about the trip, I'm first going to write up kind of a general 'here's what happened day by day, what I was doing, how I felt' thing. After that, I might write about some of my questions about the Zapatista movement that I had going in to the trip, and what I learned. That's a lot of what will be in the reflection paper I'm working on, so I might just post an edited version of that. To be honest, most of my information is filtered through the two folks with Schools for Chiapas who organize these delegations; I don't have a lot of first-hand information from Zapatistas, let alone much observation of what they do and how their community works. If I was actually doing a real ethnography, I'd be just far enough along to confidently state that I don't know anything about anything. I can make some suppositions and talk about what people have told me, but I don't believe in taking anything at face value in trying to understand how a community or group really works. That's part of them idea behind anthropological participant observation; not just that people won't tell you what's really going on, but often they aren't even aware of certain aspects of what's really going on. All that said, I feel like I have a much better idea, first hand, of some of daily life in the autonomous zones, and a rather better idea, second hand, of how Zapatista governanace works. And I did get to meet the governing juntas of two different caracoles! Those were really memorable experiences.
I have a lot of other school stuff to do to. (Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you don't care to read at length about all my term projects.) I have a paper to write about this trip. I have a paper to write for my history class that I still feel is going to come out kind of half-assed due to difficult to access source material. I have a paper to write for my anthro theory class that's going to require some very deep thought. Starting with an ethnography of the Nuer, written from the perspective of British Structural Funcionalism (E.E. Evans-Pritchard's [EEEP] "The Nuer") we're reanalyzing all of the data that EEEP collected through the lens of a different theoretical perspective of our choice. I have not yet made that choice, but I'm kind of thinking of Marxist dialectical materialism. I like Durkheimian functionalism too, despite it's shortcomings, but I think maybe it's too close to EEEP's perspective already. I have a term project to complete for my GIS class; I need to create a website for a fictional two-day tour of somewhere of my choice, and create the maps that go along with that tour. (I'm going to do an architecture and odditities tour of New York City and use a bunch of my own photos for it, if the topic is approved.) And finally, I need to read an archaeological case study for my Intro to Archaeology class and and answer some directed reading questions. That shouldn't be too bad, but it will take some time.
Oh, and I'm supposedly going to an anthropology conference next weekend. It turns out I'm the only one going from the school other than my advisor, who I can't split a room with due to dumb societal gender-related perceptions of inappropriateness. So I'm really tempted to not go. But there are some really cool panels on urban topics. But those panels are on Thursday, meaning I'll miss another two days of classes to see them. Meh. I sent out one request via Couchsurfing, looking for a place to stay, but I may just suck it up and get the cheapest motel room I can find in Normal, which seems to be around $50 a night. I kind of want to just stay home and work.
I've got about six weeks to get all this stuff done, along with some smaller tasks. Then there's studying for finals.
Somehow, I keep thinking I've planned a lighter semester for myself, and somehow the load keeps getting heavier! But I still believe I can manage it.
I biked to school today for the first time since getting back home. It was awesome to be back in the routine, even if I was greeted in the evening by a flat, puncture-resistant tire with a very sharp bit of what looked like flint protruding from the tire.
