Now/here no/where woman

Calling friends and family of Santiago Bose... Calling friend and family of Santiago Bose... What do you think of this? Out of this world! I think Santi would've loved it, no? I can hear him cackling now.

So I was miserable a lot of the time. But there were also good times, of course. Like when I first arrived and every thing was fresh and exciting and every experience potentially provided the germ for my research. When I first arrived in the village, people thought it was strange that I, 1. a woman, 2. a foreigner, 3. alone, should have traveled to Central Kalimantan just to do research. "Aren't you afraid?", my first acquaintances asked me challengingly. I have to admit this was intimidating, being asked that everyday for the first week I was there. I routinely replied by asking them why I should be afraid. "I have been told that people here are friendly." "We do THIS here," they would say, menacingly making a slitting motion across their throats with a finger. Then I would smile, and say with delight: "Oh but we do that too where I come from!" And the ice would be broken! Kantiaw , it must be a universal -- at least among Southeast Asian he...

In my head, that is... It's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of my last chapter on Indonesia. I've been putting it off because, well, I don't know exactly. I get this feeling of dread every time I start. Found this in my fieldnotes. Could be the reason why. This is almost full disclosure here folks, the unedited whines of a woman anthropologist in the field. This will never make it into my dissertation, that's for sure. And I hope it doesn't come back to haunt me but hey, I have a question: Why do anthropologists who claim to write reflexive anthropology never reveal the ugliest parts of their fieldnotes? Maybe I'll find out after sending this out into the world. This was written on one of the worst nights of my fieldwork. That's right, ONE of... This is one of those nights when I barely have anything good to say, and so I have a lot to say. I can’t seem to live by the platitude, If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all. I try thoug...

This brought tears to my eyes. Maybe I was a bear in a past life. Sometimes I imagine that my beloved dog Pomo is a bear. Isn't he handsome?

Illustration credit: the Cordillera Studies Center webpage. Who's the artist? I wish I knew! Over 140 papers will be presented at this conference from Feb. 7-9, 2008, and all of them will be about our beloved Cordi! INSANE! Brilliant! Exciting! (Says the cordianthronerd.) Program and registration details here.

Because it reduces me to this behavior, this thinking (this whining)... Everyday, the first thing I do (after coffee, after eating bread or rice and eggs or oatmeal, after washing my face, after shooing everybody out of the house so we can all go about the business of the day) is turn my computer on and open up my dissertation files. A note I wrote to myself in green text stands out from the white Microsoft Word document that is peppered with black letters. The note says, START HERE DARLING. I stare at the note for five minutes and try to make sense of the text that comes before it, and after it. I absently scroll up and down, up and down, stopping at random to read sentences that don’t make sense to me. After this ritual, I check my mail, I write emails, I check multiply, I post stuff, I check flickr, I post photos, I read blogs, I post entries, I go to three quarks daily, and I proceed to find all kinds of things to read that are infinitely more interesting and far less intimidating ...

"Change your today's mind..."

READING ADVISORY: This post is a not-so-random dissertation excerpt in disguise. Mwahahahaha! In choosing a stance which explains the ethnographic present as a result of an irretrievable past, anthropologists often stand with their backs to the future. Generally speaking, the future is remarkably absent as an explicit object of anthropological research during fieldwork. Often, the future comes later in the literature, in the form of reflections, projections, and recommendations indirectly addressed to policy-makers, development-workers, missionaries, and other similar agents of change making incursions into the anthropologists’ area of study. Unlike many anthropologists, environmental scientists and planners in various disciplines are obsessed with the future: scenarios and models based on visions for the time to come are their most important analytical instruments. Policies and environmental concepts such as sustainability and conservation, restoration and regeneration, in combinatio...

Wrote a review of Baguio Then & Now. I like the exhibit so much that this is the third time I'm blogging about it! It's been a while since Baguio's seen this much intelligence and substance poured into a bunch of photos put up on a wall. Here is a short version of my review . If you've got time to spare and can bear with my wordy gushing, read on... (The funny thing is, I'm actually starting to like the short version better than this one. Yawn.) AND, the show is on view in SM Baguio until third week of February. Go see if you haven't yet. Kulit no? Viewing Baguio’s Heritage (or what’s left of it) Have you ever unearthed a shoebox full of old photographs of a loved one and spent an afternoon marveling at how they have physically changed over the years and become the body and the person that you know and love today? Viewing the Baguio Then/Now exhibit feels just like that, except for two strange effects. First, unlike a person who naturally ages over time, Bag...