My semester

I'm doing three courses this year; Administration and organization, Geography and Anthropology.

A&O started in January, Geo will start in February and Anthropology in March, a nice spread. Even exam dates are spread out with one week in between each.

My only problem is that I find Geo interesting and I like the books. Doesn't sound like much of a problem, I know, but add Anthropology which I also like, then A&O which I seem to detest. Not the subject as such, but the books. Actually, I'd probably hate the subject if I understood what I was reading...


Instead of doing as the professor said at the end of my last A&O lecture: "For next time, read the book by Scott, will you?" Yes, sure, I'll read a book I don't understand when I've got plenty of books I do like that I have to read. That's my excuse, I have to read all the books anyway so I might as well read the ones I like first. But that way, which has been my way the past four semesters, I end up being behind the rest of the class from the second lecture on.


Reading itself isn't the problem, taking notes is. I could read all the books just fine, but that way I wouldn't remember anything when it was time for exams. Which is why taking notes is the way to go. Taking notes takes forever, especially when we have to translate terms from English, terms which seem to exist only in that field of study and not in an ordinary dictionary. Language tends to complicate things, because;

1) All books and articles are in English.
2) Lectures are in English because there are foreign students.
3) Lecture notes by professors are in English
4) Exams are in Norwegian.


I clearly don't mind English. If I did, this would all be in another language. It's when we're learning something in a different language than the exam and have to find the correct terms with which to translate all English terms, by ourselves.

We had that in Psychology a few years ago too - going to seminar groups or even the exams, finding questions about something we'd never heard of before, only to realize afterwards we knew what it was, we'd just never heard of it in Norwegian before. Especially annoying since a lot of words cannot be found in an ordinary dictionary, some not even in the dictionaries made especially for that field of study. Which is why the lectures are usually the way to learn the terms in Norwegian, now that's impossible since also lectures are in English.


IT'S FRUSTRATING!!


Maybe I should tell someone at the Uni instead of just complaining...

Articles...

At the abstract level it seems reasonable, if currently unfashionable, to posit the existence of universal features of humanness and thus of culture. This in turn opens up the possibility, at least as far as logic is concerned, of universal principles of justice, equity, or reciprocity as constituents of all cultures. There is, after all, no logical incompatibility between a pragmatic cultural relativism, understood as a method of understanding how the specific content of social practices or cultural forms has been conditioned by their relations to their cultural, social, and historical context, and universal or transcultural principles considered as constituents of the human capacity for culture.


What does this even mean?!?

It's from an article for the anthropology part of my global development course. How am I supposed to learn it if I can't even get a little bit of meaning out of it?

The Lobedu rain queen

As a great magical practitioner, the queen was set apart from ordinary people, first by her sex - a woman instead of a man in an authoritative position. She was incestuosly conceived and did not die, but commited ritual suicide after the fourth initiation school of her reign. She controlled awful magic in which skin and body-dirt of departed rulers were ingredients.

Incestuously conceived. Ritual suicide. Skin and body-dirt of departed rulers.
Another job I won't be applying for...

At a more practical level, the queen was connected through marriage to all the important political officers in the tribe. As 'cattle beget children', woman-to-woman marriage is possible in Africa. 'Every Lobedu induna [headman] sends a daughter to be mothanoni [wife] of the queen as do any of the nobility who wish to be on a good foothing with her.' The queen only keeps a proportion of the many wives she recieves: others are given by her to important subjects.

Whoa wait... I can marry a woman? Or I could if I were a member of the Lobedu tribe in Southern Africa some time between 1800 and 1894. That's what Basil Sansom writes in his article Traditional Rulers and their Realms.

I'm reading for the exam on Monday in my anthropology course on Southern Africa. How am I supposed to concentrate on anything when I have shocking new information like this sneaking up on me? Then again... I wish more of the information was a little more interesting. At least then I'd have a chance of getting through, let alone remembering, half of it.