Wednesday, May 28, 2014

"El Kula"

I've always wanted to travel around the world and staying with natives on their own society, trying to know about every culture on this planet, explaining the things that surprised and their lifestyle, beside with acquiring more knowledge and compare them with my own. Before entering the university, I thought this method, the ethnography, was like the "standard" way to know about natives, probably because I've seen a lot of TV programs showing this as the "usual way". What I didn't know, is that the ethnography as we know it was developed by a single man called Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (April 7th 1884 - May 16th 1942), who's also known for bringing back to life the cultural anthropology. 

What Malinowski did was to put an emphasis on field research, which is to take notes and draws on what surprise us on the physical field we are going to work, also as participant observation. On it, the ethnographer need to live between the subjects he is studying, needing to establish social relationship with em, letting himself go impressed for what's surrounding him: a new lifestyle, people out of the beliefs he had, etc. His most famous work, that's known on the entire planet -also, we read it on Anthropology class- it's called "Argonauts of the Western Pacific"

I think he is a genius, because he found one of the best ways to know about another society which we don't know, beside of that he developed one of the things that I would like to do before I die (the ethnography as participant observation). Also, his "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" it's a very entertaining text, in which you can easily get on the position he was just by reading it, MAKING IT GODDAMN MAGICAL!!!





Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Among The Living

As a child, I 've read books like Child's Dracula or Little Red Riding Hood that my mother bought me putting a lot of love inside 'em, and later, some scholar stuffs. Honestly, I haven't read much books, I can't say much about this topic in my life, most of my classmates must have read like 20 or 30 books on their lifes, but me, just about 5 or 7, cause I've wasted my life playing videogames or watching series. What a lazy dumb I was.
I wasn't intereseted on 'em till now, cause "officially" I started to read things I like just like 2 years ago, but now it's almost impossible to me to read things I like, because University it's draining all of my time.
The books I've read were like science-fiction and horror. Actually am reading Game of Thrones,  closer to medieval era, beside of being more realistic than the other ones, so it seems I could read a wide range of books without putting an objetcion. Actually I think my favorite book is Mockingjay, but it is hard to say with Heart-Shaped Box pushing so hard on my mind right now.

The last book I read was Hearth-Shaped Box... and I just fricking love it!!! God, I can't finish just one chapter of the novel cause it's intriguing to me to know what will happen, everynight I read it til' I cant hold my sleeping anymore. It took me like 4 nights -about 14 hours- to read it.

The story it's about a 50-years old rockstar that likes to have eccentric stuffs, so he decides to buy a tuxedo, that was was propperty of a dead man that recently died. After that, he will realize that the dead man was a person he met once...

I would reccomend it to all-age readers, cause its a fantastic book, writte by Jpseph Hillstrom King, aka Joe Hill, Stephen King's son. Marco Arenas, read it.

Sorry if I didn't write this well.