One Third

Jumping back to my Cotlow which, as I detailed above, couldn’t in reality be about conservation and primates: I went online and found an abstract of my project that I wrote on GW’s Anthropology website. Here goes: Flamenco has emerged as a product of the dialectic confrontation between Gypsy and non-Gypsy societies in Andalusia. This project addresses how flamenco works to undergird Spanish and Gypsy identity; how flamenco performers consciously/unconsciously conceptualize it/its origins; how Spanish society comes to terms with a performance culture that intensely appropriates and may even co-opt the cultural traditions of its much-maligned "other." It investigates whether there is a distinction — from emic (the performers) and etic (the tourists) perspectives — between flamenco puro and that which is performed in the commercialized venues. Reading over that abstract again after five years, it sounds so gosh-darn dry? The flamenco idea came about after Dr.

When I first heard of GW's Cotlow grant program, I thought, I have to apply. I guess even then I had the idea of possibly aspiring to get my PhD and thought this was a natural step: Get a small-scale grant, do something of my own creation; a solid first step. I felt the pressure as I was supported by the university's Anthropology department on a fellowship. This meant that my tuition was paid for and I was given a monthly stipend. I worked, of course, for the department as a teaching assistant and I loved it. For four semesters, I was a graduate teaching assistant for a large undergraduate course, Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology. As I was funded by the department (which meant that they believed in my abilities as there were only three other TAs similarly supported by the department), I felt I needed to nail the Cotlow. But, the question nagged at me, what to study? Throughout my academic training, sometimes I’ve been at a loss in terms of what to research and wri

Confessions of a Retired Pet Sitter I don’t think I’ve mentioned any of this yet but until last year, I had basically 2.5 paid jobs. One, the main one, is at National Geographic. The second one at which I thanklessly toiled (a little dramatic? perhaps) for three years, was pet sitting. I worked for an agency that takes care of animals (mostly cats but also dogs, fish, exotic birds, your random, demanding hermit crab, etc.) in people’s homes while they’re out of town. I started working for the agency that shall remain nameless due to legal concerns (the privacy of our clients but of course) while in graduate school. I had initially hired the agency to take care of my own two cats, Begbie and Andy. I had found out about the agency just by looking for such a service online; through the Washington City Paper ’s classifieds. I was impressed when one of the pet sitters, a woman I will mysteriously call “Sally,” came by our apartment one evening to get

My One & Only Ethnography The title of my one and only ethnography is: “Passionate Performance or Contrived Commodity?: Ethnicity and Nationalism through the Lens of Andalucian Flamenco.” Flamenco, Spain, and I bang into each other a bunch of times in my life, it seems. There are, after all, lots of apparent as well as invisible convergences in life, right? Or is it better to call them coincidences? Take, for example, the interrelated yet uncanny facts that 1) I studied abroad while in college at the University of Sevilla in Spain, and, 2) that during the summer of 2005, I went back to conduct my first (and probably only) ethnography. Then, 3) when I prepped for my interviews at National Geographic, I picked up a copy of Traveler magazine from Books A Million, a bookstore flanking Dupont Circle, and in it found a short piece about Sevilla and what there is that’s “authentic” to see and experience there. And the circle continues ‘round and ‘round, don’t it? For those non-anthro dor

Kurapaty, Belarus: Site of Stalinist Purges, 1937-1941 Truth be told, I didn’t know the name of this place of mass murder until I did a little research. To me, the name of the place doesn’t matter too much. The name, Kurapaty, however, does matter to those who were killed there, those who will never return from there, and the families they left behind. I am not going to present you with a comprehensive nor historical look into the forests of Kurapaty here. I’ll just tell you how I came to know this place, what I saw when I was there, and what remains in my mind about the place ten + years out. As you know, dear reader, I was in Belarus the summer between my third and last years at UPenn. After our month in the field, excavating a Bronze-age archaeological site near the village of Snydin in southern Belarus, we (me, Alyssa, and Emily; the three American girls) were wasting time in Minsk while our group’s American leader, Walt, “took care of business.” One day we headed to Kurapaty by bu