One Third

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...