The birthday weekend!

October 8th, 2008 • chatter

This past weekend was the weekend preceding my birthday on Monday, just two days ago. If anyone’s wondering I turned 27. My girlfriend had spent all last week plotting and scheming about what to do and frankly, what we did do to celebrate was something of a surprise. While we were hanging out at Holloway’s Pub on Friday night, she hands me my present which turned out to be this massive 7 person tent. Needless to say I was absolutely thrilled, I hadn’t been camping in about 6 years at this point — much longer than that for her though. It seemed that myself, my girlfriend, and my best friend were all going camping!

So off we set on Saturday to get supplies (sleeping bags, food, beer, etc) even though we were going camping later that day. Since everything was a surprise, we couldn’t have purchased much of this beforehand without me suspecting something, especially if she brought home sleeping bags. But we managed to get everything and set off to Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound in the rain. The fact that it literally rained the whole way up there and pretty much the whole time we were there didn’t stop us from having fun anyway. After setting up this monster tent, we dug into the beers and took a walk around to scout fishing spots.

Word to the wise: don’t go fishing at Jonathan Dickinson in late September/early October, there’s no fish in the river.

The night went on with us nearly failing to start a fire in the rain and me dropping my steak twice in the fire pit, although it tasted damn good, and the tent being nearly unbearably hot/humid all night. It was a lot of fun even though we ended up being extremely hot and sweaty while being rained on all night. I’m definitely ready for our next camping trip!

More on Veiled Sentiments

October 8th, 2008 • anthropology, education
Tags: anthropology, education

So I finished the book Veiled Sentiments last week and was thoroughly surprised at how well written it is. It’s the first ethnography that I’ve read in a while, if not ever, that’s written to be read by a normal lay man. Aside from a myriad of oft-redefined Awlad ‘Ali dialectical terms, it doesn’t contain the usual obscuring language of anthropology. Ms. Abu-Lughod succeeded in making this book and the lives of these Bedouin extremely accessible to anyone who’s curious.

That being said, I will probably buy her follow up book called Writing Women’s Worlds. This book was written roughly a decade after her original research in the Western Desert and takes place with the same tribe. I think it would be interesting to see how much has changed socially in that passing decade.

The paper I had to write on the book is simply abysmal but it seems I wasn’t the only one. Practically everyone else in class had the same problem I did with the topic. This was essentially a book report that could be backed up by some research but the lives of these people are so complex to Westerners, it’s quite tough to cram 260 pages into 5 pages. Almost everyone loved the book, that was overwhelmingly apparent but everyone suffered the same issue with the bounty of the subject at hand. Hopefully I’ll get a decent grade that I can more than easily make up for with our next two papers.