yeah, and getting famous by adding "meta" onto words...
does your husband prefer you in pants?

[Q. if you are out of school, and not in graduate school, can you have research interests? A. I guess so.]

1. How to make old stories new.
1a. Can old stories become new?

2. First-person narratives and autobiographies.
2a. Liminal people.

3. Northern California and Oregon myths and texts. (see #1 above)

4. Arcana

5. "the Authentic"

6. Ethnobotany

I'm really interested in the mechanics
of cultural change, what cultural processes drive it
and make it happen and how they work. Conflict seems
like an obvious candidate for one of those processes.
People disagreeing with one another, contesting social
norms and interacting with groups of people to fit
into and thus modify social norms, seems like a locus
of what makes cultures move. So if we can understand
how situations like those work then maybe we can
describe one aspect of what culture "is".

It seems to me that one of the major turns in
anthropology has been a focus on change. That turn
seems to be continuing and I think will be one of the
main focuses of anthropology in the next century.
More than anything what has characterized cultural
evoution has been ever increasing change and it's
definately speeded up more in the last hundred years
then it ever has. So change will be very important in
the next century.

Another thing that I've been thinking about is
children. It seems to me that children are often
taken for granted. We just assume that children can't
help but be enculturated by their surroundings. So we
assume that culture is passed on in a straightforward
manner from parent to child ad infinitum. As someone
who grew up southern baptist homophobic and southern
and ended up atheist gay and living in the bay area
that has never really made sense to me. So one of the
things that I would like to study is the way that
children integrate what is being offered to them. How
they appropriate what they experience in the
transnational flow of information that surrounds them.
How do kids pick and choose? Who do they listen to?
How do they become who they are? This seems to me to
be an important aspect of understanding globalization
and colonization. Also parsing cultures and
"subcultures". How do all the various "cultures" fit
together? How do they connect to one another? In the
minds of children.

This is also one of the locuses of change, one of the
contours of what culture "is". When children
recombinate the various cultural norms that they're
exposed to into their own lives they inevitably create
something that is neither one nor the other, it's got
to be unique, new, and syncretic. So all those
children creating new versions of their various
cultures are part of what's driving cultural change.
This seems to be related to the idea of culture as an
adaptive system. How does culture adapt, i.e. change?
When kids pick and choose what culture fits their
needs best, as atheist bay area culture fit my needs
better than christian southern culture, are they not
selecting for an adaptive trait?

I thought it would be interesting to study this in
homeless children in urban centers in India or other
"third world" countries. India is a really
interesting place for this in general. It has a very
interesting multilayered cultural history with a
thousand years of Muslim civilization laid over three
thousand years of Vedic civilization, laid over ten
thousand years of Dravidian civilization with two
hundred and fifty years of British imperialism and
fifty years of American cultural imperialism all
swirling around. And these huge poverty stricken
megacities are probably the sites of unprecidented
numbers of children forming groups and interacting
semi-autonomously.

Groups of children with no direct parental
relationships living together in relatively large
social groups would be very intersting examples of
this kind of selection. A family setting obviously
makes the enculturation more dominant. Though in our
media filled culture they can never really isolate
their kids. But homeless children would have a
uniquely varied number of inputs. The differences and
the new forms might be a bit more obvious than in a
child raised in a family. It would be especially
interesting to see what new spontaneous social forms
or customs or institutions or roles etc. they come up
with as a group.

It would be cool to get involved in child psychology.
I really haven't read anything much in psychology
beyond Freud. Like I said I'd like to be as
interdisciplinary as I can.

Alternate sexuality seems like an interesting
opportunity as well. Because people with alternate
sexualities often have to reject the cultural norms
that have been impressed upon them they are also
become available to more varied cultural inputs.

In any event, in general i'm interested in change,
globalization, the emerging "global culture" as it
relates to things, "monoculture", cultural
imperialism, etc. Sexuality, alternate sexuality,
religion, homelessness, refugeeism. children,
disaster, culture as an adaptive system, india,
colonialism.

You're welcome to be interested in indexical metapragmatics - Eric and I were joking about it because of a class we had with Michael Silverstein that kicked our a**es (not to mention the little snafu in which we received the wrong final exam...)

(I did well in the class, but it genuinely challenged me.)

Robin - sounds like you're interested in what is called "ethnomusicology" - it definately exists.

I work with visual anthropology, communication and how visuals have the ability to cross language barriers. my interests are in indigenous native american/south american populations and current issues, counter cultures, art, ritual - especially concerning spirituality and death, and festivals

Wow. That's what I'm doing, too. Kind of. I work on advertising images in post- Soviet countries.

Wow, it is so awesome to see so many different interests. I really need to scroll back up and get some more reading.

My interests are weird in my own opinion. I am very passionate about linguistics, mainly about the loss of traditional languages and aboriginal languages to more colonial languages, and its effects on cultures. I am also very interested in Acadian history and language and how our culture has started to die due to the KKK, catholic church and even MTV (long story). Then I am also interested in indigenous religions, philosophy, rituals and rites of passage, and the non-Abrahamic major world faiths.

I have finally separated from the U.S. Air Force and can now go to college. I am following a weird route to my doctorate. I am finishing up my Bachelors in French with a minor in Education, I'm going to teach high school and knock out my second Bachelor's in Anthropology. I would like to attend Post-Grad at the University of British Columbia.

Bah High Hopes!