Daily Journal Entry #11688 12/30/07 Sun
- There was some miscommunication, so Yvette et al. had something to eat in Houston after they landed rather than immediately coming to Bryan for my party (my birthday is actually on the 31st). I tried to play something light from my music that everyone could listen to and chose Autechre’s album Amber. My mom said, “Do we really have to listen to this?,” and I said, “It’s my birthday!” I was only joking, but it worked, so I went with it. I don’t remember the last time I exerted my birthday power. Later, as we were all sitting around the table having a good time, a family argument appeared out of nowhere.
Daily Journal Entry #11689 12/31/07 Mon
- My sister Jacqui gave me this awesome emo shirt with a bleeding heart.
- Time passed, and then we (Yvette et al.) went on a long trip to my cousin Denise’s bar in Austin. It really wasn’t my kind of scene, what with all the Tejano and cumbia. However, I did dance just a bit to some hip-hop, and the menudo was good. There was also family there that I don’t see very often. My favorite part was when everyone’s champagne glasses got filled with glitter. My other favorite part was when my cousin Tommy said, “Oh, you’re an anthropologist? So you know Carlos Castaneda?” I had to tell him Castaneda had been debunked. Ah yes, another favorite moment was when Jacqui texted me to say, “Kendall and I agree, a little bit of you died inside tonight.” It was my birthday. I turned 32.
Daily Journal Entry #11690 01/01/08 Tue
- Went to Denise’s restaurant for a long time and learned a lot of things about the family that I didn’t know before.
- Tried to look at some shops on South Congress, but they were all closed, so I said goodbye to Jacqui and Matt and they left back to Fort Worth. While we were out there I asked my sister Yvette about a foreign film she saw with Darrell recently where the story was told from a number of different perspectives. My sister said it was confusing, but that the people they were with said this was common for movies from countries other than the United States. My sister asked, “But how do they know what happened? Do they just pick the version they like best?” I told my sister that this was a typical Western response, and that in anthropology there is a greater emphasis on getting at different perspectives, which represent people’s actual experiences rather than some objective truth. I also explained that holding this anthropological view relieves some of the tension we face when communicating with others, because it creates room to understand different experiences, and also that this issue wasn’t entirely foreign to Westerners, citing the gospels as an example. She paused, thought about it, then said this was a really helpful point for her and thanked me for bringing it up.
Daily Journal Entry #11691 01/02/08 Wed
- Went to Coco Loco with my parents, and got into an argument.
- After that went to Aliens vs. Predator 2 with dad and my four nieces. It was really gory. An alien busted out of this young kids chest right after he saw one burst out of his father’s chest. And later the aliens left these gaping holes where pregnant women’s stomachs had been.
- Finished reading D’Andrade and Strauss’s Human Motives and Cultural Models. The book wasn’t as good as I thought and hoped it would be, mostly because they are arguing for a connection between culture and action, and I am already sold on this. They are also too rooted in connectionist language and thinking, popular in cognitive science, for my tastes. Either way, it’s still good and reassuring to hear someone say, “A hoped-for by-product of this argument is to highlight the irrelevance of theoretical conceptions of culture which have no psychological reality and cannot be related to either action or feeling” (D’Andrade 1992:41). In addition, I appreciated the attention given to how motivations might be captured ethnographically.
D’Andrade, Roy G. 1992. Schemas and Motivation. In Human Motives and Cultural Models. Claudia Strauss and Roy G. D’Andrade, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daily Journal Entry #11692 01/03/08 Thu
- My nieces watched an ungodly amount of television. (Wait, does saying it was ungodly make it a good thing? Must make a greater effort at decolonizing myself.)
- Quickly finished up with Barnard’s History and Theory in Anthropology and Erickson and Murphy’s A History of Anthropological Theory. Barnard is a concise upper-level book that would be good for a graduate class, while Erickson might be better for undergraduates. One interesting feature that both shared was their acknowledgment of Foucault and Bourdieus’ influence. Barnard (2000:140) says, “Finally, there is philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, who, along with Bourdieu, has had a profound effect on social anthropology over the last twenty years or more.” Erickson and Murphy (1998:141-142) say, “While a number of scholars stand out as having made profound contributions to developing a ‘postmodern’ perspective (Antonio Gramsci, Anthony Giddens, and Raymond Williams, for instance), two in particular have directly influenced the course of anthropological theory, and deserve brief mention here: the French social theorists Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.” I guess this was only surprising to me as a result of interacting with colleagues who don’t already know that this is the case. It was also interesting to see Erickson and Murphy say, “In the analytical perspective adopted in this book, theoretically anthropology can be considered to be a branch of science, humanism or religion,” especially after Shweder (1992) produced a moment for me where I thought about ethnography as an endeavor similar to convincing someone of the truth of a particular religion.
Barnard, Alan. 2000. History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Erickson, Paul A. and Liam Donat Murphy. 1998. A History of Anthropological Theory. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
Shweder, Richard A. 1992. Ghost Busters in Anthropology. In Human Motives and Cultural Models. Claudia Strauss and Roy G. D’Andrade, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daily Journal Entry #11693 01/04/08 Fri
- Square One for lunch with Bobby, then he got me this awesome multi-tool pocket knife!
- After that went to Houston with my pops. We had dinner at The Golden Room, a Thai restaurant, on Montrose. It was my dad’s first time to eat at a Thai place, but he managed to find something fried on the menu (bacon wrapped butterfly shrimp), as I have experienced before (when I took him to get sushi for the first time he ordered a fried shrimp roll). I ordered mild green curry with chicken (they didn’t have my usual yellow curry), which was quite good (my dad liked it too), though I wish it had been thicker. When our food came out the rice was in a cute little Texas shape.
- From there we went to the Laff Stop to see John Mulaney. The MC wasn’t so great, and the opener was only a little better, but I really enjoyed watching the way that John told his jokes. However, the two funniest things I remember weren’t actually jokes (though John did tell a funny joke about turning into a detective in the morning after a night of heavy drinking to figure out how he got home). The opener said he recently had a one-night-stand for the first time, and found it strange that the woman kept his shirt. A woman in the crowd said this was standard, and that it was common knowledge, to which the opener replied, “No, I think YOU’RE common knowledge.” The other moment was when John said that this was his first time in Houston and asked what places he should visit. A guy in the front asked if he was seriously asking the question, then said he thought John was just being rhetorical, after which John joked, “You know that saying, right? What good places are there to go to in Houston?” When the show was finished I could hear the guy explaining to his party that it really did sound like a rhetorical question.
- Dad and I drove around Houston. He said that Main Street brings back memories and he always likes to go there when he is in Houston. As we were driving around my dad said, “Have you ever thought about doing stand-up?” I said, “Yes, I have thought about it actually,” then jokingly asked, “Have you?” Surprisingly, my dad said, “Yeah, I have thought about it. A lot of people think I’m pretty funny.” I imagine you have to know my dad for that to be humorous to you, but it was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard (my sisters got a big laugh out of it too).
- Before driving back to Bryan, I took my dad to the House of Pies. We both got a slice of Bavarian chocolate pie, and it was good. The cashier was a short Guatemalan woman with the same name as my mother (Olga).
- Kendall admitted that SHE let the dogs out! (Kendall’s uncle gets a kick out of subjecting her to corny humor.)
Daily Journal Entry #11694 01/05/08 Sat
- I said goodbye to my sister Yvette, my nieces, and my parents, and drove to Dallas.
- Picked up Jacqui and Matt at the Dallas Museum of Art and drove to Python Dolly, a “vintage clothing store” that also sells “weird junk.”
- Curiosities was a similar store, selling antiques, folk art, and fine art. It is run by “Jason Cohen, founder of Forbidden Books and Video and Forbidden Gallery,” who is probably the person most responsible for me loving Dallas so much and for having the image of Dallas that I have today (I always made an effort to go to his store and went to an opening at his gallery once). I told him I was thankful for everything he’s done.
- For dinner we went to Vickery Park, and I really enjoyed my brisket sandwich with Kahlua cream sauce. It had a nice, sweet, but not overpowering, taste. Jacqui mentioned this interesting exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art with people from different countries all singing the same Morrissey song.
- Kevin showed up as we were leaving and met up with us again at Ginger Man. I was a little overwhelmed by the normalness, and Kevin left when a band started playing rockabilly. After a while I just started reading Foucault.