Half Study-day, half Sunday

My initial plan for today was to read ‘IT’ and relax for the whole day. However, the reading materials that I downloaded the other day were beckoning me to start with that. With uni starting next-next week and as reading is always relaxing for me, regardless of what it is, I decided to do some studying. Plus, I knew that it would give me something to talk about. I’m already done with it, so that still leaves me with half a Sunday.

This term I’ll be taking a module called Anthropological Research Methods and the book & article that I read today are prep for that. If you might expect this to be a theoretical thing in which someone teaches us how to do research, I expect the opposite. TBC when we start. Anand Pandian's 'A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times' talks about adapting traditional methods to our contemporary world and using alternatives such as literature - with examples from Ursula K Le Guin.

Reading about Le Guin from an ethnographic/anthropological perspective makes me curious to return to ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ and see what I get out of it with the knowledge that I have now. I found it almost boring when I read it in my second year at uni because of the long descriptive passages, although I still remember many parts of it very vividly. This time I’d be looking for ethnographic observations, instead of complaining about how much the protagonist travels. Might be an interesting re-read experiment!