The language and Mr. Pagel

Hello classmates and everybody there! 

Today I am going to talk about a topic that I do not like so much. Language.

I think that is really difficult to explain what language is. I mean that we can make a lot of biology hypothesis or social hypothesis but it is a fact too remote and too rooted on our human essence that makes it (almost) unachievable.

In my personal opinion, obviously conditioned for my "social" training, I think that the fact (I mean the appearance) of the language is a social thing, and it did not happens one day, it was a social process, related with the evolution too.

Now, relating this topic with the video of Mr. Pagel's speech, that outline the process of the "beginning" of language and understand language as a communication system that solves the problem of the social learning (visual theft), inaugurating the cooperative societies where the language is a piece of social technology. Mr. Pagel says on his video: "once we have language we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity". Also, Mr. Pagel can predict what language should be on the future: just one language for the entire world.

As I said before, I think is difficult to go as far as to say what will happen with language. I feel about language as a huge thing that we really can not figure out. But it doesn't make it something useless to social studies. Language is so rewarding studying our reality, the change in our cities and country, migration events,on psychology studies about learning on the kids mental process. 

Chilean culture

First of all I would like to say that I don’t feel good talking about the Chilean culture or the national holiday, because I think that at this time we just celebrate and commemorate the victories and legitimize costumes by the dominant class.

Now, if I have to define the things that I think that make people Chileans I would like to think about the popular costumes: like some kind of food (carbonada, cazuela, corn cake, empanadas, mote with huesillos, humitas, some kind of shellfish, etc.), country costumes related to the work on farms (like the traditional “party” named trilla where the people harvest chickpea, wheat or other kinds of vegetables and the neighbors and family go there to help in the harvest, but later everyone eats and drinks wine), some dances of the different cities around the country and the typical popular parties.

At the present I think that the most deeply rooted costumes are derivative of the popular parties and conserve things like eat a lot, drink so much, and dance. In the present most of the people makes barbecue, eat beer and other alcohols, dance modern kinds of music, and the most rooted traditional dance is the cueca, a dance that in my opinion is not much traditional.

I don’t know if I feel identify with some national element like nationalism or solidarity, I could say that I feel identify or angry about some injustice or about the domination that the most of the people in the country suffer, but I don’t know if that is a feeling promulgated these national days.

I don’t know what we should celebrate instead of the costumes imposed by the Chilean dominant class, the Spanish Conquistadors and the politic slogan imposed all these years. It’s difficult to say that we should celebrate Mapuche’s or aborigine cultures costumes because at this time we are not part of that and it could be a false commemoration with an exotic interest.

A place that I like

Hello everyone!

Last semester was stopped, as you know, by the strike. So we didn't have holidays. Today I'm going to talk about a place that I like and I would like to go in holidays(we have a little break next week because of the Independence Day).

I don't have one favorite place, because I really like travelling an knowing new places. So I don't prefer the country, the mountains or the beach, because it depends to the specif places, there are ugly and crowded beaches or countries that I don't like. 

But if I have to choose one of them I'd prefer in this moment the country, because of its tranquility. I usually goes to the country of my father's family. It's a huge place with some animals, a river and avocado trees. My favorite thing there are the old and abandoned houses of my father's ancestor.

It is on the sixth region, near to Melipilla, on a rural district named San Pedro. And I have go there all my life, because my grandparents used to live there. It was the meeting point of the hole family, to celebrate birthdays, holidays and to get together.

Now when I go alone or with my parents I just used to sleep so much over the grass, walk for the hills, and read. But I use to invite people with me, because that is a perfect place to lose contact with the things that we used to do.

I'm not sure about the place where I'm going this holidays, but I'm sure that I'll go there some days.

Regards!

About the last term

HI everyone!
The last term was too rushed, the strike took more time than we thought and the end of the process was really disappointed.

I was part of the strike but it's difficult to me take a precise position, because I think that the strikes are not the choice of the most of the people at the faculty, no one has the total clarity to propose the best tactics to work and to convince the others. The worst thing is that the most of the people is not thinking about the methods, is just acting quickly and repeating a process, since 2011.

Anyway,the last weeks of the last semester were chaotic. Everyone was studying for days with no rest (studying, reading or doing homework).The contents that we review at class were few and the lectures were a lot, so it was difficult to survive.  

This term I expect that the things will be better and I really believe that the time to work will be more, so we should review all the contents. 

The final post

Hello everyone!

Today I’m going to talk about the experience writing a blog for the English class.

I've never had one before this year, so at the beginning it was so difficult to write thinking that others will read it, and obviously the language was a problem.

But considering this learning methodology, although it is good to develop personal writing skills and to learn English vocabulary, I think that it is better to learn in a collective process, because from my point of view, the learning is so much fruitful if it is made from all our own shared experiences. So, I think that a good way to make this experience better in the future is to incorporate a review of the blogs all together. Also, we could strengthen the vocabulary so we can detect our weaknesses and work with them together so we can improve.

Anyway, I can’t deny that the exercise of writing every week (with some weeks of break) has had some good results. I feel I've improved my writing and reading skills (When I read my classmate’s blogs). I also learned to use a new technology tool and a lot of new words.

Now, talking about the course in general, I think it was very well despite the few sessions this term. I hope that the classes keep improving next year :)  

Mi favourite subject: Ethnohistoria

I am in the second year of my career, and the anthropological topics of this semester are more specific and concentrated on Social Anthropology. The two subjects about Archeology and Biological Anthropology are interesting but not my favourite ones, because I would like to work in the social area. This term I learned other anthropology theories and fields like structural anthropology, ethnolinguistics and ethno-history, and this last one has been the most interesting for me.

The ethno-history was something unknown for me until this year, and when I knew about it the first class I was so surprised. It was the first real approach to the anthropologist´s work in real life with ethnic groups. The ethno-history work, basically, is to recover the voice of the ethnic groups that has always been hidden or silenced on the history of the “winners”.

The ethno-history doesn’t close its field to the ethnics groups because you can make ethnohistory every time you recover the speech or ways of life that has been silenced in the dominant history. The objective, when you recover a speech, is that you recover a part of the thinking or models of that society.

But I am not sure if that class is my favourite. I really enjoy the contents of the class but I think that this Anthropology area is so unknown and the impact on the alive societies (and those ethnic groups) is so little or minimum.  That's is a huge problem, because I think that we can't dedicate our work for our own interest.

Regards!

A Picture

Hello everyone! Today I have to talk about a picture I like.

The problem is that right now I can't think about or remember a special photo or picture. But surfing on the internet I remember a beauty and special amphibian that I knew a few days ago. It is an aquatic animal named axolotl, axolote or ajolote that means "aquatic monster" and i knew it because of a Cortazar tale. 

This is an incredible animal, because is a neotenic salamander. Neotenic means, in evolution terms, that the species axolotl have a young appearance, like a baby or a young salamander (the same with humans and primate).

The axolotl lives on the Mexican waters.

The fist picture I saw was so incredible because the axolotl's face looks human. A happy human.

I just looked on the internet to see the axolotle, so I don't have any picture of it that I took and I don't know who took it either.

This picture shows an axolotle, I think it was taken on the Mexican waters and is beautiful because it shows the smiley axolotle's face. 

(This is the first picture I saw)