Slooooow

Today happens to be a slow day in the Admissions office. There are only six visitors today, compared to twenty-six per day we had a few weeks ago. The majority of accept-packets have been mailed out, so there aren’t any huge mailings to do, just a few stragglers that I took care of already. So I figured I'd write you all a blog post! I’m not really sure what it’s going to be about yet, though, so I’m just going to ramble and hope that it sounds good! I’m really excited about this project that I’m doing for my Dance, Culture, and Identity class, which is an upper level anthropology class. For our final project, we get to pick any kind of dance we want, study it, observe it, participate in it, and write a paper called an ethnography about it. An ethnography is a fancy name for a paper written by anthropologists, in short. Some people in my class are doing fire-spinning, Zumba fitness classes, burlesque classes, etc. I'm studying African dance. There’s an African dance class off campus that happens every Tuesday at 7:30 that I went to the last two weeks. I got to borrow a friends car to get there, which was a lot of fun to go a little too fast on the highway and get off campus. There were drummers there and lots of dancers. I had loads of fun, and the more I stopped caring about what I looked like, the better I felt and the more fun I had. I’m going to conduct interviews this week with a few of the participants and with the instructor.

I’m thinking I'm going to write about how this African dance class is a form of community, and maybe even a form of escape, maybe how it’s a “sacred” event… not sure yet. That’s the tricky thing in anthropology: you have to let your informants form your thesis for you. I love anthropology, but sometimes it’s hard to let go of control like that. I'm really happy that I picked anthropology as my major. When I got to school, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to study. Well, that’s not entirely true… I knew I wanted to do something that had to do with people, not anything science-y with cells and chemicals and stuff. So I just took a lot of intro classes, starting with Intro to Psych my first semester. Psych felt too narrow for what I was interested in. I moved on to Intro to Anthropology the following semester and it just totally clicked. I related to it and it made sense and my mind wondered to all of these wonderful academic places every class period. I didn't want to put all my eggs in one basket, though, so I didn’t declare anthro as my major yet, but rather took Intro to Sociology the next semester. Again, I daydreamed and let my mind wonder, but I could just tell that Anthro was where I really wanted to be. And then this semester I declared! And it's perfect and it’s great and I love it…

I have no idea what I'm going to do with my major or what I want to be when I grow up, but I find Anthropology fascinating. It looks like this blog post turned into "A History of Hannah's Academic Journey at Warren Wilson."

Maybe next time I'll tell you about my work history...