two days ago i realized i am becoming american. because being american is the way of life... yes, the piligrims who reached the shores of what they called new england were refugees of religion, but it is not only about values. or not any longer. today beeing american is a distinct way of being in the world... of your attitude to what you do, freud would complement, unconscious attitude. first thing was that i noticed myself not picking up the phone. hearing it ringing, i don't mind and continue what i am doing, it doesn't annoy me, it doesn't even distract me... from staring at the screan or deep down in my thousands pages of copied papers... john told me that americans always do that... that they are too busy to talk to anyone. that he got used to when people don't answer his calls... it's a signal that someone is busy... and don't think you are that important that they should bother... but... i didn't mean it... i didn't even check who was calling... john was laughing at me... "you are becoming american, that's how it is", he said... after that i was determined "not to become that american" and have been answering all the calls ever since... but it is hard, damn it is... it is difficult to resist americanness:) the next thing, however, is time. i don't distinguish between day and night anymore... i sleep in the evening, wake up before midnight and continue reading till morning, then have a nap and go to school... or sleep an hour after classes... and read again... crazy... always tired and always having so much to do still... working... lenin would be happy to hear that everyone obeys principles of education... however, i don't feel lonely, as most of my friends at the anthropology department look as bad as me:) especially on thursdays... ghosts of bodies who were once human beings...



anyway, weekend is a gateway of escape. i went to sleep at eight on friday night, or was it still evening... and today with uli we headed to the isso's (international students and scholars' office at brandeis) foliage tour down the essex river to the atlantic... very touristic, very cold, but very cool to get out there, to see the birds and the seal... to breathe some fresh air... to see the horizon... to have some video for my enclosed dreams:) i did get wet, i did lose the cover of my great sony alpha... and i did buy some honey expecting to get ill... at russel's orchard full of apples and pumpkins which we decided not to buy for our (uli is born on 31 october, the same as me... or, more correctly, i was born on the same day as he, as he is one year older:)) - halloween birthday party... we'll do that later... my homemade honey is now safe in the cupboard, awaiting still colder days in this unpredictable climate of massachusetts.





more photos... http://picasaweb.google.com/ieva.jusionyte/EssexRiverCruise

for the "museums and public memory: cultural production" class we are working with the community of refugees from Southern Sudan in Boston. there are nearly four thousand of them in the States, where they arrived from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya before 9/11. and they reached Kakuma after several years of travelling through Sudan, after being in Ethiopia, after being reduced by half or more by the bombs, crocodiles, starvation, deseases... even if you listen to their stories, still can't believe it, how they made it... there is a wonderful book by three of these refugees, which are called 'lost boys of Sudan', although there were some girls among them. the book is entitled "they poured fire on us from the sky". the kids had to leave there home in Sudan at the age of three, four, five, six... their parents were killed or lost, villages burned... in the camps they painted as some guy brought them some canvas and brushes. now we have these paintings or, more correctly, the Southern Sudanese education fund has them, and we are preparing an exhibition. difficult, as we don't agree how much explanation should be given on each painting... or let the art speak for itself... we have been doing interviews with these refugees who are about our age and study in various universities, like Brandeis and University of Massachusetts... setting up an exhibition like this is difficult. and most of the artists are still in Kakuma camp. they need some money.





today in Lincoln, the fanciest suburb of Boston, there was a cocktail party for the rich and famous where the Sudanese refugees sang and danced and where the paintings were sold in an auction... well, only the right to have your name on the painting and the reproduction as the paintings will be stored at Brandeis after travelling around Boston for some exhibitions. more than a hundred people showed up, including the democrat candidate for the presidential election some years ago... i was asked by my professor to be the photographer of the event. weird but good event. those rich and famous spent hundreds and thousands of dollars for the reproductions, for the pictures, for the evening with some refugees, for the wine, for a four-day stay in a villa in South Africa... and just donated for the books of the refugees who are already in the U.S. they told stories about their flight from terror, wandering around Sudan for years and coming here... sad stories but with a happy ending, at least for some. Aduei, my classmate at Brandeis, was among them...





although it was sad and a bit disappointing to contrast this elite with the life of the refugees... it was also good. the party had a purpose, i think. if i had the money, i could donate them for this purpose.

look here for more pictures...
http://picasaweb.google.com/ieva.jusionyte/SouthernSudanese

getting up at five and seeing the darkness outside i headed to the train station to meet seim and... go to providence in rhode island. i missed my classes today... but we were following the steps of the ivy league... talking, laughing and sleeping at the anthropology department at brown university. this is where i belong. or i wish to belong. who needs harvard anyway? :) brown is the third or so spot on my anthropological tour... weird kind of academic tourism... and i think it is really the best place for me to be:)

i must be in a parallel reality of books and assignments... lost in the papers... monday was at harvard department of anthropology meeting professor herzfeld, wednesday films at brown 224 - "un chien andalou" and "the couple in the cage", friday - two-hour long interview with one of the lost boys of sudan... incredible story. a miracle of life. and saturday meeting ksenia, hanan, diego and roberto, the other chilean studying physics, who arrived from new jersey for a weekend... crepes with nutella like during the good old italian days... tea and some more tea... one panetone (incredibly italian, i remember on christmas the supermarkets are filled with these huge sweet "things". i bought one for my neighbor upstairs who saved me by opening my shut door on christmas' eve... mmm... memories)... anyway... i finished my first two papers. first one on the origins of inequality in aristotle, hobbes, rousseau and marx. and another - the museum as the playground of knowledge and power, which was on the "balance and power: performance and surveillance in video art", "the body worlds" exhibition and the armenian museum... of course, foucault, gramsci, lacan and bennett. we'll see... now it all depends on the grades... as i have NO IDEA what my professors are expecting. but i did what i could. although not too much...

i wish there was an anonymous club for amazon.com addicts because i am one of them. i buy books with just one click. more and more books i have heard and never heard of. my small room is becoming full of them... on my table, on the floor, on my bed... books everywhere... at the bookstore near the harvard square there are so many of them... and dictionaries of all languages imaginable... different dialects of arabic, armenian, cambodian, african tongues... i love being there. and i love the smell of old books. and almost everyday i find a parcel outside our door... one more book has arrived:) yesterday simon and uli even had to carry me while we were passing the harvard bookstore as i am mad about books. i need a club for someone like me... "hello. my name is ieva. i come from europe. i buy books. everyday. i think i am obsessed. will you help me?"



for those curious about what i am reading, here is the list of the compulsory literature for this semester. books and articles, all mixed up. but appart from that there are other books which i have always wanted to have... renato rosaldo, more antonio gramsci, pierre bourdieu, sudan and chile. should i open a bookstore?

Herodotus, Egypt
Tacitus, On Germany
Bartholome de las Casas, In defence of the indians
Montainge, On Cannibals
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Locke, The Two Treatises of Government
Giambattista Vico, The New Science
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality
James Cowles Pritchard, Researches into the Physical History of Man
Auguste Comte, System of Positive Philosophy
Henry Maine, Ancient Law
E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology
Karl Marx, "Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production," Grundrisse
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society
Karl Marx, Capital I
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Max Weber. “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy.”
Georg Simmel. On the Nature of Historical Understanding
Georg Simmel. The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel. The Stranger
Freud, “Fixation to Traumas-The Unconscious”
Freud, “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices”
Freud, “Reflections upon War and Death”
Freud “One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis”
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Fustel de Coulanges. The Ancient City
Emile Durkheim, "Individual and Collective Representation"
Emile Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Condition
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Emile Durkheim, “The Realm of Sociology as a Science”
Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification
Marcel Mauss, The Gift,
Robert Hertz. “Death and the Left Hand”
James G. Frazer, “On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul”
A.C. Haddon, “Migration of Cultures in British New Guinea”
W. H. R. Rivers, “On the Origin of the Classificatory System of Relationships”
W. H. R. Rivers, “The Unity of Anthropology”
A.R. Radcliffe Brown, "The Mother's Brother in South Africa"
A.R. Radcliffe Brown, "On Social Structure
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, “The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology”
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On the Concept of Function in Social Science”
Bronislaw Malinowski, "The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis”
Bronislaw Malinowski, “Baloma”
Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Bronislaw Malinowski. Sex and Repression in Savage Society
Ernst Jones, "Mother-Right and Sexual Ignorance of Savages," Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis
Parsons, A., Is the Oedipus complex universal? The Jones-Malinowski debate revisited
Evans Pritchard. The Nuer
Evans-Pritchard. Nuer Religion
T.O. Beidelman. “Nuer priest and prophets”
Douglas Johnson. Nuer prophets
Franz Boas, "The Aims of Ethnology"
Franz Boas, "Human Faculty as Determined by Race"
Franz Boas, "The Limitations of the Comparative Method"
Franz Boas, “Growth of Indian Mythologies”
Clark Wissler, “The Culture-Area Concept in Social Anthropology”
Edward Sapir, "Do We Need a Superorganic?"
Ruth Benedict, “Configurations of Culture in North America”
Edward Sapir, “Culture: Genuine and Spurious”
Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
Background: Alfred L. Kroeber, “History and Science in Anthropology”
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship
Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”
Claude Levi-Strauss, “Social Structure”
Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology”
Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind
Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide
Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse
Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto”
Marshall Berman, “Marx and Modernism”
Weber, Max, selections from The Theory of Economic and Social Organization
Benedict Anderson “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”
Foucault, Michel “Panopticism”
Salzinger, Leslie, Genders in Production
Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks
Donald Kurtz, “Hegemony and Anthropology: Gramsci, Exegeses, Reinterpretations”
The Rebel Consumer”
Eric Wolf “Facing Power”
Jean and John Comaroff, “Hegemony and Ideology”
Elizabeth Ferry, “Envisioning Power in Mexico”
Janet McIntosh: Reluctant Muslims
Ann Stoler “Perceptions of Protest”
Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence”
Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance”
Ann Allison “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunchbox as Ideological State Apparatus”
Carlota McAllister, “Authenticity and Guatemala's Maya Queen”
George Collier and Elizabeth Quaratiello, Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion
Beth Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society
Carole Hendrickson, Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemalan Town
Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers
June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines.
Mona Rosendahl, Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba
Paul Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint
Helen Safa, “Women and Globalization”
Derrick Hodge, “Colonization of the Cuban Body”
Leslie Salzinger “Making Fantasies Real: Producing Men and Women on the Maquila Shop Floor”
Diane Nelson, “Gendering the Ethnic-National Question”
Isar Godreau, “Changing Place, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico”
Elizabeth Ferry, “Dancing with the Indios”
“The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol”
Conklin and Graham, “The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics”
Terence Turner, “Defiant Images”
Alejandro de la Fuente, "Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba's Special Period"
Ellen-J. Pader “Spatiality and Social Change
Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex”
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder”
Bann, Stephen. Shrines, Curiosities in the Rhetoric of Display
Linenthal, Edward T. “Heroism and Villainy”
Deen, Rebecca, “Exhibition review of ‘Loss and Renewal: Transforming Tragic Sites’”
Greenspan, Elizabeth L. “Spontaneous Memorials, Museums, and Public History: Memorialization of September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon”
Low, Setha M. “The Memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center”
Feldman, Jeffrey D. “One Tragedy in Reference to Another: September 11 and the Obligations of Museum Commemoration”
Lupu, Noam. “Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s Germany”
Deng, Alphonsion, Benson Deng, Benjamin Ajak, and Judy Bernstein. They Poured Fire on us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan
Beswick, Stephanie. Sudan’s Blood Memory: The Legacy of War, Ethnicity and Slavery in South Sudan
Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum
Stier, Oren Baruch. “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance”
Korte, Mona. “Bracelet, Hand Towel, Pocket Watch: Objects of the Last Moment in Memory and Narrative.”
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “The Agency of Display”
Prentice R. “Experiential Cultural Tourism: Museums & the Marketing of the New Romanticism of Evoked Authenticity”
Rugoff, Ralph. “Beyond Belief: The Museum as Metaphor”
Henare, Miria. “Wait 262: A Maori ‘Cultural Property’ claim”
Herle, Anita. “Transforming Things: Art and Politics on the Northwest Coast”
Handler, R. “On having a culture: nationalism and the preservation of Quebec’s patrimony” McMahon, Felicia Faye. “Repeat Performance: Dancing DiDinga with the Lost Boys of Southern Sudan”
DeLuca, Laura and Katherine Bruch. “Lost and Found?: Fragmented Fieldwork among Sudanese Refugees.”
Chanoff, David. “Education is my Mother and Father”
Bixler, Mark, The Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience
Azoulay, Ariella. “With Open Doors: Museums and Historical Narratives in Israel's Public Space”
Katriel, Tamar. “Remaking Place: Cultural Production in an Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museum”
Azaryahu, Maoz. “(Re) Locating Redemption. Jerusalem: The Wall, Two Mountains, a Hill and the Narrative Construction of the Third Temple”
Kahlili, Laleh. “Places of Memory and Mourning: Palestinian commemoration in the Refugee Camps in Lebanon”
Glock, Albert. “Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past”
Freedburg, David. “Idolatry and Iconoclasm”
Cohen, Cynthia. “'Removing the Dust from Our Hearts’: The Search for Reconciliation in the Narratives of Palestinian and Jewish Women”
Cohen, Cynthia. "Working with Integrity: A guidebook for peacebuilders asking ethical questions"
Van Keuren, DK, “Cabinets and culture: Victorian anthropology and museum context”
Hinsley Curtis M. “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition
Cohen, Bernard. “The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities and Art in Nineteenth Century India”
Dubin, Steven. “A Matter of Perspective: Revisionist History and The West as America”
Stewart, Susan. “Objects of Desire”
Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture
Krauss, Rosalind. “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum”
Parmentier, Richard. “Institutional Regimentation“ in Signs in Society
Mathur, Saloni. "Museums and Globalization"
Phillps, Ruth and Elizabeth Johnson. “Negotiating New Relationships: Canadian Museums, First Nations, and Cultural Property”
Phillips, Ruth. “Disappearing Acts: Traditions of Exposure, Traditions of Enclosure, and Iroquois Masks”
Merril, W.L., E.J. Ladd, and T.J. Ferguson, “The Return of the Ahayu da: Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution.
Abrams, George H.J. “The Case for Wampum: Repatriation from the Museum of the American Indian to the Six Nations Confederacy, Brantford, Ontario, Canada”
Simpson, Moira. “Making Representations: Museums in the Post Colonial Era”