I'm gonna, you know, do stuff. And things.

17 December 2007, 10:09

Today I returned to a few places I had contacted last year to let people know that I had returned. The Ministry of Legal Aid was quite busy, and I believe that they had an arbitration going on when we knocked on the door. However, the man I had most contact with last year recognized me and sent someone out to get my contact info.

We then went to the Centre for Human Rights and Advanced Legal Research. I sometimes find it hard to describe how I envision doing research on grant/research/ethics proposals, and this provides the perfect illustration. Last week we went to the Guest Line Lodge where I stayed last year to say hello to the owner, who, as it turns out, is the uncle of a person on my committee, and to say hello to the little girls who live next door who used to talk to me. As we were walking along the street, my cousin D. noticed a sign that said “Centre for Human Rights and Advanced Legal Research” and we all agreed that it would be a good place to check out as possibly important for my research. It turns out that they are heavily involved in disseminating information about the very law that I am interested in studying, and that a large portion of their assistance to people involved in court cases revolves around intestate succession cases.

The young man we spoke with today suggested that it would be a simple matter for me to attend some of the education sessions that they conduct, and that I could be an intern with them (with no requirements on my time). This seems like a great idea to me, and a really good way to meet people who are involved in intestate court cases. He suggested that not many people are actually aware of the intestate succession law, even in Kumasi, which is not the same impression as I have received from other organizations, but does match my impression from discussing my research with random interested people I meet on the street.

Anyway, with respect to proposals: “I plan to walk around until something incredibly helpful falls into my lap” is not a very convincing sounding methodology, but it has definitely comprised a great deal of the initial contacts and forays that I have made.

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The Big Push

29 July 2007, 09:06

Today I am knuckling down and trying to get my thesis proposal over the hump from barely-coherent mass to articulate and convincing evidence that I should be released into the world.

Really, it’s almost there but I’ve got a number of things that have been shoved into the I’ll-get-to-that-later pile, and now it’s later. And while most of them are small by themselves, there are a lot of references to look up, methods to hammer out more explicitly, and transition paragraphs to write.

Anyone who’s dying to read it, let me know :)

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Thursday's Child

24 July 2007, 16:02

In the British nursery rhyme, Thursday’s child has far to go. Akan speakers assign names based on the day of birth: a girl born on Thursday is Yaa. Yaa is the name of a female deity and also of an Asante cultural hero, Yaa Asantewaa, who led the final Asante revolt against the British.

When I was young, I thought that “far to go” was a pretty lame—what? fortune? Anyway, I would have much rather been “fair of face”, “full of grace” or even “loving and giving”. My travels to Ghana, where you can often tell the day a person was born by their name and which is far from my home left me reflecting once again on that invocation from my childhood. I didn’t draw any exciting conclusions, just thought about it, and that I had, indeed, come far.

Now, again, I find myself reflecting on this scrap of rhyme, bit of memory. This year has marked a lull in my enthusiastic pursuit of academic goals. It has become difficult to maintain the excitement that brought me to grad school and that focused me so intently on the project that I have set for myself.

I’m still committed to my project, but I realize what makes people leap from project to project, what makes people take forever to write their thesis. Graduate work, in particular the PhD, is far to go.

There are, in every project, points at which the effort to sustain the project is disproportionate with the satisfaction that one is currently deriving from it. In an anthro PhD, I think that period may be most of the second year: classes are over or ending, intellectual demands are increasing, and yet you still have nothing that the discipline takes seriously as academic work, that is, fieldwork.

As my fieldwork approaches, I’m finding that my excitement is returning, although with considerable trepidation as I contemplate a year removed from friends and family. And I’m very glad to see it, because it is a welcome companion on my journey.

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