The conference that was a vacation

Today is the big day.  In other words, off to N.O. for the AAA!! Panel is done tomorrow around 4pm, and then time for awesome food, music, and well free time.  At some point, I suppose I will actually attend the conference that I paid a ridiculous amount of money to go to (just talking about fees here,  if you include airfare, food, hotels...actually I don't want to think about it).

But isn't the point of the AAA that students are supposed to mingle and make professional connections? Well yeah, but I know I told you about the time that some grad student tried to talk to Maurice Bloch....

I will just take lots of pictures, especially of the sunshine.  B/c down South they have this thing called "the sun."  It is really hard to see up here in the tundra, especially when it is dark at 4pm.

Mostly I am happy to be finished with grants, turned in the last one yesterday! And to not be teaching for a few days, or worrying about school.  Though of course, when I get back I will have tons of catching up to do.  Like transcribing 2 hours of interviews!

November complaints

I am rather confused by how it is already November 15, and the AAAs are already next Wednesday. The last few weeks of school are always the worst. I have a proposal to write, which I should have been working on all semester, but, as usual, was not evening thinking about. I also have this crazy paper to write for my religion class. Of course, the professor loved my first paper (b/c it involved Asad), and after discussing various themes and potential topics in a meeting with him, it looks like I will once again be writing on Asad. I think the paper is going to be about religious and secular violence, something to do with power, and maybe nationalism. Actually its too much to think about right now.

But if anyone has suggestions for articles or books that I could use - feel free to tell me. I did find this potentially super useful anthology Violence in War and Peace edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. I glanced through it last night. Oh, and I guess I should really look at Discipline and Punish, but sometimes Foucault makes my head ache.