Finally started writing yesterday, didn't write much and most of it is rubbish but there are at least words on a page. This dissertation has been a difficult one for me, it has raised many questions that I have not thought of before and has caused me considerable amounts of sleepless nights. Its difficult to study something you have been a part of your entire life. I find it increasingly difficult finding the separation between myself and my research. Things I think of as common knowledge I find are things I have to explain in detail.
Some days are so frustrating I want to pull out what little hair I have. But all post graduates go through the same frustrations and I am no different. We must each forge our own path and do our best to sort out what we have learned in our fieldwork and explain it to others. After all isn't that what anthropology is? Learning about culture and sharing it?
I often wish that I had chosen a topic that was far less personal, I had grand illusions of going off into the field to some exotic country I had never been to before, studying a culture I had little knowledge of and returning to Canterbury with amazing stories and beautiful film footage. I envied my fellow students who went to Nepal, Columbia, Kurdistan, Finland, Cameroon and the like. I wanted to do the same, but instead my field work was predominantly chat rooms and websites, talking with people I couldn't see and using pseudo names, rarely leaving my flat.
In all honestly my preconceived notion of fieldwork was naive and silly. Brought on by reading far to much Malinowski and exoticizing other cultures, for shame.
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