Anthropology

I chose Anthropology as career in a period in which I didn’t know what to study. I felt lost but at least I knew that I wanted some career pertaining to the social sciences. Once I was talking with my psychologist about the factors that produced stress to me and she said that the career election was one of the main ones. I finally chose Anthropology by curiosity and mainly because it seemed to solve some doubts (or to approach it at least) that I had with respect to our society.

Anthropology is the science that studies the culture and its different expressions. Anthropology also tries to respond the following question: how can we explain the cultural variation? As a society doesn`t exist without a culture and considering that the culture is a complex, symbolic, integrated and shared phenomenon, the Anthropology has an inexhaustible “battle area” (as economic Anthropology, rural Anthropology, Anthropology of the development, medical Anthropology, etc.).

My favourite subject is the study of the social success associated to soccer (as the study of the violence in the stadiums). The most important thing for an anthropologist is to have a multidisciplinary vision and to make its work as objective as possible (following an empirical method).

A photograph

I was looking for long time a photography for this task, because I didn’t know which to choose within my 10 Gigabytes of photographies. It was taken in the summer of 2007, when I was in Paris at the Eiffel Tower. Felipe González (one of my best friends) took it. I was in my “school trip”, in which Alianza Francesa’s students visit Madrid and many cities of France (Lyon, Nice, Paris, Strasbourg, Rouen, Monaco and Gaillon). This photography shows my ex- girlfriend Camila and me, with the Parisian streets behind. I like it very much because it's an excellent memory with one of the people I have most loved, in one of the most romantic and beautiful places that I have visited. This trip is the best one than I have ever had because it was with my childhood friends and because Europe is an impressive and unforgettable tourist place (and probably priceless for my future work as a social anthropologist).

3

The website which I enjoy visiting is Scielo Chile. It’s a scientific electronic library online which has a collection of selected works from many Chilean scientific magazines. Its link is http://www.scielo.cl/. I found this website while I was looking for information on Prehistory for a college work, in my first semester at university. As I'm an Anthropology student, I usually have to search for some prehistoric and archaeological texts (that many times are only on this website). This website has a lot of articles and it's updated frequently, so it's very useful because it helps me to make works and tests. I often use this website when there aren't books about the subject I'm investigating in the university's library. Another good reason to use it is the fact that often it has more recent information than the majority of the libraries of the country, due to the fast publication that occurs on the Internet.

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My favourite piece of technology is my Cowon d2 mp3 which also is a movie player. I get it on Christmas 2008. I was very happy when I get it because it's a very comfortable and functional machine and because that gift was a surprise (I was waiting for a soccer ball). My Cowon d2 has a Touch Screen, 74 mW of poweful sound and it can read flash applications so it's very useful because I can play some games when I'm bored. I use it when I travel to everywhere specially when I go to Viña del Mar because I have to wait about 2 hours to arrive there. I like it very much because I can listen to music with it, to see movies, to play games, to see photos, to record sounds, to use it as a calculator and I also likes its durable battery.

I think that my life would not change much without it because there are many other technologies that I can use to replace it as Ipods, mp4s and notebooks.