ESSAY

I believe that self-evaluation is a necessary step in the process of self-assurance of the quality of my education, so it must be linked to my expectations of it. Because of that, I would like to talk about why I chose to study this profession, in order to talk about the self-evaluation of my academic year. I chose Anthropology as a career in a period in which I didn’t know what to study. I felt lost, but at least I knew that I wanted a career pertaining to the Social Sciences. I finally chose Anthropology by curiosity and mainly because it seemed to solve some doubts (or to approach them at least) that I had about our society. In view of these considerations, is that in my self evaluation I want to talk about the theoretical tools that I have learned and the usefulness of social Anthropology this year.

During this year, I’ve learned much about cultural materialism, structuralism, functionalism, post-structuralism, cognitive and symbolical anthropology, and many other theoretical tools. I think that this is associated to the fact that I like all these theories, because I think they allow Scientifics and anthropologists to generate verifiable and cross-cultural knowledge. But, on the other hand, there are many theories and theoretical tools that I did not learn this year and that were mentioned in the curricular program. I think that this is generally due to the lack of motivation that I have to those theories. In addition, many times I could not learn about these theories because teachers were not trained or prepared pedagogically to teach these theories.

On the other hand, this year I believe that I progressed much in my vision of the practical utility of the social Anthropology. In broad terms, it seems to me that Anthropology is a great instrument or tool of analysis methodology: one can choose the component that serves better for one to investigate a specific object, in order to help people and to protect “natives” of the unconscious cultural contradictions of the socioeconomic structure that restrict their repertoire of action.

Finally, I would like to conclude by saying that in this year I feel that I have progressed greatly as much theoretically as mentally in my future occupation in social Anthropology. I think that in this year I have confirmed my affection to Anthropology and now I am certainly that I want to obtain my degree. It is why I believe that my self-evaluation of this year was positive. Although I believe that I must learn to make an effort to learn all those theoretical aspects that do not please to me, in order of being a good anthropologist.

=)

I think that this subject is very uninteresting and boring. I suggest that you change it for the next year, dear reader.

I like challenges and to issue those challenges to win the fucking soccer game of life. Anthropology is a challenge that lasts almost 90 minutes and that we have to face hardly through science and with bravery, courage, audacity, valor and faith.

Actually, Social Anthropology needs complex statistical computer software to process and to analyze qualitative and quantitative data. The technology challenge is then, the problem of buying fucking expensive licenses. The most used statistical software in Anthropology is SPSS, a very useful program because it can develop functional correlations and co variances between sociocultural variables. Nevertheless its license is very expensive, so it’s very difficult to use it in a “legal way” (we can use it a legal way however, at the university for example). I think that we can resolve that by using illegal licenses (crack software are very easy to look in the web) or by developing free software as Linux software do.

The principal challenge in social matters is that in our country the little State’s bottoms are not destined to Social Sciences studies. Therefore, the studies that anthropologist can do are very limited by the economics resources. I think that we can solve this problem through doing a nuclear war and destroying capitalism and globalization. On the other hand, in Anthropology we have the political problem of the cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. Consequently, we have the challenge of trying to explain the causes of certain sociocultural phenomenon with the purpose of helping involved sociocultural agents, and not to make “worse” its material and immaterial situation.

The principal challenge in education is that we have many bad classes or done by professors that don’t know about pedagogy. Sometimes I think, and also other friends of anthropology, that our education “is like shit”. I can say that our curricular program is much disorganized and unsystematic, so I think that we have to complain and to fight to improve our fucking education through violent actions.


Kisses, peace and love.