The new Blog-o-rama  

Hello-

congrats for finding this...it's brand new! I'm currently in the process of designing my home site on WIX with flash, and I want to keep a blog function open. So, I'm moving to blogger.

I'm a little disappointed though; my title was supposed to be "After Culture: Ramblings of a Confused Sociolinguistic Anthromusicologist" but it turns out that it's too long. I will probably call it that on my site, and let the rss feed do the dirty work of translating.

for those of you who find this and don't know me, I'm Bryce. I'm currently finishing an MA at Brandeis University in cultural production. My interests are in music, identity, imagination, and globalization, and I've been attempting to develop an approach that utilizes phenomenology, narratology, and (recently) psychoanalytics. Thinking of culture as text makes me feel as if the prominent literary theories should be applicable to the real world; but don't take me for an optimist, I utilize whatever theroetical tools are in my belt that come up. I may not like structuralism, but sometimes it has a good answer for the question.

I've been doing fieldwork in Gozo (a Mediterannean Island that is part of Malta), and Toronto. I plan to return to Gozo this summer before going to Tunis to participate in 1) an intensive arabic school, and 2) to do fieldwork on mental mapping. My focus for this summer is to find out how people conceptualize where Europe starts and where non-Europe ends. With Malta become part of the EU, I'm interested to see if ideology in Tunis is changing about how European they are (or could be). In Toronto, I've been doing fieldwork on zombie walks- specifically focusing on the phenomenological experience of collective imagination (which will be the topic for my thesis paper). In general, you could say that I'm interested in what it means to be _____.

Hopefully you'll come back and find some very interesting things in this blog- if not, don't sue me.