Introductions...

So this is my introductory entry.

First things first: I grew up in Seattle, and I was obsessed with anthropology for years without actually knowing what it was. It started with the Discovery and History Channels, and more recently BBC Documentaries. My high school Japanese teacher also worked on a few archaeological digs in Japan, and would tell us stories about all the cool artifacts he found.

Speaking of Japanese, the character for "death" in Japanese is 死, read as shi (pronounced "she"), and is made up of two radicals (parts of a character that contains meaning about the word). The first radical is death, 歹, and the next is ... spoon, 匕. I'm not sure where the connection between death and spoons comes from, but it would be fascinating to find out. Before I actually looked into this, I thought it was a combination of three radicals, the first being that straight line at the top that would logically signify something buried underground (there are other characters with that sort of meaning). But it's not. Interesting.

Besides anthropology, I also have a passion for linguistics and languages (which are not really the same thing). I'm sort of pursuing a minor in linguistics, though it may just end up as more of a lots-and-lots-of-electives-in-linguistics thing. I'm semi-fluent in Japanese, and have also dabbled in French and Lushootseed, the Coast Salish language of the Puget Sound area Native Americans (First Nations is a Canadian term). If anthropology doesn't pan out, I'd really want to do work with language revitalization. There's a ton of environmental and cultural knowledge embedded in the languages of aboriginal peoples, and losing that insight would be tragic.

In short, there are a lot of areas in all disciplines that interest me, and I'm excited to be taking Archaeology of Death at UVic. I think it'll broaden my understanding of cross-cultural funerary rituals, and I'm especially interested in learning about how the artifacts found in these burials translate into knowledge about the people who buried them and how they thought about death. Most people say the universe makes them feel small and insignificant, and that's basically how I feel about anthropology. The more I learn, the more I realize that the time I spend here and alive is small and insignificant in comparison to the 200,000 year lifespan of Homo sapiens.