I did it. I added a shortcut to my desktop. For my thesis. Yep.
But Im actually quite excited about it. Daunted as well, certainly, but excited. Ed Swenson, professor and friend, believes quite strongly in my project--which can make all the difference when one attempts to write any sort of academic paper. The important lesson, they tell you as you prepare to undertake the journy, is always to simplify and specify...of course the impulse is to think grandly, with grand concepts and topics filled with grand insights. I orginally started out with this ji-nourmous topic including extensive compartive analyses of complex Amerindian societies and somehow bringing in spatial/landscape theories, place-making and connecting it to ritual(ized) violence and sacrifice and...er...something like that.
I eventually cut it way, way down to like, comparitively (tehe) parse nothing to what it was before. A topic that Ed and I spun out for a course Im taking with him turned out to be much larger then originally expected, so I thought "why not turn it into my MA". Once I have a coherent thesis together I will post it here, but roughly its gonna be about emic (vergueishon says inserting this term isnt all that important) spatial ideologies of the Mexica Aztec and how thats expressed and mediated through the medium of sacrifice and ritual(ized) violence.
Anyway, gots to get to bed. Doctor's appointment tomorrow morning way early. ack
Eve
22 November, 2005
It Begins!
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I'm so dorky, I'm posting a reply with tired eyes as I get ready to hit the sack. Anyway, here's the Grand Old OED's rather rich definition of "emic":
1954 K. L. PIKE Lang. in Rel. Human Behavior I. ii. 8/1 In contrast to the etic approach an emic one is in essence valid for only one language (or one culture) at a time..; it is an attempt to discover and to describe the pattern of that particular language or culture in reference to the way in which the various elements of that culture are related to each other in the functioning of that particular pattern, rather than an attempt to describe them in reference to a general classification derived in advance of the study of that particular culture.
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