Mike's Semester in OU Review

Hello all: It seems we have all survived our most recent semester. I never thought people here at OU were serious when they said 6 credit hours was a full load, but I'm a believer now. 35 hours of work a week also adds to the load, but I digress.

I took Cultural Theory (which is a required course for all graduate students - classic 4 field approach) and Political Dynamics of Small-Scale Societies. The first was taught by a recent Berkley graduate (just hired on here at OU). Let me tell you, she fit the mold, but was very conducive to other modes of thought. The Political Dynamics class was a great immersion into theory behind the development of complex societies and a good spring-board into my dissertation. My final paper will eventually turn into my dissertation proposal which deals with Mesoamerican symbolism on pottery produced in the Southwest and how it served as tool for rising elites ("aggrandizers," if you will) to create political legitimacy. The theory behind foreign symbolism for legitimacy is a little weak and undeveloped, but hopefully I will be able to address this issue.

Cultural Theory:
This is a classic anthropological theory graduate class, like the two required at BYU, but combined. It was extremely informative. Just to give props out to faculty at BYU, we're on par when it comes to other institutions. And don’t worry, archaeology students here hate cultural theory just as much as any other archaeologist (except for my twisted self). We basically covered the development of anthropological theory from the late 1800s until about the end of the 1970s. It was a good overview, although it was a bit weak on the post-modernist side. We delved into a couple of ethnographies and trudged through British social anthropological history as well. Glad it's over. Below is the reference to my favorite reading for the semester. In this lecture, Weber really hits the nail on the head when it comes to being a good professor of anthropology (or science).

Weber, Max
1946 Science as a Vocation. In Max Weber: Essays in sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Mills Wright. Oxford University Press.

Political Dynamics in Small-Scale Societies:
This was an awesome class taught by a visiting professor who just graduated from UCLA. His dissertation was on the obsidian (or “obsdidian”) workshops adjacent to the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan. He reminded me of Ian Robertson. He even knew Ian! Good guy who could relate to what we are doing as grad students. Anyway, this guy really knows his political development theory. We read a couple of Clark articles (appropriately) and a few others that were really great (which I've listed below).

DeMarrais, Elizabeth, Luis Jaime Castillo, and Timothy Earle
1996 Ideology, Materialization, and Power Strategies. Current Anthropology 37:1:15-31.

Bayman, James M.
2002 Hohokam Craft Economies and the Materialization of Power. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 9:1:69-95.

Wilk, Richard
2004 Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca. Journal of Social Archaeology 4:1:81-98.
(This article is a great effort by a soco to explore the transmission of information and style across cultural boundaries. He used modern-day fashion and beauty pageants as an analogy for Olmec style appearing in the Valley of Oaxaca. Extremely entertaining.)

Other activities:
I've just been working on keeping food on my family's table by working part-time for the department as a GA at the Museum of Natural History. I also have a part-time job leasing apartments (great way to get paid to study). In addition, I have a few publications in the works. One is the New World Archaeological Foundation publication of my thesis, and another is one I'm trying to get out into a peer-reviewed journal (a condensed version of thesis research). Also, I’ve submitted a paper for the SAAs, co-written with one of Chris’s classmates at ASU, but it is still pending acceptance. I also have a film in the works, just trying to find funding to do it. Looking to do a Kekchi-English dictionary with a friend at SUNY Albany and the list goes on. If we all only had double the time and double the funding.