PhD Update

Well, had a meeting with one of my supervisors today.  He's been really busy, so I haven't seen much of him, so the first bit of the meeting was just chatting about life and how we've been.  I then told him about the case study I've been working on now and some of the problems I've encountered.  

We then went on to discuss some of the methodological problems that I've been having that he can directly help with.  I'm not sure how soon it will be resolved, but I feel like I"m getting closer.

The biggest thing that we discussed was how to handle the next background section I need to write.  I need to write about the methodological and theoretical context of my work, which means tackling the entire corpus of theory concerning the social nature of architecture and the archaeology of architecture.  He had some good suggestions on how to structure my work, which gives me the direction I need to get started.  Hopefully it won't take me too long!

Working from home

I am at home waiting for a repairman to come this morning and am once again caught up in the eternal quandry of how to work at home.  I brought home work I can very easily do here - writing up some of the research I did late last week, and I am determined.  There are just so many more distractions here at home.

It's not like the office is any better.  There, there's always someone dropping by to say hi and to pass on the latest gossip.  I love that, love seeing my friends, hearing the latest goings-on and chitchatting.  

How can you really get stuck into work though?  

Then again, I work well when I'm flitting back and forth, but I always feel more accomplished if I've put in a solid couple of hours in of reading and writing.  Unfortunately, the only place that has recently allowed me to work steadily has been the coffee shop down the road, which gets expensive in tea.  Maybe I'll drop by later, but I sure hope I can get settled into working somewhere else.

How do you guys get settled into a working headspace?  What do you do to get yourself in the mood?  Do you force it if you're not feeling it?

Helpful colleagues

Thank goodness for people around me who have experience in the field. The problem I was having with inconsistent publications a couple of days ago has been solved since I found out that Experienced Fellow Grad Student had actually dug at the site in question and had in fact excavated the exact building I was interested in! I could have kissed him!

He couldn't solve my weird publication problems, as they are indeed weird, but he could tell me what exactly was found where and describe things for me in more detail than I was getting.

Hurray!

Experiencing the divine and pilgrimage

I listen to a really good podcast The Dark Side of Fey. The most recent episode was a thought-provoking one on Experiencing Deity. The discussion itself was fascinating, and an issue that I have struggled with myself, it triggered some thoughts on recent issues concerning experience and archaeological sites.

My field work is located very close to the famous site of Catalhoyuk. This site is now the pilgrimage location of many different goddess groups due to some scholarship from the 60's that suggested that the Neolithic community living at Catalhoyuk were goddess-worshippers. While this interpretation is no longer accepted in the archaeological community (many of the images are now believed to be bears rather than women), the pilgrims continue to come and are an integral part of the experience of visiting Catalhoyuk.

To these women, and indeed any pilgrim of any religion, the act of travelling to some particular location brings them closer to the divine and allows them a truer experience. I find this difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, I am a pantheist and believe that all things are divine, therefore no one location will provide a "better" or "truer" experience than another. On the other hand, I truly believe that you gain a better understanding for having visited a site, and have submitted many grant applications for a research trip through the Middle East based on this very belief.

Does location matter?

It seems as if I'm a hypocrite, because I would say that it didn't matter for spiritual reasons, but for academic reasons it does. But, my spiritual beliefs center around the understanding that divinity is everything and that there should be no separation. How does that work??!

Having this contradiction handed to me means that I need to reevaluate my assumptions, and I think it is very true that different experiences are available in different locations. You see/feel/smell/taste/etc different and therefore travelling is very valuable (thank goodness!), but I can't justify prioritising one experience, or one person's experience over another. All are perfectly valid and valuable, and should contribute a person's understanding of the world.

This means that the women who travel to Catalhoyuk to experience the lives of the "goddess-worshippers" will gain something from their trip, but also means that they should not think that it is the only place they can connect.

Inconsistent publications

I am making progress.  I have started on a new case study this week and so have been busy accumulating all the publications on this particular site and trying to get a feel for the layout of the site and the nature of the architecture.  This is always really rewarding and I feel like I am making progress, learning something new.  Unfortunately, working with sites that do not yet have their final publications leaves much to be desired.

The problems aren't always immediately obvious.  I wanted to work with this particular site next because I felt like there was a lot of published information and that it would be easier than the other site under consideration.  I was right in that there is a lot of information, but I was sadly sadly wrong that it would be easy.

See, these publications are not at all clear about the labelling of their buildings.  There are two buildings that I am particularly interested in, but I'm having trouble telling them apart.  Publication X has the buildings labelled 1 and 2 in the text but A and B in the photos.  Publication Y has the buildings labelled A and B in the text and photos, but the photo of A in Pub Y is the same as B in Pub X.

Confused yet?  Me too.

So I tentatively assigned the following labels:

1 (from Y) = B (from X)

2 (from Y) = A (from X)

But more problematically, the photos of the details of each building (benches, etc) aren't labelled at all, so I have to guess which building they are from and where they were located in the building.  Oh, and the photo of the same building in two different publications has been flipped left-right, so I don't know which way was East and which was West.

*tears out hair*

I would be tempted to go and dig the site back up myself, but it was flooded 10 years ago by the building of a dam in Turkey.  So no luck.

These are the days that I wonder whether anyone ever reads back over their publications to see if they made sense or if they just throw stuff together without thinking.

Is this where the promise that I will never be *that* kind of academic goes?  Best laid plans. . . 

Conference Networking

I attended my second academic conference in two months this weekend.  I presented at this conference, but while my paper was relevant to the wider community, it did not fit with the recent trends this conference focussed on (GIS and complex computer modelling).  I have really tried to keep my methodology simple and intuitive, which has the benefit of being very evocative and easy to understand.  It also means that I was out of my depth when it came to talking to the other attendees.

None of the other attendees were people I was desperate to meet, but I wanted to get to know other PhD students in order to build up a support network.  I also wanted to get some ideas of where to go with my work.  While I accomplished both of these things, I always felt very awkward once the conversation had passed the initial 5 min introductory mark where things would naturally fall into a discussion of some technical detail.  At this point, my knowledge runs dry and I tend to fall silent.  

This is bad for networking.

So, while I think my presentation went over well generally, and I met some great people, I know that I still have some work to do when it comes to carrying on conversations at conferences.

Sigh.

Stupid learning and growing.

Engaging with the Community

As I walked home last night with a few friends, we passed a restaurant where a man was smoking outside with his son.  We had had an unexpected snowfall that day, so the boy was entertaining himself by making snowballs and throwing them at passersby.  The three of us were on the other side of the street ignored the boy (he was about 10 - no need to encourage him) and he proceeded to come and throw his snowball at us.  I am no wilting flower so proceeded to give the kid a hard time about throwing snowballs at people, telling him that a snowball was *exactly* what I needed to top off my evening and thanking him sarcastically for it.  (Note - father said nothing).

I then walked face first into a pole.  Ouch.

Of course, kiddo thought this was frickin' hysterical and what I rightly deserved for having the gall to tell him it was inappropriate to throw snowballs at strangers on the street.

I got home, sore and my face throbbing, and I was really pissed.  Not at the boy, really, but at the adult who stood and let his kid throw snowballs at strangers with no regard to his relationship with the community.  I can only imagine what sort of holy terror this kid will grow up to be.

This is a common problem where I live, parents do not seem to be engaged in their children's relationship with the community around them.  No one bothers to teach their children how to interact with strangers and how to be a functioning member of society.  This might explain the number of rude and infantile adults around here as well.  

It can be truly unpleasant to go out into the world some days when common decency seems to have fled.  So what can we do?  My husband thinks that if every single person who had been hit by that kid's snowballs had taken the time to tell him off, he would have eventually gotten the idea, but I also think that he was probably looking for the attention.  Also, is it our responsibility to teach kids manners?  In some cases I think it probably is society's responsibility, but it is also a parent's responsibility.  

What do you think?  How can we engage with our community and deter undesirable behaviour?  Can we teach kids good manners when the parents don't seem to care?  Should I have kept my nose and dignity intact by not talking to the kid (and therefore not walking into the pole)?

Book Review

Well, I've finished another book that I got over Christmas, Naomi Novik's Throne of Jade - Temeraire Book 2.  I read the first Temeraire book over the summer, and really enjoyed it.  The second book lived up to all the promise of the first, with an imaginatively written world.  Novik's China was particularly creative, with the integration of dragons into their society showing that she thought about the realities of daily life in detail.  This made for very satisfying reading.

I was very pleased with the development of the relationship between Temeraire and Laurence.  In the first book, Temeraire is treated as a young child and over the course of this book he clearly matures and forces Laurence to see him as a fully independent individual.  This made Temeraire a more interesting character rather than simply a curiousity.  

The plot rockets along, engaging and very exciting.  I found it hard to put the book down and really enjoyed the political intrigue.  The writing was clear and colourful and lots of fun to read.  All in all, I really enjoyed this book.