I am enrolled in two courses that give me an ungodly amount of reading. One, Swedish Society and Everyday Life, I don't mind because it's interesting and the class involves fieldwork. The other is People, Power and Food, it is about as interesting as it sounds; sustainability, free market, global harmony, pretty unicorns etc. It's supposed to be an anthropology class but it's really economics. Honestly, I don't care about the population of blue fin tuna, I want to know about people and cultures. The class wants us to answer questions that are better suited to be rhetorical questions; asking us to contextualize need, define what sustainable development is and who has the right to decide what the future will be like. The discussion groups all end up agreeing that the terms are impossible to define and we end up just talking amongst ourselves for a half hour, which I suppose isn't all bad. The reading is by far the worst part of it all. I've never read so much and not learned a thing, the information repeats over and over without any solution. I guess that's an allegory for the real world bureaucracy. One thing that's kind of cool is that every week we have video conferences with universities around the world, so there's an opportunity to get global perspectives on these ever so fascinating issues. We get the best time though, one university has to get up at 4AM to talk to us, which makes me feel better about having a 1PM class. And of course I must mention one of the universities is called EARTH University, which naturally leads to: "Earth? Earth? Are you recieving our transmission? Lars I'm not picking up anything from Earth!"
The other class had me do a fieldwork at a bank, which was boring but since I had to actively observe my surroundings it was boring in an interesting way. My later fieldwork will be at a Swedish high school and I will study how Swedish culture is created in the school systems. Should be enlightening, I'm particularly excited because I was very curious about how Swedish high school functioned since I'm told the US high school movies are very different from what the Swedes are used to. Now not only will I be able to satisfy my curiousity, but I'll get credit for it too.
In one of the books I'm reading for that class, they explain origins of Swedish archetypical traits like loving nature, avoiding conflict and a solid work ethic. Some of the best gems from the book are fun little etymology lessons, for example the Swedish word for autumn, höst, means 'harvest.' The word for Saturday, lördag, means 'bath day' because the peasants only bathed once a week and only the day before church. My favorite is the word for knacker (the person who slaughters worn-out livestock): 'rackare'. The knackers were the lowest rung of society, like gypsies or prostitutes. Since the largely rural Swedes had such a connection to their cows and horses anyone whose job it was to kill them was treated as diseased. And where do I live? Rackarberget: "the knacker's hill." That might explain why the rest is so cheap and why most people I know don't live here. Lovely.

Word of the Day: etic- Of or relating to features or items analyzed without considering their role as a structural unit in a system, as in behavioral science or linguistics.