I guess the first thing to say is that here, if you say 'school,' everyone looks at you funny. 'School' is all your education until you go to university, that is, primary, secondary, and A-levels. 'College' is the school you'd go to if you're not doing A-levels; I think it's roughly equivalent to a vocational school. 'University' is where I'm at. (To avoid confusion, I always now refer to Whitman as a university, which sounds so wrong to me.)
We have so few hours of class time here, usually one or two hours of lecture per week per module (course) plus one hour tutorial. I have a grand total of nine hours of in-class time per week. Though the rest of my time is not 'free' per se, it is 'empty,' and I get to decide exactly what portion of this time should be allocated for schoolwork, and what portion for exploring and going on adventures. Lecturers are pretty impersonal, are hard to find if you have any questions, are not very good at responding to emails, and don't make any effort to learn names or even to recognize who is in their classes. This is a huge change from Whitman, and kind of odd to get used to.
The anthropology library is my favorite place to study.
My first class of the week is Political and Economic Anthropology, which sounds absolutely fantastic, but doesn't live up to my expectations. The lecturer has put all his lectures online as (painfully boring) podcasts and has asked us to watch them before coming to class, so that we can spend that hour asking questions. Needless to say, attendance at these classes has dropped precipitously. The content of these lectures mostly revolves around gypsies in Hungary or Romania, with an occasional reference to other parts of Europe. I once emailed him and asked if some of the things we'd been learning could be applied to societies in Africa, for example, or Australia. He never responded.
Next is West African Ethnography, taught by an older professor who came the first day with a map of Africa that had been in the department since it was founded, and who takes a break in the middle of class to smoke. He's certainly grown on me since the first day, and is quite friendly, though painfully not technologically savvy. He is the only lecturer who does not put the readings for his class online (we have to actually use the library! gasp!) and recently one student told me that she'd emailed him over the summer and didn't hear back for three months.
Third class is Theoretical Perspectives in Social Anthropology and Material Culture (a bit of a mouthful). This is probably my favorite class because both lecturers (they tag-team it) are extremely clear and concise. This is the class that teaches us all the names we can later throw around to impress other anthropologists at parties: "I'm more of a Weber person myself...can't stand Durkheim's way of avoiding the individual" or "The way Levi-Strauss modified and built upon the foundations of Radcliffe-Brown's theory positively fascinate me" or "Oh, that is such a Geertzian 'thick description' way of describing Molly's pudding" etc.
Last is Anthropology of Media and Consumption, taught by a lecturer who must have published about fifteen hundred books already. We talk about such diverse things as coke consumption in Trinidad, second-hand shopping in London, yuppie coffee consumption in the US, domestic foods in Russia, grocery shopping in London, and Christmas everywhere. We're only just beginning media now. I love a class that take grocery shopping and TV watching as serious markers of social life.
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