My blog experience

Hello buddies, this is my last blog in the year. Well, today I’m going to talk about the experience of writing blogs every week, or at least, twice a month. In all my life, I never tried to write in English, only vocabulary and try to read or listen to English, but never I wrote it, as I say, this year was my first year trying to write something in English.

Discussing about something, making understandable an idea is complex in our native language, in another language is more difficult, but I think if you practice with little things, such as write about a photo, you can develop a higher quality of English. But, nevertheless we are future social scientists and we need a specific training in English, because we need to read very specific texts in English, with a complex vocabulary, so, with these exercises, one can develop basic abilities and competitions in English, but it is more difficult to apply this in our careers. For example, when reading medical anthropology texts or an archaeology text we need more knowledge to understand these texts.

Finally, the blog exercises are a basic training, but a necessary exercise, and personally, I learned a lot trying to express my ideas in another language. 

Boas

The person that im goint to talk, is Franz Boas. He was a North American anthropologist born in Germany. He was one of the first modern anthropologists to propose a new method to work. Even, I was not a clever ethnographer, but he started to work in America and Latin America. He opened the first Latin American school of Anthropology in México. In other way, Boas propose a method to understand the different cultures approaching into their particularities, he started to talk about cultural relativism and historic particularism. While his perspective it is not entirely convincing, he started to give a grat and complex discussion against the difussionism and the evolutionism. The approach of Boas overcame the physical racism, and he proposed understand the cultures in relation with their own environment, unlike the evolutionism or the difussionism which understand the culture like a linear and global process whose ultimate expression is the Occidental Civilization. Boas, in my 1^st semester, was the sole author that convinced me.

Finally, He tries to understand the anthropology like one discipline with 3 (o even 4) subdisciplines, like linguistic anthropology, arqueology, fisical or biological anthropology  and cultural anthropology.

Charango

Hello buddies, today I’m going to talk about my charango.

Ok, the charango is a colonial Andean instrument, played and created by the South American natives.  In Chile, it was popularized by the “nueva canción chilena” in the early 60’s, by Victor Jara, Violeta Parra, Quilapayún, etc.

I started to play charango in 2010 when my teacher requested me to play a song because I knew how to play the guitar. Then, in 2011 I bought my first charango in a music store and learned to play with this. Meanwhile I was saving money to buy another better because my first charango was cheap and low quality.

Then, I bought a second hand charango to a friend, but it is better than my first charango and it is like my partner.

I like so much playing charango because it is a very melodic and rhythmic instrument.

Finally, the charango is a very unknown instrument therefore is a challenge for me to play this instrument.