In five days from now, I'll be right there. Well, somewhere in there. In a cornucopia of varying locations, from small villages to sprawling urban centers.
It's been an interesting summer every time I mention to people that I will be spending my fall semester in the Brazilian Amazon. There's a pretty wide range of questions people ask me about what exactly it is that I'll be doing there. Usually, people ask if I will be doing stuff with biodiversity conservation or with indigenous populations. Truth is, not really. Maybe somewhat. But something the SIT program aims to do is to broaden our understanding of the region in general. So, while there will be a lot of work in ecology (like the giant Introduction to Tropical Rainforests textbook I've been trying to get through), we're also going to be looking at how the drive to develop the region and exploit its resources (by both the government and international organizations) affects the people living there. Basically, its going to be really interesting.
So, to do so, we're going all around the Amazon, to gain perspective on the whole host of different lifestyles and forms of resistance in the region. We start in Belem, the capital port city of the state of Para, located right on the mouth of the river. For a month we chill in Belem with our host families, taking Portuguese class, our Amazonian Resource Management and Human Ecology (yeah!) Seminar, and the Environmental Research Methods class. Then, we take a two week excursion to the state of Amazonas to stay in Manaus with another host family, village style. To do so, we get to ride in a boat for 10 days, and sleep in hammocks. It's going to be awesome. Then, it's back to Belem, where we get back to class and start thinking about our Independent Study Project. Near the end of October, we then take another excursion to Southern Para to do a short homestay in a settlement of the Landless Worker's Movement. Then, back to Belem to take final exams and start our research project, whatever that might be. The SIT program then ends with us doing our presentations, and the off to whatever. Personally, I know I'm planning on staying afterwards in Brazil for a bit. But we'll see.
Of course, this is the really loose schedule, and from what the Director has told us, there's a bunch of smaller excursions, visits and lectures at extraction sites, interactions with community-based development projects, and lots of time to explore the cities. So, why Brazil? I dunno. It sounds awesome. You know when something just really interests you. Plus, I like rivers. And markets. And so far, I'm really taking to Portuguese. It also might make sense that my major is Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society, so the fact that I'm going to a region where we will be exploring resource use, local life, international development, local knowledge, and the modernization of such a "natural region" seems to fit pretty well, I'd say. But really, it just seems like the right thing to do right now. Bard has been pretty good over the past two years, and finally finding the right sort of stuff there has been worth it. But I think now as a student is a great time to travel around, be open, eat lots of different stuff, make connections, and grow. Hence the cheesy name of this blog. The Vortex is the name of this novel by Colombian novelist Jose Eustasio Rivera, based in the upper Amazon. Now, I haven't actually read it. One of my favorite anthro books (or one of the only ones that has really sucked me in) Shamanism Colonialism and the Wild Man (read it!) analyzes the way it portrays the jungle, and the metaphor of a vortex seems like a good one for this whole study abroad experience.
So, the whole point of me writing this in the first place is to have somewhere I can share my trip with you all, cause I'll miss you this fall, whether you be friends or family or maybe even a professor or two. I have no idea how often I will have internet, so I figured it would be best to make one big blog so that I could still keep in touch with people from home and at Bard. Hopefully I'll be able to put up pictures and even maybe small videos of things we end up doing (I'm crossing my fingers we get to go to Macapa, a supposedly large freshwater island near Belem where you can ride water buffalo...oh snap). So, until I'm actually in Brazil...Tchau
