1st cultural anthropology lecture

guess it's time for me to stop whining and put down a day's happenings with some humbleness. another way for me to regurgitate stuff learned i guess instead of cramming everything before tests. bio lec from 2 to 3. Prof Goring is slightly plump, no, she IS plump. that's where the contradiction starts coz her high pitched typical female voice doesn't match her image. and somehow gives me a very frenchy feeling. makes her look a bit funny. But she's very patient at explaining, to the extent that she never managed to finish a day's agenda so far. there're 2 pages of slides left to be covered till next lecture. Was learning membrane transport function. a bit boring coz 90% is old stuff. as is always the case with a new topic. started off simple and basic and took off to mind boggling, dizzying lenghthy paragraphs of explanations and then i started realize that i need to work hard in order to catch up. and i won't try to relive last semester's scenario this time.

Ivan Kalmar, our cultural anthropology lecturer is absolutely hilarious and he's obviously unaware of his power of humour. or rather an unconscious joker. He has a rather strange sounding European accent which makes even innocent things sound a little bit funny. For example somewhere thru the lecture, a slip of tongue he said ' princess charles' while he meant to say prince charles. and nearing lec's end, some people were already packing up all ready to flee and the prof, whom I regard as the most powerful and efficient lecturer so far at stopping people from fleeing from the scene, shouted 'sit down', with a horribly strange accent, and added 'or you wil FAIL', with an equally strange accent. i think some people laughed so hard they were too weak to walk so they just stayed. the lecture content, well, is very philosophical and confusing. we talked about sign cultrues and language. language not as communication, but as something in 'constructing the world', lots of arbitrary ideas. that the realization of 'ego', or self/I, is a result of language. what we understand as I is not an innate behaviour but a direct consequence of language, a culture's construction. that is to say, 'I', instead of natural, is 'cultural'. the theory that a new born baby has no consciousness of being a separate individual, i.e. a total lack of 'ego', was proposed by Jacques Lacan[1901-81]. whether it's experimental or theory i'm yet to find out. and the funny thing about language is, it's based on a 'binary' system, or say, words are understood 'in oppostion' to each other. we know there's an 'I' because there's a 'you'. they're opposing elements. i'm still confused about this concept. so far what I've understood is, language is based on something similar to 'relativity'. That each single word on its own has little meaning unless compared to its opposing element. we're not conscious of such concepts because language is a natural thing to us. we know what message the word 'good' conveys, but we're unaware that 'good' will probably be meaningless without 'bad'. and another feature of language is that there's a constant site of struggle. words take on different meanings in differnet contexts. and it can become a dangerously sensitive topic.

'charles pierce', now he mentioned it. i didn't realize he's such a renowned linguist, etc. etc [a super long title list], i did quote his sayings in my classics essay. will that give me a bonus??