Post No. 8

For me personally, my favorite two guest lectures were Mary Stegmaier and Peter Motavalli. Starting with Mary Stegmaier, it was very interesting to hear her talk about her time as an intern for a company in Barcelona. This was due to the fact that I myself had actually studied abroad in Spain just the semester before albeit in a different city; Seville. Her experience and mine could not be more different even though were in the same country in a couple of its biggest cities. She was in the North of Spain, in Catalonia, which is more akin to the rest of northern and western European culture whereas I was living in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain which is more similar to Mediterranean culture and very laid back. She described her experience there as sounding very formal and business oriented, which sounds about right for the North of Spain. My experience was very relaxing; people walked slow, businesses operated whenever they chose to, and there were no hard deadlines for anything. For me, this really shows how remarkably different the the cultures of different regions can be within a country can be despite being being only hours apart. 

Peter Movalli's lecture about the indigenous community he became close with in rural British Columbia, Canada was especially eye-opening to me. To me, it seemed like despite being a white man from, the midwest, he was able to successfully immerse himself in a culture that couldn't be more different from his own simply by trying to live among them and understand them for his own research purposes. When they discovered the remains of a long dead tribal member in under the shore of the lake, it seemed like something out of a movie. It is crazy to me how much we can learn about the past through archaeology. The thing that stood out most to me, however, were the burial traditions of the locals. What they did with the remains of the tribal members in order to get to their version of the afterlife is something that would be considered desecration in the Irish Roman Catholic culture I was raised in, but to me it seemed so beautiful and respectful. 

I initially picked Panama just because I knew it was in Central America due to the Panama Canal. There was literally nothing else I remembered about the country other than my eighth grade social studies teacher telling us that when the CIA was trying to capture Manuel Noriega, they blasted "Panama" by Van Halen at a high volume outside of his compound for days until he finally came out to be arrested. What I actually learned was a long pattern of American interference in the Central American nation going back over a hundred years. What I also learned about was the treatment of the indigenous people by the government, which isn't great. I also learned a much more in depth history of the country's defining feature, the Canal. All I really knew about the Canal was what my grandpa told me family when he was stationed there during his Navy years. The conflict over the ownership of the Panama Canal between the United States and Panama is representative of more than just the Canal, but over the ideals of self determination in a country that has been subject to foreign interference for much of its history.

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