social "scientists"

i love social scientists. since arriving at sarah lawrence, i've pretty much surrounded myself with social science. who knew i was a historian at heart? i went to an elections discussion and even though it was crap, it involved people i really admire, so i enjoyed parts of it. nearly everyone i want to study with before i leave slc - maria elena, julie, ray siedelman, mary dillard again - is a social scientist.

i love social science because social scientists analyze very specific actions and contextualize them. here is an example:
the social implications of hair, by sarah's inner social scientist
(if thomas's penis gets to talk in entries, my inner academic is nothing by comparison)
i tend to wear pigtails when i'm feeling blah, or want to dress up, or be paid attention to. i also do it in sexual/flirtatious situations. when i do it in these contexts, i am playing on a couple of assumptions. pigtails are a hairstyle generally worn by younger women and associated with youthfulness. i'm sexually submissive (what, you couldn't tell?), so i'm playing on the assumption that younger people are easier to dominate and therefore subtly telegraphing my desire to be dominated by trying to appear younger. occasionally when i'm pigtailed in an academic setting, it's a way of shirking responsibility for my opinions, a way of making myself less threatening - again very subtly playing on age assumptions. this set of actions is a direct result of my conditioning as a white, middle class american female.

how could you not love that shit? isn't it hilarious? they go on like that FOREVER. just studying humans and their behaviors and how one behavior relates to another. it's great.

in that vein, here are some
projects i want to see:
- the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and Mexico (i wonder if there are parallels? historically? contemporarily?)
- marginalization of Amerindian and Mexican immigrant populations in the American Southwest, particularly in education (again, are there correlations? obviously the Amerindian situation of forced "assimilation" is somewhat unique, yet the confluence of 3 cultures in the Southwest is partly what makes it unique/attractive for study)
- African/West African concepts about the trans-atlantic slave trade (what did the people who were "left behind" think? what did they tell their children about the people who disappeared? how did africans escape the slave trade? how did coastal communities survive and adapt?)