Blog Session 10: Evaluation of blog experience

Hello my friends, I’m going to talk about my blog experience. Sincerely writing in English isn’t so difficult to me, but I didn’t have the chance to do it in my high school, so I enjoyed a lot doing this activity, and now I think it was a great opportunity to improve our vocabulary and writing skills, because when I started to write in my blog, I had a lot of mistakes in my posts, but with practice and the help of the professor, my posts were getting better trough time.  

I always read the comments that the professor and my classmates made in my blog, because some of them were really funny, and I also like to read other posts because I always learned a lot of new things of them and I really love to found out that there is people interested in the same things that I like. I suggest more free posts to improve this activity, and I would like to write about metaphoric stuff, or colloquial language stuff, because I think that writing and speaking in those terms is really important to achieve a good communication with other English speakers.  I really feel that my writing is getting better when I do this kind of exercises, but I think that if I stop doing this my new skills may disappear.    

Blog Session 9: One or the Other "Franz Boas"

Hello! Today I’m going to talk about Franz Boas a German-American anthropologist; he was born on 9th July of 1858 on Germany. Boas studied physic in three german universities, but after an experience with some Canadian natives known as “Inuit” who helped him after he got lost doing a geological field work, he turned to anthropology. He is called “The father of American Anthropology” because his influence and contribution to the construction of modern anthropology.  

Boas is very important for the study of social sciences because he proposed the relativist concept of “historical particularism”, which denies the evolutionist current, and establishes that all the societies have a unique form to gain their cultural form depending on their historical processes.
This is the reason because I like Boas, because I think that he is maybe the principal responsible of the change of direction of anthropology, from an evolutionist point of view that based on the reality of Europe, segregated another ways of life and considered them inferior, to a point of view that respect and try to understand why certain society has so many differences with ours, but with no judgment between.  

Blog session 8: A free Post, Halloween

As you can see in my last post I’m a fan of Queen, so when a friend of mine told me that he was organizing a party for Halloween, I decided to start making a costume of Freddie Mercury, it didn’t take too much time, and I was ready one week before the party. But my friend Urbano, didn’t have his costume until the day of the party. So we went to the “Persa Bio-Bio”, and he bought a jacket and a t-shirt to make a costume of vagabond, after that, we went where there was a barricade on Grecia Avenue and dragged the clothes there to make them look deteriorated and dirty, and also we threw them some wine to make my friend look like a drunk guy (Thing that he is obviously not).

The party was really good, I saw a lot of my friends, classmates and ex-classmates there, we danced a lot and we had a really good time, I’m waiting for the next Halloween party.

  This is how a social scientist looks in the future?, I'm scared...

                       Hanging out with Francisco (Matías) aka "The pirate", aka "Failed Dorian Gray"

Blog Session 7: A photograph you like "Queen live at Live Aid"

I really like this picture and I think it’s one of my favorite ones, because it was taken in maybe the biggest rock music festival ever: “Live Aid” in 1985, and it shows us some moments of the performance of Queen, who is remembered by a lot of music magazines as the greatest rock performance ever. “Live Aid” festival was organized by Bob Geldof (Maybe you know him by his role of “Pink” in the Pink Floyd’s movie “The Wall”) to raise money for Eastern Africa, with the participation of a lot of my favorite artists: Sting, Phil Collins, George Michael, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Boy George and of course Queen. I like this picture because it captures one of the greatest moments of Queen’s career playing to big crowds as they used to (this festival sold 78.000 tickets), one year before they made the “Magic tour” (their final one), and it shows us the power of music, that can gather a lot of people to have fun, relax and in some cases to take awareness of poverty and all the others problems of our world.

Blog Session 6: How green are you?

Sincerely I don’t do anything to avoid pollution, I just complain sometimes about it. People can learn about these practices in a lot of places, but I think that the better place to do it is Internet, because there we can be in contact with all the organizations that work with these subjects, and with all the information that they upload. I haven’t tried recycling, but I would like to do it because is good for our planet and our environment. In Santiago I just use my legs because I’m poor and I don’t have a car (I nearly have money for the BIP!), and I really don’t like cars very much, I prefer bikes. I haven’t supported eco-organizations principally because I don’t know their real intentions in terms of their policies, maybe one day I will join some of this organizations, I’m interested at the ones that work in my university. But now, writing this I remember that in High School I supported the committee of environment in their work of planting trees and in the recuperation of a garden that was covered by junk. We worked really hard for about a week, and it was a really good time because I met a lot of people, and we saw how the garden was finally alive again, but now I’m really disappointed because the authorities of school didn’t do anything to take care of the garden, and now is full of junk again. I think that Santiago has a huge lack of policies in this subject, many people want to take care of environment but they really don’t know how, the population needs to be instructed.

This is why I don't support this eco-organizations

I don't have a car

Blog Session 5: My future job

In the future I would like to have a job that impresses and makes me feel happy every day, maybe an outdoors job that allows me to travel and meet a lot of people. I really don’t feel very comfortable with the academic life so I would like to work on applying anthropology to improve public or cultural policies. I would also like to follow another career related to art or humanities (Theory of music, History and Theory of Art or Spanish Literature); because I feel that my vocation is in all the cultural and artistic subjects. I don’t really like the idea of taking a major or a Ph.D. immediately, because I don’t want to give all my life to a certain career, I would like to do a lot of things not necessary related to Anthropology.

My biggest dream is living through music, maybe doing reviews for a music magazine, having a club that promotes local bands and culture or a radio show, and the most unachievable one: joining a band or a big or consolidated artist as a bass player. I think that all of this is really difficult to do but not impossible; it only takes a long time and hard work, and I hope that all the things that I’m learning at university help me to achieve any of my projects.

A pic from my former band Suicide Nation

Blog Session 4: THEMED POST (Movies)

Almost every people get shocked when I explain to them that my favorite kinds of movies are the horror and exploitation ones, they think that I love death, bloodbaths and destruction. But what I really love about these films is the criticism of society that they express, through an exaggerated image of social taboos, black humor, and the metaphoric reflection of human weakness. My favorite movies of this category are the Italian film Cannibal Holocaust directed by Ruggero Deodato, which shows us the story of four documentary-makers that abused from indigenous people in order to obtain modified images to be able to sell them easily to the audience. The crew, in a dangerous trip to the jungle, got lost and were searched by an anthropologist. And Nekromantik 2, a German film directed by Jorg Buttgereit (maybe my favorite movie director of all times), who is maybe the first one to show us explicitly a story about necrophilia and love. It contains really shocking images but I suggest you to see it because this movie really achieves a great ambience and story.

Cannibal Holocaust

A really nice couple (Nekromantik 2)

Blog Session 3: My favourite piece of technology

My favorite piece of technology is the cellphone; I got my own cellphone a Sony Xperia M2 one year ago as a gift from my parents after my high school graduation. This cellphone is very useful for me because I use it to stay in contact with my parents and my friends from Santiago and the VII region through WhatsApp and Facebook, I also use it to stay alert with the material that my teachers send to U-Cursos and the information that the university sends to my Gmail account, and the most important thing, waking up in the mornings!. In my free times, I generally use it to watch my favorite series in Netflix. I would like to live without cellphones, and improve my communication with people but honestly in the context of the current dynamic society I use my cellphone very often because if I stop using it that would be a social and academic suicide.

                                                   please don't buy it

Blog Session 2: Expectations for a New Semester

In this semester I hope to improve my responsibility at the university, and achieve a better organization of my time. I’m doing 7 subjects in this term: Anthropology II, Archaeology II, Evolution, Statistics, Social History of Chile, Sociology and English Pre Intermediate, and also I'm taking Capoeira as an extracurricular course. I'm very happy with my new subjects matters, because I think that they are more interesting that the ones that we learned in the first semester, but I’m not happy with my schedule because I don’t have enough free time to watch my favorite series, play my bass guitar, run or play football, all the things that I really love to do!. When I’m not in classes I’m reading texts in my house, so I’m very tired.

In this semester I promise to my mom, and to myself to be a nice and christian boy and be a worshipper of the virgencita of guadalupe. So don't invite me to your carretes. 

Blog Session 1: My Auto Biography

My name is Diego Aguilar Fuentes,  I was born in Curicó, at Hospital San Juan de Dios, on April 23th, 19 years ago… I studied at Leonardo da Vinci School in San Javier, and Liceo Abate Molina in Talca. I’m studying anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de Chile, in Ñuñoa. I don’t have any brothers, and my parents live in San Javier. My hobbies are playing the bass guitar, listen to prog rock music, write short stories, read about my favorite bands, playing football and do any kind of exercise. I like to have fun and share a good conversation with my friends.