The words! the words!

I started this whole thing and in the last few posts I have not added dutch words of the day:

So here is an extended round of Dutch words:

Gesloten: closed
Groeten: vegetables
Pikant: spicy (this word needs some qualification: in theory pikant might mean spicy but that is just not how the Dutch do their food).

ISP this!

I don't think I have mentioned this before, but a major part of the Macalester-Maastricht one year abroad(not really for me) extravaganza is this monster called the ISP (Independent Study Project). For the last 4 months I have been here I have pseudo-worked on this project. Initially I was really excited...I was going to write about minority language rights. I had already written two papers about language politics in classes last semester - I was really enthusiastic about it. No, seriously I felt that I had found my academic calling. I emailed professors at mac for advice, researched EU laws and such. Then sometime around February my advisor told me that I was ignoring my location. I wanted to write my comparative globalization paper about the EU and the US. The advisor said that I should focus on this place in the Netherlands called Friesland (which apparently has its own language that is not Dutch). Now this wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I mean I like the Netherlands, i think its wonderful, great even, but somehow comparing the US with Friesland did not sound exciting to me. So my advisor and I reached a compromise and now I am studying Belgium instead. Again, not exactly what I had in mind but at least there is more to read and write about.
The problem is that in the last few months (I don't know why) I have lost the will to work on this project (I mean I should be doing that right now, but I am blogging instead). I am supposed to turn in an introduction with a research question, with a detailed outline, a preliminary conclusion and key sources to the advisor tomorrow.

Problem 1: With the exception of the conclusion I turned in a document very similar to what I just described to him 3 weeks ago. The page limit for this assignment is 3 pages (I turned in 4 last time).

Problem 2: I don't really have a conclusion. I barely have some research.

Problem 3: He/Mac (I am not sure who to scapegoat for this) wants us to do interviews with people. Apart from the fact that I do not know whom to interview (after taking a few stats classes, talking to some students from Belgium does not seem to be a very rigorous methodology), I can't really speak French, and obviously Flemish is out of the question.

Problem 4: I have really stopped caring about this project. It is strange because in the end this whole thing is just a twenty page paper. I know I will be able to write it so it isn't very scary, but somehow this project that I was so excited about in January is the least exciting part of my study abroad now.

Problem 5: (Which I am in serious denial about,) we have to present our papers come June 5th at a "symposium". Send me good wishes ... I will need them.

Thief

So my wallet got stolen a few weeks ago from our kitchen. I think it was the shady friend of the cleaning lady ... but who knows. A few days ago though I got a call from the building security and they/someone found my wallet in a parking lot. The money was gone (thanks asshole), but in the meantime I canceled my atm card and stuff.

Eurocentrism

Since getting back from a trip to Prague, Vienna and Budapest, the 9 mac people and I have started regular Universiteit Maastricht classes with other students. I am enrolled in two classes right now. So recent events in these two classes have really bothered me. Maybe its just me being too sensitive, but the general consensus here seems to be that everything good basically came from Europe. According to one of my profs no one used to think before the greeks, i.e., the Greeks invented philosophy. In the same class people also decided that human rights come from Germany and Christianity, and that the real issue in the globalization debate is how to export modernity from the West to the rest. Basically, before the enlightenment, humanity lived in a pre-modern era without reason, human rights etc., and modernity from Europe will save us all.
The worst moment so far was when one of my professor basically said that social Darwinism and eugenics make sense, because according to him there is some truth to the idea that some races are inherently superior to others. As evidence he pointed out that a large number of nobel prizes have been won by Jews, and also that the Germans, come closest to the language and philosophical tradition that the Greeks had. He also said that National Socialism makes sense when you think about it, and that there was "some truth" to the idea that Palestinians have taken up the "Jew-hating" previously espoused by the Nazis.
The rest of the people from Mac and I have been talking for a long time about how so many ideas and inventions were thought of in the "east" a long time before the "west", and how it is important to bring up the non-western origins of these ideas for a variety of reasons. These classes have just confirmed this for me. I don't think Macalester is perfect, but it is definitely not as America-centric or Westcentric as these classes are with Europe. Case in point: One of the classes that other mac stuents are taking here talks about how Eastern Europe is basically backward, and Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations is actually correct. I was discussion leader in class one day and one guy was talking about the Arab world is very relativist (i don't want to take up space with his argument here), but when someone asked him what he was defining as the arab world his response was: Well that whole region from Morocco to Iraq and Iran. I was so pissed at this point that I cut him off and said Iran is not really the Arab world. But this is what a lot of our class discussions are like. We read these texts about hybrid and multiple identities, and how just the idea of the Muslim world is flawed, and people still come to class and make sweeping generalizations about everything, including Europe (or Western Europe, because the eastern part is clearly very different).
I don't want to come of as being whiny, but while shit like this is common, you don't expect to hear it in classes and definitely not from the professor. So now I am trying to get a hold of this book by Amartya Sen called "The Argumentative Indian". He discusses, in that book, examples of ideas thought as western/european/modern that originated in India. We are also reading parts of Orientalism for one of our classes next week. I wonder whether that will change anything about our discussions.