Graduate School -- Begin.

First meeting with the Social Anthropology postgraduate (as the UK calls them, Americans just call them graduate students) group today, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn of the size and makeup of the group for the first time.

30 students and 14 nations -- Bulgaria, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, China, South Korea, Georgia, Poland, Spain, England, Scotland, and the United States -- are represented in the University of Edinburgh Social Anthropology MSc class of 2012. Americans from New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Atlanta, Berkeley, and Texas. So cool.

We introduced ourselves, then our program director (who is also from Greece) explained the most important rule of graduate school:

Don't. Worry.

He told us first semester may be torture; we will feel disoriented, challenged, confused, and lost, but it will get easier. Slowly, he said, everything will work itself out, and we will graduate. I'd like to trust him on that.

My current view from the Central Library. Click to see a larger version.

I'm close to deciding the courses I'll be taking this year. Here's my working schedule so far:

1st Semester (starting on Monday!):
An Introduction to Anthropological Theory
Advanced Anthropological Theory
Culture and Power
Himalayan Ethnography

2nd Semester:
Ethnography Seminar
Belief, Thought, and Language
Human Origins and the Genesis of Symbolic Thought
The Invention of History
Globalization

Summer:
Dissertation

In fact, I just now discovered the course called The Invention of History, about the social process of remembering, the cultural importance of artifacts and archeology, and the relationship between nationalism and memory. That is exactly what I was hoping to get, in bits and pieces, from some of these other courses. That was my emphasis as an undergraduate and is something of a fringe subject in the social sciences -- I've only heard of universities offering full courses on it. But it so happens that here, in Edinburgh, they have it wrapped up in one neat little package just for me. I am inexpressibly excited for this year of unabashed geekery to begin.