The Slovene Ethnological Society published a still from Unreal Boys (or Imaginarní fantje as the film is called in Slovenian – I like it!) in their journal Glasnik to represent their article on Days of Ethnographic Film. I love so much in this photo: I’m sitting comfortably on the floor, shotgun mic in my hand, talking to my research participant who is in his office chair at his desk. Solomon behind the camera has captured me, in his unintrusive, intuitive filming style, in the moment of an important insight that became the main finding of my thesis. Fieldwork at its best!
Japanese test
I spent most time this week practicing my Japanese, since I had a personal Japanese evaluation test over Zoom on Thursday morning. The results will go into the application that I worked on last week and which I finished and sent off on Thursday afternoon this week.
I think the test went fine! It was a bit of grammar (particles) in the beginning, but then mostly reading (my weakest side), then listening (to a news reportage), and lastly 20 minutes of conversation. Writing came in naturally as I had to summarise both the reading and the listening with my own words. No multiple choice questions at all! Some kanji reading questions as well, which was superfun, because I love kanji and I’m good at them.
The test was quite similar to the one I took three years ago at FU. Then I “failed miserably”, and that was mainly due to the fact that I couldn’t write kanji by hand! I was used to only writing on computers, where kanji are suggested to you as you type. Since then, a revolution has happened in my Japanese learning, and that revolution is spelled Heisig and his book Remember the Kanji – I started the method in April 2020 and it changed my life. I was bad in other areas too, and ever since that failed placement test in 2019 I have studied Japanese actively and improved. No matter how I did on the test this week, the improvement was real and that felt good.
Schedule
I think it can be seen from the schedule that this week was a bit off. Last week was so busy with the Queer autoethnography course and the SVA Film and Media Festival, which ended with Zoom Q&A’s (where I was the one Q’ed) on both Saturday and Sunday, and writing a great funding application on top of that, so I think I needed to do less this week, and that’s why the days – for the first time! – don’t line up at a nice 8 hours of work per day.
Was invited to O for coffee on Tuesday – good talk. Dinner out on Friday with A, Ale and C. Visited birthday boy P on Saturday. I’ve spent the weekend sorting out stuff, getting lighter. And some very good news from S that means so much.

Lovely walks every day.
Readings
Queer autoethnography essay (QA X)
- Johnson, Amber. 2014. “Doing It.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 3 (4): 366–88. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2014.3.4.366.
- Boellstorff, Tom. 2010. “Queer Techne: Two Theses on Methodology and Queer Studies.” In Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, 215–30. Surrey: Ashgate.
- I liked this one, and especially the importance Boellstorff gives to the anthropological craft. He mocks a bit the contemporary focus on letting people describe themselves (p. 218). Already Malinowski apparently said that there was a difference “between what people do and what people say they do” (p. 216-17).
Michel Foucault
- The Foucault Reader: “The Body of the Condemned” (from Discipline and Punish), p. 170-78.
- The Foucault Reader: “Docile Bodies” (from Discipline and Punish), p. 179-87.
Film
- Josō (screening and Q&A)
- Living While Black, In Japan
Japanese
Anki, kanji, news, and:
- Try N2 repetition (around chapter 3-4)
- Bojinsha N1, N2, N3 book (the N2 part):
- Grammar, words, reading: 24/31 (50 min)
- Listening: 4/9
- Bojinsha N2 book (full test, actual time limit):
- Grammar, words, reading: 41/75 (cause skipped 69-75 when the 105 minutes were up; I got 6/7 on those later but in 45 minutes – my weakness is reading and reading fast!)
- Listening: 20/31
- Shaman King (episodes 36-40).
TV
- På spåret! E01.