Thursday, October 4, 2007

Meet the butler

2 hours writing, 2 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hour phone meeting, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 138

Today I starting telling the butler's story (see yesterday's post). Ideally, I'd like to start with an especially vivid anecdote from Antioquia where you see the local police, the state police, the national police, and the army all involved - but for now, a placeholder where the local and state police are on opposite sides of a fight in Tolima in 1948 will do. That gives a very different flavor to the introduction. I'm going to send my committee a couple of chapters tomorrow; at first, I wasn't sure if the intro would be one of them, but now I'm thinking that it ought to be.

In terms of reading, I continue to get up to speed on current events in Colombia. It'll be very interesting to be there during a local election season, given my interest in the dynamics of state-municipal relations. It was only in the past 20 years that mayors and governors were elected; for more than a century before that, they were appointed by the central government. (Well, governors were, and then they appointed mayors.) Imagine what that would be like here....

In terms of researching, I went back to tapes of interviews I did during my last fieldwork to prep for my trip. Useful stuff on there, I'll continue to listen tomorrow, and it gives me an alternative to the iPod for the plane ride down on Monday. I can't believe I'll be there in five days! Crazy.

Had a good phone conversation with a Yale graduate student who's done really interesting work on La Violencia. It confirmed that it's a good idea to work on Antioquia because others have focused on it and gathered local-level data.

Continued to reach out to scholars in Bogota to set up meetings for next week. I'll surely have plenty to do in the archives, but if I can also meet with people who can provide new ideas and contacts, all the better.

2 comments:

Laura Sumner said...

Hi chris,
sounds like you're on top of planning your trip. I have been overlooking this so far, but you *are* below your 3 hour quotas for writing and reading. What can I say, I'm a big softie. :)

any plans to let us mere mortals read this thing?

Chris said...

Sure! I mean, why would you want to do such a thing, but yeah, I could post the final product on here when I'm done.... Thanks for the interest!