University of Rochester--alas

It occured to me that given my background, I may be able to persuade a professor or two to let me audit his/her class to keep my brain from rusting too much. So yesterday I went on a course roster hunting.

I knew the University of Rochester is a stronghold (some might say birth place) of what is known as formal modeling in political science. What I did not know was that it was pretty much all they had. There is NOT ONE SINGLE class offered on politics relating to Asia, Africa, or South America. (There is one class on Western Europe and one class on post-communism taught by a former Finance Minister of Poland, which I take to mean Eastern Europe.)

So I thought, all right I'll go look up their Asian Studies department and see what I can find there.

....they don't have an Asian Studies department.

a lot of Americans seems don`t care about Asia,except for some politicians

引用

最初由 霸王哆啦 发布
em~~~How about your schedule for studying in nippon?

飘过去飘过来ING
不到最后关头我是不会说什么的

I don't think the word "ethnocentrism" is used that way... :P

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be starting a class named "The Samurai" from their History department.

By "starting" a class, I mean tomorrow will be the first time the class meets this semester.

And so what about the samurai? The samurai was a distinctive and important social class in feudal Japan, with its own interesting political/social/economic impilcations in history. If all you can think about is the katana and harakiri when the word "samurai" comes to mind, perhaps you should take the said class and get educated.

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical." --Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures

I've always considered social science to be good for my soul, shrugs. There is nothing futile about trying to understand how people interact with each other.