Life on a Ship

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I’m taking an Ethnomusicology class here on the ship. Ethnomusicology is actually a field of research where people (ethnomusicologists) study music as culture. For the past couple days we’ve just been discussing identity and culture in music, but today my professor went crazy with his questions and discussion…

What is music?
What is a musician? Who are musicians? Who decides what musicians are and aren’t? Are “musicians” a social construct developed by society that make “non-musicians” feel inadequate to participate in music?
What makes music good or bad?
What does a certain type of music say about a culture? Or the people singing it?
What are the underlying meanings in different songs?

Pretty loaded questions…and that’s just a little taste. Over the next 2 months we are going to go out into the cities we visit and actually ask local people these questions…and hopefully find some answers.

Then, at dinner, I sat with a professor and a couple other students. We had a long conversation about civil rights and racism. The professor lived during the Civil Rights Movement and was telling stories about protesting and having to basically live in fear of the KKK. In her senior year of college, her whole school had to be evacuated because of threats from the Klan and they all missed their finals. It was really fascinating to hear her stories.

The atmosphere on this ship is so different from a normal campus. I feel like this is only something I would see in movies, like Oh Captain, My Captain, where the professors are facilitating these really intense and enlightening conversations simply for the sake of knowledge and understanding. I never really experienced something like this before, so it was really cool to be a part of this conversation and hear the opinions of other girls who were from all over…Queens, the Bahamas, Virginia, a professor in African Studies at UVA, and a lawyer from Charlottesville, VA. So much has happened and we haven’t even gotten to land yet!

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Photos

Rock the Boat
Dance party on the boat :)