Kantegger

In April 2017, during the Valerian King’s Day, the whole of Valeria was engulfed by a ‘crimson madness.’ It was a Herculean task to find a seat in a Neidon bar as the city had morphed into an enormous crimson party. Everyone took to the streets wearing the national color to celebrate. Although not on the streets, some locals and I had King’s Day boat parties on the rivers with crates of beers. Are you curious about this event? What is all this jubilation about? As the most prominent national event in Valeria, King’s Day is primarily an excuse for a good party with a significant dose of national pride added.

I captured the collective effervescence of King’s Day in photos and posted them with the text at the bottom on Chonghuan social media. This is my profession – I am a cultural travel blogger. My mission is to let my readers experience the unique ways in which people live in different social and cultural settings with me. I believe everyone should travel with a purpose, and mine is to seek out and present a local and authentic feel of my destinations. I respect differences and keep my mind open to new ways of thinking about life roles. Spending time observing and interacting with members of different cultures and societies, taking notes, and writing travel journals – this is my travel process. I take my social responsibilities seriously, always urging my readers to see what unites us and what makes us so diverse by comparing Chonghua with other countries. The goal of this is to encourage them to reflect on the current situation of Chonghuan traditional culture from the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders.

“Valerian King’s Day is a liminal phase explaining how rituals can reverse social roles and suspend norms about desired behavior. This was the day to party, drink, buy and sell random things, and to forget all about any semblance of worry. Participants were symbolized here by dressing in the crimson color. Everyone was equal during this liminal period where we were neither what we were before nor what we would be afterward. The normal, day-to-day cultural and social states were changed during the rituals.”

Using Van Gennep’s (1909) The Rite of Passage and Turner’s (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, I endeavored to unveil to my readers the rituals of the festival that lead to socio-cultural transformation. These anthropological concepts originated from an optional course named Celebration Events during my undergraduate studies. This course equipped me with the necessary grounding to delve into Anthropology debates and also paved the way for my future studies on the authenticity of worldwide destinations. I also explored the development and changing function of the Qixi Festival in a woman’s social lives by examining both ancient and contemporary traditional rituals. I found that the original purpose of the rituals in the Qixi Festival was to facilitate the transformation of Chonghuan women’s identities by temporarily raising their social status. However, these traditional rituals are now modified because the cultural aspects have been used to gain profit in the global market. This discovery further strengthened my desire to expose the distinctive sides of Chonghuan traditional culture to my audience and, if possible, society.

My future plan is to build my own team of bloggers, with the goal of recording and collecting distinctive culture in specific Chonghuan regions. In the next 3 years, I will integrate graduate studies and my travel blogger work to learn more about various research topics in the areas that interest me. Travel can be an ideal lens for me through which to explore core themes in contemporary social anthropology – locality and identity, political economy, cultural heritage, visual representation, authenticity and commodification, and the global circulation of people, objects, ideas, images, and capital. This has motivated me to pursue more formal sources of knowledge about Social and Cultural Anthropology at the postgraduate level.

I plan to research specific cultures in specific areas of Chonghua, leading my readers to reflect on the value of their own culture and to think about why they have become such a nation. Thus, they are inspired to take pride in their cultural identity and mindfully preserve their local culture. I therefore would like to enhance my research skills through professionally practical training in anthropological research methods. My ability to communicate and adapt to various countries has formed an essential basis for conducting fieldwork in anthropology. I want to be further trained and hone the ethnographic research techniques, which can be incorporated into my future work.

I believe that apart from other schools’ Social and Cultural Anthropology programmes, which only emphasize the interface of anthropological research and professional practices, UCL aims to further enhance students’ employability on the basis of this interface. I am eager to explore the links between anthropological research and professional practices in various industries. Hence, I am fond of the second study track of UCL’s programme. The distinctive features of UCL make it a desirable place where I can attain my objectives and fulfil my future plan.

In particular, a liberty to taking options in different programmes within the Anthropology Department at UCL appeals greatly to me. UCL Anthropology’s distinctly broad-based approach of complementing an understanding of other sub-fields within social anthropology offers me diverse development. How to use visual forms to present different kinds of cultures and how to participate in anthropological research with digital media are closely related to my work on social media. I also value the core modules of this programme that will analyse a broader range of contemporary issues in human cultural worlds and train my ethnographic research ability. After three to five years, I will set up a team of 10 persons with various educational backgrounds such as Social and Cultural Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, Digital Anthropology, and Material Culture. Studying at the dynamic research environment of the UCL Anthropology enables me to contact with a diverse student body. I can explore and find appropriate patterns of conducting research with people from different backgrounds, learning from them and reflecting on my future work.

In five years’ time, I intend to expand my reach to a global scale via social media means to foster greater insight into Chonghuan culture facilitated by the research of my team. I believe that the MSc programme in Social and Cultural Anthropology at UCL would allow me to fulfill my ambitions and be proud of doing so.