If you’re curious about other cultures, love to meet new people, want to travel to Vanuatu and Tibet, and the occasional bout of malaria doesn’t daunt you, then you’ll definitely agree that Carlos Mondragón has a very cool job. I found his blog not too long ago, and I’ve been an “armchair traveler” following his current field work in the Torres Islands of Melanesia ever since. This is a long post, but it’s a great read and I guarantee by the end of it you’ll find yourself saying, “I never thought about it like that before, but being an anthropologist is a cool job!”
Carlos writes:
I am a social anthropologist and I specialise in the study of small-scale societies in Island Melanesia and the central Tibetan plateau.
Throughout the past ten years I have chosen to focus my research on
the environmental concepts and relations of Melanesian and Tibetan
peoples, which is to say on human-environmental relations in those two regions of the world. On the whole, I have tended to concentrate on
Melanesia more than Tibet, because it is the first place where I
began to carry out ethnographic field work and is therefore the
region in which I have developed my greatest skills as a social researcher.
My forays into Tibet only began in 2002 and have been on-and-off, partly because
it takes time, money and concentration to do in-depth fieldwork, and
up until now I have privileged my Melanesian research over other
endeavours.
MY COOL JOB 