Guest Contributor Biographies—Rachel Johnson

Click here for the introduction to Round and Square's "Guest Contributor" series (coming soon)
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square Series "From the Geil Archive"
To learn more about Geil, click here for the Accidental Ethnographer Resource Center
A year ago on Round and Square (12 September 2012)—The New Yorker: Donald Barthelme: The School

Two years ago on Round and Square (12 September 2011)—Remonstrance: Introduction

[a] Lithic RJ

“Now we’re going to go around the room and tell each other a little bit about ourselves.”

After twelve years of primary and secondary, four years of college, countless summer programs, camps, extracurricular activities, and so on and so on, I still get that momentary spark of panic when I hear those words. It’s like an inevitable trigger for a momentary identity crisis. Who am I, really? What does that mean, when we really get down to it? What are the essential factors that encompass “being”, in the sense of identity?

Normally I just blurt out where I’m from, what I study, how old I am, and the other expected “stats”, and, when more is clearly expected (and it always is), wind up muttering something about really liking cats and books.

But somehow I don’t think that’s what Rob LaFleur had in mind when he asked for an introductory post from us, so bear with me here.

[b] Areas RJ

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first: My name is Rachel Johnson, I am a recent graduate of Beloit College in Beloit, WI, and I hail from the Chicago suburbs. I majored in Anthropology and minored in Asian Studies. I still like cats and books.

More specifically, I study prehistoric archaeology, and am in the process of applying for graduate programs in archaeology. My current interests and tentative research areas include lithic technology, hunter-gatherers, experimental archaeology, and paleoanthropology. My Asian Studies minor focused primarily on Chinese language and culture. I studied Mandarin for three years at Beloit College. I am also conversant in Spanish and can read and write Biblical Hebrew at a beginning-to-intermediate level.

I spent this summer in the Nevada desert, four hours outside of Reno, excavating a mining town founded in the 1860s, now entirely gone save for one lone and very dilapidate standing building. The project focused on Jewish shopkeepers and Chinese woodcutters, and I spent much of this time attempting to translate one hundred and fifty year old Chinese opium tin lids.

At various points in my life I have wanted to be a writer (and I will never stop considering myself to be a writer no matter what else I study), a film director, a rabbi, and a Jedi. Because of this I find that I can relate quite readily to Geil as missionary-traveler-writer-pseudo-anthropologist, and I admire and envy his ability to combine his many passions so effectively. 

[c] Dreams