So, you haven’t heard from me in a while. Well, the past three weeks I have been studying Spanish at the Xinabajul Spanish school in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. Although Huehuetenango is really untouristy (and full of traffic), I really saw no point in describing experiences that probably are 100% alike of those all other language students in Guatemala have.

Nevertheless, besides camping in Mexico city and studying Spanish here, I have also been helping to get the latest version of the Norwegian social anthropological yearly journal Betwixt and Between edited, written, layouted and printed. I don’t know if articles I have been editing are representative of the entire collection (220 pages in total), but at least as far as what I’ve seen, the articles tend to be of a more activist nature in that it’s not just all about describing things using the most advanced version of the Bourdieu-analysis-toolkit, but rather it is to actually try to point at some real problems/issues out there. (Un)fortunately, almost all the articles this year are written in Norwegian (one in Swedish) and few in English. While I understand the point of writing articles for those who do not know English (or any other language of size, however not in order to just keep Norwegian around as a museum type artifact), the problem is of course that writing an article in Norwegian severely hinders the spreading of the knowledge gathered specifically for the article.

Specifically for me I felt that, when I was in Douglas a few weeks ago and the conversation turned to the landless movement in Brazil and how ideology and practicality do not always go together. I was about to tell the others about the article Kristin Vestrheim has in this issue, exactly about such issues within the landless movement, when I realized that none of the others would be able to read it… It’s a problematic balance at best.

For those who know Norwegian though, the book is definitely something to check out, and thanks to the usage of print-on-demand solutions this year, we should have saved in excess of 20000kr this year, while at the same time for the first time actually making it into the general printing catalogues of most bookstores on the web and cutting the price (included shipping) to 100kr/book. As a Marxist, one knows about the difference of actual production costs and socially necessary production costs — keeping an eye on the development of the means of production is therefore crucial!

While I might be back within faster next time, my schooling here continues for another three weeks during which I will not be too active on the net (at least I hope I will be able to).