Introduction and Explanation

The first of July 2024, I arrived in Spain at the Alicante Elche airport, weary but excited. I had just retired from being a professor of anthropology and honestly had little idea of what, specifically, I was going to do.  I arrived in Alicante where I knew some people and quickly--as they say in Spanish, me ubiqué, I found a place.

I threw myself into getting to know the city, and into writing poems.  Since arriving here, I have become more dedicated to my poetry which thrills me.  

As a way of celebrating my first year here, I returned to writing roughly thousand word essays in which my ethnographic training, my anthropological knowledge, my sense of sentences, sounds, and metaphors, came together. 

The essays were a means of getting ot know Alicante, as they involved physically moving through it, exploring it in space, as well as online and in published articles and books. They are the product of a dynamic interaction played out in my fingers on the keyboard. 

In this, they built from the years I worked on CuzcoEats. 

Quickly the ideas began to overflow the limited schedule I allowed myself and I began to write more frequently, as you will see here.

In this space, I shall post the current essays as I write them and post them on Facebook as I originally intended, but they will also be here, to be found, indexed, cited, argued with, built on and so on. 

I shall also be posting essay from before that appeared on Facebook but that I think matter. 

The essays are my contribution to various of the communities of the mind to which I belong.