i'm entirely unable to make a single decision about anything ever

I started writing my thesis chapter on South Africa, and I'm not sure what it was, maybe the fact that I've never been to South Africa to see a real SA'n play, or never spoken face to face with someone who lived in SA during apartheid, but I just felt like I was writing a research paper. Everything I wrote was taken directly from another source, and primary sources (either scripts or films) are pretty hard to come by.

Also, our theses are supposed to be cumulative expressions of what we've learned, our most passionate arguement about our the issue we care most deeply about. Anything I strive to prove about South Africa only applies to South Africa. I can always say there are parallels with other regions, but without going into it in depth, it's just words.

As long as I'm not independently investigating a region, ie collecting data myself on a specific revolt/person/piece of artwork, nothing I look at is really a primary document. Meaning what conclusions can I draw from 10 accounts of the soweto riots that isn't biased by every one of them, and that provides anything at all new to the equation?

BUT if I compared 10 accounts of 10 riots, and drew out the commonalities or clashing factors in the comparison, I might stand a chance of coming up with something new. I could base it all in social movement theory (which does exactly that, compares various movements to distill common threads/theories) and try to find some common quantitative way to compare cultures. Maybe.

All that said, I wrote my thesis chapter on the hikikomori in Japan, soon to be available for your perusal...