Doing it.

Back in the day, when I was having fun and living the dream of being an applied anthropologist, I’d often spend a large amount of time every day with a core group of individuals who worked on the programs and projects we planned for the community. It’s an important distinction here. It was their community, and I was doing a combo job of studying it and helping them create programs and projects to strengthen the community’s identity and be educational.

The group consisted of people from all groups and ethnicities living in the neighborhood. Although the city was employing me, I worked for these people in a very literal sense. These people became close friends as well as informants. We collaborated on projects for the community’s benefit and saw each other daily. They tolerated my ethnological queries with good nature and inquiring minds – why was I asking these questions?

Sometimes, they were amused by my reactions to their answers. There was a day when about ten of us were waiting for rides to go to a function. I started asking questions relating to preferred dating and marriage patterns. I wasn’t surprised to find that preferential marriage was within the ethnic community. But then they started discussing all the exceptions to the rule, which seemed to have been about half of the people in the group. Then they hit me with a stunner: if not within the group, then certainly within the boundaries of the community – Eastie.

I almost jumped up and hollered out something stupid like “cool beans“! An endogamy rule, weak but present. My mind was skittering about as I started mentally reviewing literature from grad school. Then I stopped, looked suspiciously at them, and caught them smirking at me. I had been had.

It turned out that they hadn’t lied to me, but they had laid it on a bit thick. One of their grandkids was taking an introductory anthro class and had helped them set me up. We all had a laugh, and actually having them actively participate in the ethnography was an intersting experience.

So what makes an anthropologist happy? Doing anthropology.