Tag: anthropology

Working as a practicing anthropologist meant following threads in people’s lives and their community. I worked for about a decade in one community that a historian friend of mine friend described as a “three-generation community.” At least three generations of many of the families lived there. After looking at the census records, I found that the generational depth was sometimes much more profound – I found families in the 1880 census whose descendants I knew.
One bitter-sweet result of this was finding the household records of a close friend’s great-grandmother. Her husband walked out in 1884, went west, and never returned. He left a family of around eight to fend for itself. One day I was able to lay the 1880 census page in front of him to see an 1880 snapshot of what his family had looked like before it had been sundered. It was a poignant moment watching him touch the page with the record of ancestors. The sundering happened almost a hundred years before. But it had echoed down the years. Family members recalled the stories of how life had been hard for gran, how they had wondered where he had gone and why. One recurrent theme was, “Is there another family out there?” Sometimes there is no reprieve from the past.

Working in that community wasn’t just about families. It also was about the persistent links and institutions they had developed there: churches, religious societies, social clubs, businesses, and generations spanning friendships.
After a while, you begin to hear the stories that don’t go past family or community bounds. These are about generational disputes, feuds, family successes, and humor.
Stories about the local undertaker who, eager to win a city election, “voted the graveyard.” This got discovered when the relative of a man the undertaker buried noticed the ballot for his uncle – dead twenty years. His wiles failed, but he acquired a sort of local fame for doing what is only rumored about elsewhere.

Being embedded in a community for so long means that your life becomes entwined with the community – you do not simply walk away from it at the day’s end or the end of a job. My ties to that community have endured for forty years and only now fading as most friends and associates have died.

I’d ask that you consider how different the meaning of the word community is today. Today we use the term loosely for any aggregate to which we feel linked. In contrast, the community I worked in had deep historical depth and recognizable geography. Members were residents or connected deeply with the community, families, and social institutions.
There was a sort of solidity that many places today lack or are rapidly losing.

I’d get asked by students and other people how you build community, as though it was some formula you could apply. My answer was only with time.

This time of year always takes me back to my first professional job after grad school. I worked in a city near Boston known for its intellectual, cultural, and ethnic diversity. The city library system was enlightened enough to have an anthropologist on staff, me. But while I was on staff, the boss, nicknamed Joltin’ Joe, limited my role to one square mile-sized neighborhood; Eastie.

To be fair to Joltin’ Joe, I was not the only one singled out for lockdown. The entire staff was locked down in their branch libraries and departments. But it’s lonely at the top. And it’s especially so when your immediate cronies are known as such and not trusted. So much time got expended on periodic exercises in control and terror. The problem with such a leadership style is that it became as predictable as wanton; wherever the cronies weren’t looking, individuals would pop up some innovative program or initiative almost to spite Joltin’ Joe. His anger was truly wrothful within his organization, but politically, it was ineffective. The city council members considered themselves sponsors of their local libraries, and Joe’s fear of their reprisals could keep him in check.

My job was to run a special collections library and create regular programming featuring the cultures of my neighborhood’s ethnic groups. Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Portuguese, were within the square mile. Being that Joe did not get along well with the inhabitants, I think he suspected that I’d chewed up and spat out in concise order. He assumed that I’d be seen as encroaching on perceived inter-ethnic prerogatives, and my presence would not be abiding. ” It’s a tough neighborhood Louie, they’ll chew you up and eat you alive.” was the warning.

Lucky for me my first visitor was Mrs. Gelowtsky. In a three-hour late afternoon meeting, she laid out the geography and history of the neighborhood. It wasn’t five separate groups. All the groups had intermarried over several generations, and there were only a few small areas with significant concentrations of one group. After that, the conversation turned to food.

Over the following days, I was visited by a number of the communities spark plugs, the people who ran local organizations, sponsored events, and were generally influential. They suggested others that I should call or visit. As they shared with me, I shared with them. They were interested in my being an anthropologist but amazed that I wasn’t someone’s relative. City Hall relatives frequently got these sorts of jobs. An analysis by the local Franciscan Priest suggested that in a showdown between two favored candidates, they got forced to pick someone qualified for the job.

Over a few months, a group merged to form what I called the Brain Trust, but they called it the committee. I’d love to say that every committee meeting was full of trust, cooperation, and beautiful ideas. Not so. Not too many Kumbayaw moments. But many naive ideas got hammered into doable form. For example, programs that later expanded into a new life at the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife ( 1988) got banged into shape in the heat of committee meetings.

Early on, a pair of themes emerged: 

• First, while the city beyond the borders of their little neighborhood saw them as distinct ethnic entities, they viewed themselves as one community with varied traditions. A few generations of co-inhabitation and intermarriage had helped this along.
• Second, despite internal divisions, they perceived that they were at the bottom of the city’s hierarchy for services and status. There was a perception that our activities could raise the esteem and status of their community.

As an anthropologist, I feverishly took notes, made recordings, and was excited at the possibilities.

Meanwhile, at the other side of town lurked Joltin’ Joe, who decided to jerk the chain and cut off my funds for programming. I was scared. The committee got pissed and began to call in favors. The First Annual Harvest Festival was wholly funded and supported by community members. The committee made sure to invite Joltin Joe to the festivities and broadly smile as he ground out praise for the Eastie community from between clenched jaws.

Like most of the programs, articles, lectures, celebrations, videos, and more that followed, the committee adhered to one principle – as much as possible, it was about the community as a whole, even when one element took the lead in a particular event or the content of the program. For example, have an evening of Portuguese songs and dance. Many folks in the audience were Italian and Polish. They were there for a good time, supporting friends, or watching a grandchild dance.

Joltin Joe never figured it out. He, like many people, expect failure based upon the things that split people into competing groups. They don’t understand that cooperation is a fearsome way to unite despite competition.

Allowing outsiders to divide you will not ultimately improve your community; it’ll just marginalize you further. The committee understood this.

Although I was an anthropologist, few of the people I met knew what I did once I left the university. If I mentioned that I studied culture, I’d get a knowing wink and this reply, “Yes. But with a big C or a little c?” Others making veiled jokes about the sort of work I did would ask me where my pith helmet was. One woman who, I guess, had taken a survey course in anthropology asked, “who are your people? Where in Africa did you go?” 

When I replied that she and others like her “were my People” and that I studied American culture, She looked distraught, put her arms akimbo, and stated that she did not require study. Then, off she walked highly insulted.

I’ve run into this sort of “Colonial” attitude towards anthropology not from my peers in the field but the well-educated well to do layperson. It’s Ok if I am studying Native- Americans, Hispanic or other groups within our nation, but not them. The intimate details of other people’s culture are open to voyeuristic examination, but not how they behave at work or play. I find this amusing because neither the coastal community nor the urban ethnic communities I worked in seemed to mind. One Saints society I studied possessively claims me as “their anthropologist” a sort of role reversal of the “my People” trope.

I see it as an elite sort of thing. Everything is fair game for examination but not the Country Club, the concept of “legacy” admissions at universities, or the kind of privilege that opens doors to political and economic position. As Deep Throat might have said, ” follow the influence.”

The patterns of privilege and power in our society may be one of the best areas for future doctoral dissertations. But these days, I’d barely have to go too much farther than the pages of the Washington Post, New York times, or the cable networks to see the bones of privileged patterns laid bare for examination. It’d hardly be research, would it?

In the field, an anthropologists notebook is a friend. Yes, you may have a recorder and a camera. But there is still something about notes written in a quiet corner that cements your observations. Unfortunately, I’ve had tapes and videos meet with accidents or get misplaced. But I still have all the notes.

The notes are a path of crumbs through the forest of your memory.

A few months ago, I was sorting out junk for the dumpster when I came across one of my notebooks from a summer research visit in Maine. Reading one entry, I got transported back to the tiny post office in coastal Maine, where I learned that people in that community were as curious about me as I was about them. It was the moment of turnabout in which the observer became observed.

It was a bountiful summer for learning all sorts of things that I thought would help form a solid foundation for my doctoral research. Instead, they are a kind of cadre of experience that I draw upon for my stories. As author Carl Hiassen said – you can’t make up stuff like this.
Not that everything I write is true, by the way.

One of the principal research methods, while you are in the field, is called participant observation. Simply put, you observe, but you also participate. Years later, reading my notebooks and reflecting on some of the stories I write, I see how I was shaped – not just as the practitioner but also as the person I became.

Suave, elegant, cultured; that’s never been me, but thanks for implying it. No, by the time I’d developed the proper social camouflage, I was out of grad school and working as a practicing anthropologist. So it had become a professional disguise.
I was not in academia but almost continuously on projects for various long-term and short-term clients.

In the field, anthropologists put forward aspects of our personality to enhance our role as participants and observers in a community. This field persona is eager to learn and interested in what people tell you.
You can’t fake this for too long. Most people who wind up in anthropology will tell you that being in the field can be a drug. It juices you, and after my first year in “practice,” I was thrilled that my only academic involvement was an occasional adjunct position.

For academic anthropologists, it’s not the same – catch them in their native setting roaming the departmental offices, the lecture halls, or browsing in the faculty lounge, and you’ll see personalities vastly different than you saw when in your community. Those rivalries over tenure look more like ritualized combat sequences from bad ethnographic documentaries.
Most spend a year or two at most with you. Then talk and write about it for decades. A sabbatical year will allow them to return and do the long-desired follow-up study; if they are fortunate.
Their long arc from adjunct professor to tenure begins with some pithy dissertation and terminates with a sappy rewrite of old data. With any luck, they’ll wind up an emeritus professor with a horde of former grad students hurridly writing a book in honor of their contribution to the field.

Of course, things are changing. For decades academic programs took on more students than there would ever be full-time positions for. The interim solution was to hire on short-term contracts, dangle the possibility of tenure track positions, and then pull out the carpet and send them on their way to the next alluring college or university.
Ph.D.’s have gotten wise to this tactic. Some have decided to leave academia and go into marketing, cosmetics, urban planning, and other areas. I’m prejudiced enough to think that wherever they go, they’ll contribute positively to that enterprise.

But every once in a while, just before bed. We’ll get visited by an apparition of the bold tenured professor we once thought of as being our future. Some dreams don’t die quickly.