Tag: anthropology

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.