Tag Archives: academia

May 27, 2017 · 8:55 AM

I miss thinking about these things

Animals and Anthropology

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1119-animals-and-anthropology

A Case for Applied Anthropology: Let’s Get Personal

In honor of the first National Anthropology Day, I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and write something anthro-related. Or rather, type something anthro-related that I scribbled down in a tiny notebook nearly 2 years ago.

Imagine, if you will, that it is spring 2013. I’m headed back from the first of a two-day conference of California Cooperatives. I’m neck-deep in a sustained effort to start a community-owned grocery store. I’ve just landed a dream job working with and for people two generations ahead of me at a local non-profit.

My days of suffering through thankless customer service jobs are over. I’m high on collective action. I’m still livid about my graduate school experiences & failures. All these feeling coalesced in a frenzy of brain-waves. The following are the thoughts I rushed to get on paper every which-way as I metroed back from the church basement in Los Angeles where the conference had holed up, ravenous for the life I was experiencing as well as a proper dinner.

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Applied anthropology gets a bad rap. Partly for fair reasons, but I’m here to talk about things we don’t think of when those who have the luxury of working the ivory tower use the term pejoratively.

Full disclosure: I am making this case partly as a way to defend the work I do as a natural and positive way to use my academic training.

I consider the work I do to be applied anthropology. Not this blog, which is armchair anth to a fault, but my real-world work. I have the great fortune of being involved in the following projects:

At a local history museum, I’m collecting and curating personal memories as part of a virtual exhibit of community stories. Last year, I re-wrote a docent training manual to make room for those groups discursively erased from dominant historical narratives.

I am contributing to the start-up phase of a food co-op.

I’m working for a non-profit that creates a support network enabling people to stay in their communities of choice as they age.

One of these projects pays me, but I spend arguably more time on the volunteer projects. All of them are local and community-oriented to some degree. And in everything I do for them, I apply my anthropological lens. My training informs my work.

I use the tools and perspectives of cultural and linguistic anthropology to navigate all of this work. I don’t consider this “selling out,” and while it may be an impure form, I do not see it as a bad thing that I’m using the knowledge I and others (have) produce(d) to do very real things. To effect the type of social change we anthros always seem to be advocating for.

I suppose that makes me an activist anthro–another pejorative term. I’m working with folks to address and solve the social problems that anthropologists are so good at identifying. There may well be harm in this endeavor, but there is also a great deal of good.

For example, I use linguistic anthropology for good, not evil. Yes, I’m referring to marketing, but this is marketing for a better future! I haven’t sold out to a corporation, here (unless you count the food co-op). I’m taking the collective will of the people and packaging it for even more people. “Selling” folks on the very ideas they helped to create.

But that’s not what people mean when they snark at those of us who aren’t masochistic enough to be in a PhD program. I admit that I don’t have the temperament to hack it. I’m not into feeling overwhelmed and mentally inferior. I’d much rather be fulfilled, using my skills to engage with my local community and make it a better place.

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Collective production of paper mache’ floats trafficking in mixed metaphors totally makes the world a better place.

All of these are reasons why I like the CCC’s better than the AAA’s. There’s a commitment to putting theory into practice. Turning idealism into action and ideology into reality at a grassroots level. Joining pragmatism with idealism to forge unstoppable forces for good in the world!

Besides, if we sequester ourselves in the ivory tower, if we don’t retain ownership of the knowledge we’ve produced, it has a higher risk of being co-opted and used for evil, rather than the good we intend. There’s nothing shameful in seeing something through, in applying theory to practice.

What’s the point of research if it doesn’t have real-world implications? And who are we if we don’t see the value in implementing those implications of our research?

Instead, let’s embrace the practical applications of our research. Let’s retain ownership–sharing the burden, to be sure, with those who have the experience and power to implement our ideas. Not just handing it off, but sticking around to be active participants. Taking action!

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In the two years since this breathless tirade against academia for poo-poo-ing applied anthropology, I’ve mellowed a bit. My involvement in the museum and the co-op has lessened, and my work in the non-profit world, while still rewarding, is definitely work. I’m not quite as bitter about my negative experiences in graduate school, and instead enjoy gazing through nostalgia-tinted glasses at the wonderful undergraduate experiences that drew me to anthropology in the first place.

There is peace. There is still action. The museum endures. The co-op is open, now, thanks to the efforts of many talented people. There is still a case for applied anthropology.

Embracing Multiplicity, Shunning Competition

The prevailing mode of research in academia is that you want to find what no one else is looking at and explore the crap out of it. Dive into that niche, carve it out of what exists if you must, but first and foremost do your due diligence to make sure no one else has staked their claim on it. This is a great way to produce knowledge, and a shit way to produce culture.

Culture needs repetition. Culture needs a multiplicity of voices. In short, culture needs movements, or it will never be, much less change.

“I will never be the only person writing about X, and that’s okay.”

As a blogger, tweeter, nascent fiction scribe, I will never be the only person writing about X. And that’s okay. That’s a good thing.

Rather than bemoan the lack of opportunity to be original, the healthier thing might be to embrace it. To shout it from the mountain tops. To foster a sense of pride in sharing ideas and opinions and ways-of-expressing with others.

It’s little wonder that many of us have similar opinions. True iconoclasm may be a myth. There are no isolated test-tubes within which we incubate our conscious selves. We are each of us exposed to shared nutrients and toxins. We choose what to take in and what to discard. And there are so many of us that of course some of us will have chosen to take in and discard almost exactly the same things. Thus are many of us raised in similar vats of culture, allowing us to harbor similar opinions. look anywhere, to any opinion on any subject, and there will be a vibrant multiplicity of voices.

Even diversity needs multiplicity. Needs amplification. Just as we flock together, so must we cast outside of our comfortable nest, to visit and understand and embrace other flocks. But each flock must be just that–a flock. Otherwise we lose difference in the noise. One single voice is difficult to hear. But many voices crying out, in bunches, creates tides of change and opinions to move millions. Multiplicity is amplification. Amplification is the first step in cultural transformation.

Why not share and repeat and re-work a great idea? How else will that idea change anything for the better? Ownership is a dangerous thing…

Rather than feels guarded, jealous, turf-y, we can choose to read one another, share one another with others, and continue writing ourselves. We can choose to embrace multiplicity by amplifying the ways others express ideas we care about; ideas we want out there so much that we wrote about them ourselves. By sharing and amplifying the work of others, we bring these ideas we hold dear to even more people than we could ever hope to enlighten alone. Together, we can multiply the number of people who care, increasing that idea’s importance in public discourse and consciousness.

We can choose to shun the idea of competition, not worry about who’s doing it “best,” but worry that any of us are doing it at all–and support and encourage one another to keep at it. By reading one another, we all learn to do better. We see slightly different ways of expressing the same idea. We encounter slightly different perspectives that can cause us to examine our own and shift it to suit the greater good. By embracing the difference and the sameness, we are stronger together.

I hope I’ll never be the only one thinking and writing about

gender
class
power
technology
consumerism
body politics
animal-human relationships (bovinity, even)
the insidious ways that advertising misconstrues and reconstitutes social norms, influencing us without allowing those who live them a say in how we are represented

All these things and more, which are each huge and multiple and deserving of many voices and much attention.

I’m sure many writers have already figured this out. But every now and then I catch myself slipping into that academic fetishization of the new, or else the capitalist obsession with credit, and I needs must remind myself of the good that comes from multiplicity.

We must embrace one another, be each other’s champions, if we wish to change the world.

In the spirit of supporting, sharing, and connecting, here are links to a few voices I enjoy listening to:

It was a Privilege Being your Cash Cow: Reflections on Academia

More often than not, I forget to confront my own privilege. Even when I remember to confront it, I often fail to do the important work of interrogating it, pushing back, making space for underprivileged people, making right.

This post began as a cynical, navel-gazing look at how annoyed I get when I think about how my MA program failed to prepare me for the real world. (The underbelly of this is annoyance with myself for doing so little to prepare, to investigate the actual options I would be able to seek out upon graduating.)

In the context of my personal experience, this annoyance with the program is valid. But there are always multiple, layered contexts. In the broader context of American society, with its nearly impenetrable stratification of resources and opportunity, the original idea for this post is disturbingly privileged.

The catalyst of this realization was a twitter conversation initiated by Tina Vasquez (@TheTinaVasquez), a writer based in Los Angeles. Ms. Vasquez’s thoughts on the now-standard trope of white academics bemoaning their “disenfranchised” lot in life inspired me to rethink this post and take it into what I hope is a more constructive direction.

Instead of whining about my terrible experience in an MA program and how little it did to prepare me for a job, I intend to explore the origin of that type of privileged perspective, and do my best to see past it. So thanks to Ms. Vasquez for cutting me off at my very white and very middle-class knees. She is doing great work. You should read it.*

Onto the post!

I’m in the process of reading Magaret Atwood’s newest collection of short stories (she calls them “tales”). Atwood delves into the lives of older adults who seem to spend a lot of time with their pasts. These tales are wonderful, absorbing, and hit upon some truths that strike even the younger readers among her fanbase. To wit, I was in the middle of “Revenant,” and a character had the following thought about MA students:

“Superheated in the academic cooker. The hot air expands. Poof! An M.A,” Not bad, he thinks. Also true. The universities want the cash, so they lure these kids in. Then they turn them into puffballs of inflated starch, with no jobs to match. (p.44)**

In my MA program, we knew at the time that we were the department’s cash cows. Even with 1/3-off “merit” scholarships flung at us like they were going out of style, the department was making bank off our aspirations and idealism. This was a conduit to a PhD, we were told, if we worked hard enough, if we cultivated relationships with the right people. Academia was the be all end all, held up like fodder for the cash cow hive mind.

Afterwards, those of us who didn’t pursue a career in academia were left casting about blindly for an alternative. Some of my colleagues were far more proactive and had opportunities lined up & waiting upon graduation. I gave myself over entirely to the sense of being adrift. You could also call it depression. It took me a year of volunteering to crawl out, another year to find a volunteer opportunity I was passionate about, and a year after that to match a passion with a career.

That’s a lot of uphill struggle for a post-graduate degree, but having the opportunity to even contemplate a post-graduate degree (especially what turned out to be a time-sink one) requires being in a privileged position in society. It didn’t feel that way at the time, but I was lucky. I am privileged. To have been a cash cow in the first place is not something everyone has access to.

And still my feelings about the whole experience are fraught, bitter. to a large extent, I’m upset with my own naivete and lack of ambition. That didn’t mean this cow didn’t turn around and try to cash in.

Although a career in academia was most likely out of the question, still I clung to the MA program. For a while, I could make my academic lineage sound impressive. This was because I believed in its power and cache’. I believed my degrees had clout for every possible employment and volunteer opportunity that came my way. Which is ridiculous. You don’t need a degree to excel at administration, at event planning. Not my degree, anyway.

Some people are still impressed, when I remember to tell them that I graduated from X institution, but as I wandered further away from academia and deeper into a semblance of a career, that particular “credential” gave way to the priority of promoting whatever organization I was shilling for at the time. It didn’t matter to me anymore. The degree is in the past–a symbol of my wandering 20s and my privileged ability to wander into academia and flounder there for an extra year, all for nothing.

We graduated into a crap economy, we were told. Our generation is SOL, went the refrain. But “our generation” refers to the privileged few who didn’t come from hardship to begin with. Besides, how is it hardship to be able to mooch off your parents when our contemporaries were working their asses off at one, two, three crap part-time jobs AND raising families? The difference in lived experience in this country is stark.

Last night, in a series of thoughtful tweets, Tina Vasquez took aim at this sense of entitlement by deconstructing and recontextualizing an article about what it’s like to be an adjunct professor. Vasquez–and several of her astute followers who joined in the conversation–pointed out that the idea that the system “owes” you something–that you are deserving of success–is a very privileged viewpoint to occupy.

And boy, was I guilty of it. I hammered that note for years, using it to explain my lot in life–or, more frequently, allowing others to use it to explain my lot. Honestly, it wasn’t the circumstances I was in so much, it was my attitude that underlay the depression. I wasn’t working hard enough, putting myself out there, making enough effort. I didn’t believe I could.

As life proved later, this was bullshit. Once I started trying, it was pretty easy to get in the game and secure some good jobs. And I know that is largely due to my advantages within our society: white, middle-class, & educated.

Being able to have a sense of shock that the system isn’t working for you is itself a product of the system and your advantaged place within it. As @blackgirlinmain pointed out last night, it’s a very white phenomenon.***

We all know (I hope) how our society privileges whiteness. I’ve worked hard; society owes me a good job is a thought easy for those who of us who come from privilege, and difficult, if not unthinkable, for those who don’t. (Unless, of course, someone has bought into the whole American Dream fantasy, but as some in last night’s twitter conversation pointed out, the American Dream is a lot easier for poor whites to buy into than poor people of color.) Working hard and getting screwed have historically been part of the deal for a lot of people in America. Thinking that society owes you something is an attitude reserved for the already-enfranchised.

It’s when the system stops working for those who historically benefit from it that these phenomena become newsworthy, that dominant voices begin their hand-wringing over a socioeconomic crisis. And that’s what happened to me and my MA program cohort. We graduated, expected the moon, and quite a few found dirt that didn’t even pay. For us, this was revolutionary. For most, it’s just life.

Clearly, we have a LOT of things to tackle as a society if we’re even going to pay lip service to a level playing field. Thank you to everyone who is keeping this at the forefront of the conversation. Please keep writing, keep talking, keep thinking, keep working. Maybe a change will come.

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*Visit http://inthefray.org/author/tina/ for a sample of her work.

**Quoted from Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood, feminist, environmentalist, and so much more: http://margaretatwood.ca/

***@blackgirlinmain’s full tweet: “The concept that we are ‘supposed’ to have financially abundant lives feels like a very white thing to me.”

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Tagged as #Twitter, academia, American society, Margaret Atwood, privilege, Tina Vasquez