por el amor de antropología

Last week, on v day, rex at savage minds suggested that anthropologists write love letters to anthropology. i thought it was a nice idea and decided to do it. then things like grant proposals and monday morning 8am lectures got in the way. but i was still inspired by it, so i wrote a little something.

Its not exactly a love letter to anthropology. Its more of a love letter inflected by anthropology. but by way of an introduction, it also very much demonstrates what it is I love about anthropology: the cataloging of seemingly inane details, coupled with theory and criticism, to help us learn something about ourselves (as humans). so here you have it.

They say on average, women speak 8805 words a day. So, i suppose i've spoken about 16,069,125 words in my life. Yet no matter how I do the math, I can't calculate how many times I've said the word "love." I suspect it first escaped my lungs at the age of three after my mother read me The Wind in the Willows and kisssed me goodnight. The next Christmas, I exclaimed that I love my new Cabbage Patch Kid. I love my dad. I loved our cat Tiller. I loved my older cousin Charlotte, but decidedly not my younger cousin Amanda, for a while. When i was 5 1/2 my sister was born, but I didn't love her for another year. I loved spaghetti and strawberry cake. I first sang the word one summer in the backyard to the tune of Not Fade Away. I loved Anne of Green Gables and A Wrinkel in Time. I loved John Waters movies before I really understood them.

At the age of 16, my first boyfriend stood on my parents' porch, kissed me goodnight, and said it to me. It took me a month before I said it back. In the years since, I've said it to three partners with various levels of sincerity. I've said it to five friends, whole-heartedly every time. I've said it about Karl Marx, Wes Anderson, Dwight Conquergood, and Tom Robbins. I've said it about four U.S. cities, the island of Tobago, and the entire nation of Bolivia. I love beets. I love the rain, and the snow, and sledding. I love swimming nude in the Atlantic Ocean and wading through small tributaries of the Mississippi River.

I love so many things in so many ways and the linguist in me asks how so many different feeling could be lumped into one category. The Marxian in me asks what ideology it reflects. The cynic in me silently screams that this thing we call "love" isn't real. The anthropologist in me points out that its socially constructed and and relies on patriarchial and heteronormative notions of citizenship, only serving to reinforce the capitalist reproduction of the means of production. In essence I don't believe that love is anything more than the opiate of the masses.

And yet, I mean something when I say it to you. No matter how I do the math, I can't calculate how many words I've said to you. All I know is everyone of them is true.