Anthropology: 2, Love: 0

I love my job. I get to learn new things, almost everyday. Things that no one knew yet. And then I get to tell other people by writing about them. That’s pretty awesome. And what makes it even more awesome is that the things I learn are about people: about their history, their current context, what they do, what they think, what they feel, and hopefully, why all of that is true. A lot of my job is just hanging out with people. Sometimes they are fascinating. Sometimes they are terribly boring. But there is always a story to tell. And I get to be the one to tell it. I get to travel to amazing places: the highest national capital in the world, the driest desert in the world. Sometimes the places are impoverished and it’s both hard to watch people suffer, and hard to live there myself. But in the end, it always feels worth it, especially if I can help relieve some of the suffering through my work.

But there’s something that’s not worth it. As of last night, I am single. My job requires movement. And that’s not good for relationships. This is the second time (a conservative estimate, a few other situations could count if I were assessing very liberally) anthropology has snatched a relationship away from me. The first time, I was so excited to spend a year doing dissertation fieldwork, but that kept me from making a commitment to a person who wanted and deserved someone who could promise they wouldn’t run away to South America for the long haul. In the end, that’s exactly what I did, and though I still deeply love and admire that person, we both know it wouldn’t have worked. The second, and more recent circumstance involved me falling madly in love with a person who lived where I researched. He was endlessly giving of assistance with research and with simply being an emotional support for someone living in a foreign country under difficult circumstances. But when I left the field site to move to the national capital for a year of analysis and writing, the distance was too much. With me planning to eventually return to the US, and him firmly rooted in his small city, we just didn’t have a workable future.

And I sit here, questioning, is it all worth it? I wouldn’t say that “settling down” is in my plans for the near future, but I would relish the opportunity to build a life with a person who I love and inspires me. I crave the kind of security that comes with knowing exactly how your head fits on their shoulder and exactly the joke that person is going to make when something goes wrong. And I wonder, is it impossible to have both? To have a partner and thrive as an anthropologist. I look at my fellow postdocs across the office, both of whom are bright young stars in their fields. Both of whom have partners. Partners who have followed them on their journey, and no doubt have at least a little sacrificed their own dreams for that of their partner. And both of my colleagues are men. Now of course, I know plenty of women who are anthropologists and have life long partnerships, but I wonder if being a woman makes it a bit harder, particularly in a context like Latin America.

In falling in love with this field, and in sacrificing so much to attempt to succeed as a scholar, have I all but given up my rights to love? I know that I am selfish. Is it possible that there is a person out there who could give up just enough to follow me on (or wait for me during) my anthropological adventures, yet is still invested enough in their own passion that they inspire me as well? The outlook is not bright, but I remain hopeful. Just as the academic job market is not bright, but I remain hopeful. Hopefully, at least one will eventually work out.

mapa de chile

an auto-ethnographic memoir of the ways social media has changed (almost) absolutely nothing

In 2003, I graduated from college and moved to New York. Well, Jersey City, New Jersey to be exact. But I worked in Chelsea. For this small town girl, it was the illusion of “living the dream,” but I was too poor and too depressed that my top-10 University degree was not helping me do anything worthwhile with my life.

Yes, 2003, as you will recall, was pre-Facebook. When I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast that October, I had already begun to migrate away from Friendster and towards Myspace. It would not be until late 2005 when I would, under pressure from co-workers, open a Facebook account.

In 2003, I was employed as a librarian at a boutique architecture firm on 22^nd Street, right around the corner from a Barnes and Noble where people like Betty White and David Sedaris regularly did public readings. The only thing I liked about my job was that it sounded fancy and I once ran into Austin Scarlet (from Project Runway season 1) in the building’s elevator. But really being the “librarian” meant that I opened mail, filed catalogues, and eventually learned to master the art of using Excel as a payroll system. The “boutique” firm did not usually design cool restaurants or private homes. Most of our business came from the hospital sector.

I quickly found that the actual amount of work I needed to do in an eight hour day probably amounted to about 90 minutes. But I had the internet. I read the New York Times website cover to cover (or whatever the appropriate term would be), back in the days when there was no pay structure. I wrote on the billboard site for all of the Discovery Channel shows I watched with my roommate at night. I wrote emails back and forth to said roommate who worked downtown for a large credit card company. We usually averaged about 70 emails a day. Then we started using gchat instead and we lost count. I was obsessed with this website called Flavor Pill which essentially posted free and low-cost arts related events around the city. Every week they had a short 200 word essay contest to win tickets to some sort of film premiere or art opening. I won about every other month, which is a testament to the time I spent crafting these essays, rather than any innate writing talent. And by 3:00 when it seemed I had exhausted all other alternatives, I resigned myself to Myspace. I searched for new music there. I commented on friend’s latest picture uploads. Of course back in those days, people uploaded pictures at the tune of 5 a month. I even met new people. I don’t remember how exactly. Probably through groups one could join. I met a professor of anthropology from Florida who ended up guiding me through the graduate school admissions process a few years later. I also remember essentially planning a lunch date with a woman who worked a few blocks away, but I canceled at the last minute and just went to the Whole Foods salad bar 3 blocks away. I even started this here blog while working there.

Today, I read an NPR article that reminded me of those days. The days when my nokia phone worked just fine. When the internet was a waste of time, but I needed a way to waste time. When I lived a twelve hour car trip from my family and my best friend had just taken off to backpack in Australia for a year. I had no land line, so I called my mother using my cell phone, usually on Sunday afternoons. My roommate and I had internet at home, with Ethernet cables running between our bedrooms (Who needed wifi? Who needed internet in the living room or kitchen? I had my fill of internet at work). My boyfriend did not have internet at home, but he did have a giant television with 200 channels. The article laments, like so many, that “We Are Just Not HereAnymore.”

I offer my story here as an example of what the article gets wrong. In 2003, I spent at least 6½ hours of my eight hour work day, mentally not there. And social networking at it’s early stage was my last resort for ways to waste time at work. I’d then ride the train home, listening to my new mp3 player, reading a book, and barely making eye contact with anyone. Once home I would make dinner and watch tv with my roommate. We were physically in the same room, but our interaction was minimal. We found it so funny that this was our usual mode of existence that we hung a painting of us sitting on the futon staring at the TV (pictured above). On nights that I spent with my then boyfriend, I was often driven crazy by his obsession with television. He often spoke exclusively in quotes from whatever Bravo TV show was hip at the moment. In the morning, if we took the train to work together I was often deeply offended because rather than talk to me while we rode, he preferred to wear his headphones and listen to the news on his pocket radio (maybe I should have known it wouldn’t last). In those days, I paid rent on an apartment in Jersey City, and received paychecks from an architecture firm in Manhattan, but I didn’t live there. I lived through the phone calls to my mom and sister. I lived through the monthly emails sent by my best friend in Australia. And occasionally, when we’d all get together for a backyard barbeque, Sparks, and a rousing game of paper telephone, I lived with my friends. But we did not have rousing, meaningful conversation. We’d watch tv and comment, and generally drunkenly make fun of each other. The adventures would end up retold in my roommate’s livejournal. Photos would be shared via Photobucket or Snapfish. The stories might end up condensed into inside jokes about a hairy rock in the bathtub or what happens after bazooka, but they were not worthy of literary inscription.

The point is, maybe we’re not “here.” But if we are not now, we never were. People have been interacting with people in other places since the beginnings of modern humans’ existence. They have been preoccupied with what’s going on “over there” with “those people” for 200,000 years.  To think that new forms of technology are creating supposes there is some prior, “more authentic” form of communication we’ve left behind. But that simply did not exist. We are still human. We still communicate with other humans in the mode of our time…from cave painting to Snapchat, these modes help us share information with people close and far, for now or later. So let’s stop lamenting the social ills that everyone seems to want to find to be emerging from social media and get on with the usual business of being social with those in our immediate vicinity and those far outside of it.

ser mujer en la academia

Last night I attended and spoke a dinner reception put on by the Cosmos Club Foundation as one of the invited Cosmos Scholars, whose work had been supported by the foundation in 2012. It was a fancy affair in the club’s headquarters near Dupont Circle, and as I entered the building with Dr. B I whispered “I feel like I’m sneaking into a fancy hotel to use the bathroom.”

On the second floor of the building we checked in, put on our name tags, and went to our assigned table to leave our bags. As I was putting my coat on the back of my chair, a member of the club—Mr. HB, as I shall call him—introduced himself first to Dr. B, and to myself only to offer to take my coat to the coat check.

Fair enough, I thought. This is what I get for bringing as my guest a faculty member who is young enough to appear to be a student as well. My advisor, usually referred to as Leapfrog in these posts, was otherwise engaged, receiving an award for outstanding teaching and mentoring at the university.

Dr. B and I quickly found the open bar (this is precisely why I asked him to be my guest), and the Georgetown professor ahead of us in line began chatting us up. Again, he assumed that Dr. B was the honoree, and asked about my research after B indicated that it was worthy of conversation. The three of us moved to a room I would describe as something of a conservatory. There he told us a bit about the history of the club, noting that it was not until 1988 that women were allowed to enter via the front door or go above the first floor. Well, then….congratulations to me for getting to the second floor I suppose...

Right about this time, Mr. HB returned with a ticket for the coat check, which he handed to Dr. B. “I believe this is for your wife’s coat,” he said. Oh my. And now congratulations to me for being downgraded to attendance as someone’s wife.    

Ok, so maybe I set myself up for this. I attended a swanky, bougie, white event, in which there were plenty of female award recipients, but only 4 people of color in a room of about 100. I’m wondering how they were feeling. And further, rather than attending with my grandfatherly 70 year old white male advisor, I asked a faculty member who is more friend than colleague to put on a tie (accounting for ½ his yearly tie quota) and have some free cocktails with me.

Fair enough.

But in a world where the glass ceiling is sometimes said to not exist, I can’t help that notice in the two weeks that I’ve been a doctor, it seems more and more apparent.

The other instance(s) in which this felt apparent was during and shortly after my defense itself. I stood at the front of the room talking for over an hour and the most common compliment I received after officially being welcomed into “the realm of the anointed” (in Leapfrog’s terms) was that I looked beautiful or that my dress was very pretty. “I sounded smart, right?” I asked my mother afterwards. “Oh, yes. And you looked beautiful too.”

Perhaps that’s a mother’s place. But friends, colleagues, they said the same thing. This was right around the time Obama made inappropriate comments about California Attorney General Kamala Harris (as recapped on Jezebel). Sure, I’m not the first to point to this larger trend, it just struck me as surprising, because I come from a department that is so conscious of gender issues. That is so committed to social justice. Because in general, we try to be so overly cautious and respectful of our colleagues. And sure, I like being told I look nice in certain situations (though, as I’ve mentioned before the true way to my heart is to comment on my intelligence), but not at the event that was a culmination of six years of academic work. I think Brett was the only one that got it right. Though apparently she commented on how she liked my dress to my mother, on facebook she wrote: And she was brilliant--thoughtful, poised, riveting.

buena onda en la paz

I am so much cooler in Bolivia.

“Really, I am!” I want to shout at people I meet here in DC.

I suppose it’s a matter of social positioning, and I can’t really help it. Here I am a grad student and adjunct professor. I either stay in sweat pants all day or try to fight my younger-than-I-actually-am appearance by trying to dress like an academic. I hate when librarians ask me if I’m looking at information for a class paper. But in La Paz, I am one of the cool kids. I wear vintage, rockabilly dresses or ripped jeans and t shirts given to me by tattoo artist friends. I’m a live music junkie, a tattoo shop groupie, booze-slinging benefactor, restaurant aficionada, mural-painting sidekick, dj enthusiast, and a legitimate luchadora who rarely pays for a drink.

I wrote in May that I’m famous in La Paz (only half-jokingly), and its (half-jokingly) true. La Paz has the feeling of a small town, and if I don’t know everyone, I at least know someone who knows them. DC is small too, but rather than being comforting, its almost oppressive. When I left here in April 2011, I had good friends and a comfortable repertoire. I return to a place that feels empty. Most of my friends have left (such is life in such a transient city). With others I have grown apart. Evenings feel empty here as I crave distraction, camaraderie, excitement.

I came back in a depressed state, and googled “post-fieldwork depression.” Most of what turned up was written by people who disliked their field site and were depressed in the field. I felt the opposite. I longed to return to my friends, my usual days of training, reading, writing, visiting friends workplaces or homes, nice dinners served by my favorite Belgian, and the free tequila shots that went along with it. I missed the guessing games of who I’d run into on the street (there was always someone, but you never know who). Slowly it gets better. Easier. I instinctively put paper in the toilet, and don’t turn my nose at tap water. I wait patiently at bus stops, and thoroughly appreciate my electric heater. But I’d happily give it all up, even knowing there are horrific electric showers waiting for me on the other side.

But this is how it happens. We re-integrate ourselves to the best of our abilities. We find the little things that make us happy (hot water in sinks) and try to forget the things that were so magical about our other home (evening light on Illimani). And at the very least, I’ve found a bartender here who hooks me up as well as I was taken care of in LPZ.

suspensión corporal

WARNING: possibly gross-ifying picture below

...and in an interesting turn of events, i noticed that on 7 october 2007,  during my first semester of grad school, i wrote this

while taking a break from reading today i notice True Life: I'm a Coney Island Side Show Performer was on. I didn't watch it, but it made me think those dudes that pick up heavy things with chain links pierced through their skin would be an interesting study. 

well what do you know? i'm now friends with some people that do that. i've been thinking the next project will be about street art or something, but maybe i should go back to that old idea.

viajeros verdaderos

(crossposted at fieldnotes)

Two years ago, I saw Bolivian lucha libre for the first time live. I took a tourist bus and was fascinated by the conversation that ensued. The riders grappled with “knowing” that it “must be traditional” yet calling it “far too WW[E].” And while I recognized the tour company that leads the tours is probably the real culprit here (wasn’t it Ani Difranco that said “look at where the profits are/that's how you'll find the source/of the big lie that you and i/both know so well”?), I saw these young travelers as naïve, exploitative, and at times offensive.

And it was easy to write about that. To follow the age-old critique of colonialist/ imperialist/orientalist travel. And I don’t mean I did so in a righteous way—in fact is was a matter of accidental convenience, but I ended up challenging those assumptions (and isn’t it Tom Robbins who said “You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous about risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés”?). So I stayed in the Ekko* hostel for two weeks, to get a better ethnographic perspective on the tourism in La Paz (and also to give me time to find a permanent place).

And my fieldnotes are filled with an undertone of “OMG” and “What is wrong with these people?”, but I also met some really amazing people who I respect and at times admire.

And so, amidst emails to tour companies and the Fulbright office, phone calls to friends of friends in La Paz, and no small amount of viewing wrestling, I find myself editing this paper/(hopeful)journal article on tourism and the Cholitas Luchadoars, and just can’t find the voice I want to convey.

I guess that’s always the worry with ethnography. Maybe sometimes you get too close to be critical. Or you can’t find the balance between compassionate writing and dismissing wrongdoings. But in any case, I’ll submit a piece of fieldnotes that almost didn’t happen.

I went to bed around midnight on Tuesday, and was sleeping peacefully, but around 4:30 some of my young Irish bunkmates wandered into the room, likely on some sort of substance, and talked loudly, turned the lights on and off several times, and giggled themselves to sleep. They giggled me out of my sleep, and when I was still staring at the ceiling at 7am, I decided I might as well go have some free breakfast in the bar instead of continuing to count the cracks.

I had some rolls with jam, but by 11am was falling asleep while trying to type, so I went back to the room (still containing the sleeping Irish men) for a nap. I woke up just before 1pm, and was starving. I decided to go back to the bar and order some lunch while using the internet there. I was looking for a menu when I noticed that Vijay (an off-duty bartender) had one. I sat down next to him and asked what he was ordering.

“Actually, nothing. We’re going to the factory for Amanda’s birthday.”

I had learned about the factory earlier that week, when Mike, another bartender, was traveling to Cuzco to tend bar there. The factory, according to legend, had the best chicken wings in the world and he was taking about 15 dozen for the staff of Ekko’s sibling hostel there. All week the Ekko staff had been talking about “The Factory” and I pictured some sort of distorted Bolivian Perdue factory where they would sell you wings right off the line or something.

Most of the bar staff at Ekko are travelers much like the patrons of the hostel (and thus of the bar). They simply agree to stay for a minimum of three weeks and tend the bar for four shifts a week in exchange for free housing in a room shared with the other staff, and one free meal per day. Many of them, like Mike, start working in the Ekko hostel in one city and then transfer to another Ekko in Peru or Bolivia. Most other travelers stay in the hostel for only a few nights and spend most of their time at the city’s attractions like biking down the “most dangerous road in the world” (also known simply as “doing death road”) or climbing the Huayna Potosi mountain. I however, was simply trying to make contacts in La Paz, catch up with a few old friends, and start my “real fieldwork,” which consequently meant I was in the hostel a lot more consistently and for a longer stay than most of the other guests. And so, people started recognizing me, talking to me, and I became friends with the bar staff.

So when Vijay suggested I come along, I decided it might be good to get out of the building for a while and spend some time with him and Amanda. The three of us hopped in a cab headed for Zona Sur, and eventually arrived at The Factory Bar and Grill, which I imagine is somewhat of a Bolivian Buffalo Wild Wings (though I’ve never been to a BWW, so I really can’t make that claim).

But the important part of the story is what happened in the taxi. As we got further into Zona Sur, the upperclass part of La Paz, Vijay said “Being in posh places makes me uncomfortable.” Amanda, who grew up in the UK, concurred and told a story of meeting her family for Christmas in Ecuador (where her extended family lives). She had been backpacking for several months before that. “Its just such a different way to travel.” We stayed in these 5 star hotels where everything was taken care of and took private tours. It felt like being on a safari. Just seeing the world through rose-colored glasses….Then again, we are all staying at Ekko.”

So, I suppose my (initial) conclusion is something like this: The relations between travelers from the “first world” (North America, Western and Central Europe, Australia, New Zealand, urban South Africa) to the people and places they visit in the global south (and yes, I realize the terminology here is highly lacking) are at the very least problematic. However, I don’t think that young people who travel are entirely to blame. Yes, perhaps they are in a way taking advantage of structures that maintain their ability to consume of other “cultures” “people” and possibly most importantly food and alcohol thanks to beneficial exchange rates. But they are also doing so to learn something about the world. They take language classes and volunteer at orphanages. And again, I don’t want to minimize the problems of the NGO and volunteer-vacation industrial complexes, but simply want to point out that the travelers have good intentions. For the most part they are making decisions to experience other places rather than stay in their home country and only read about far off places and people like a new generation of armchair anthropologists. And given that the options for travel tend to be very polarized between five star hotels with private tours, and the more adventure tourism of hostel hopping and death road riding, I find that I have a lot in common with the hostel guests and staff. Even anthropology (gasp!) is not without its colonial and imperial history and undertones. So in a way, we’re all just trying to find a balance of broadening our knowledge, making the world a better place, and working within the structures that are so hard to subvert. Both Amanda and Vijay have moved on to other South American countries now, and I do find myself missing them a bit.

But don’t get me started on the gap years…