On Wednesday, I took the 22 Fillmore to the 38 Geary to Polk Gulch, and then walked the remaining four blocks to visit some friends at On Lok. I ate lunch at Darbar, a great Pakistani restaurant in the neighbourhood, and then walked most of the way home, where I picked up my bike and took a ride through the Panhandle. I settled down in the park with The Culture of Make Believe and finally finished the last hundred pages. I finally got into The Invention of the White Race (vol. 1). I returned home to cook some barley, cinnamon cannellini, and mustard spinach, and to monkey around in PhotoShop, attempting to pull together a more aesthetically pleasing guise for this site. (It has come to my attention that what I thought was a pleasing rugged old canvas hue appears, in the words of Brenda Chenowith, “vomitrocious”.) After dinner, I looked at cake-baking advice from the sacred, pre-Fall 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking in preparation for Thursday — Erin’s Birthday (observed).

But Wednesday was no working holiday. This week, I am unemployed as only a White boy with a BA can be: voluntarily, comfortably, and still urban and safetynetfully bourgeois. I’ve been marginally or partially employed since last September. I would prefer to work for an organisation I could believe in, doing work that mattered. But I far prefer this biking and reading, combined with a couple hours a day of consulting work, to office wage slavery.

So… why shake things up?

My last couple posts have made clear that I want to be an anthropologist and, I hope, why: I believe that anthropology is uniquely placed to bring a humanising understanding of one group of people to another. I want to be part of an anthropology that makes this happen.

This past Fall, with the aid of my best proffs from the Friends World Program, I applied to grad school at Harvard Anthro, Harvard History, Berkeley Anthro, and the Social Anthropology program at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. America roundly rejected me (possibly, my ego urges me to add, due to the mysterious disappearance of one of my requisite recommending proffs), but I’ve been offered a spot at SOAS.

In many ways, the SOAS situation is ideal: I’d get my MA in eight months, allowing me to move on to PhD research without any more putzing about. And it makes sense for continued Asante studies: I’d be at a school that actually has Twi teaching faculty. I’d be right next door to the British Museum, which has the only Asante collection I know of outside of Ghana. (Righteously procured in the 1874 invasion of Kumase.) I’d have access to the fieldnotes of R.S. Rattray — an anthropologist who spent several years in Asante back in the 1920’s. I’d be affordably close to Dutch mercantile and Swiss missionary records. I might be able to convince Prof. Tom McCaskie at Birmingham to let me look at the 1947 Asante Social Survey papers (sitting in his garage for a decade, now).

SOAS is also, as an old proff tells me, a way to leave my sordid Friends World past behind, and to let possible PhD programs consider me based on my work at a “real” school. (My quotation marks, not his quote.)

But I’m not sure that the classic route to anthropologery is an appropriate route for me and what I want to do. I’m not interested in working in academia. Publish-Or-Perish and the immense personal costs of distant fieldwork are encouraging an increasingly quantitative, sociology-like anthropology which devalues (despite protestations from the vanguard old guard) ethnography, or at least pragmatically ignores the importance of context. I don’t know whether or not I’m a post-modernist — I suppose it depends on whom you ask — but I do believe that academic treatment of post-modernism has (most likely against the intentions of its better thinkers) promoted a kind of anti-intellectual glossolalia and a cardboard city cynical verbalism. And then there are the mirages of activism in which the American Left as a whole is wont to engage. Of academia in particular, David Graeber writes:

[Mainstream anthropologists' populism] [m]ainly … means that you must demonstrate that the people you are studying, the little guys, are successfully resisting some form of power or globalizing influence imposed on them from above.

Which, Graeber points out, really does nothing to make anyone any more free.

When’s the last time an ethnography made any waves outside the Ivory Tower? Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928? Derek Freeman made a bit of a media splash a few years ago, but only because he was riding on (while snipping at) Mead’s coattails. (And how many folks do you know outside of the field who’ve actually read Freeman himself, rather than newspaper headlines and magazine synopses?) Following the Darkness in Eldorado hullaballoo, I imagine Chagnon’s Yanomamo saw increased sales, but what was the political impact? I know a number of non-anthropologists who’ve read Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing, but most of them wouldn’t identify it as ethnography (which is fine), and I know none who have attributed it any special political or social significance. (This, I imagine, would be different were we in Europe.)

And if ethnographies were making waves, would ethnographers be tolerated? Or would dissenting academics get the boot, like Ignacio Chapela (whose case has been resolved favourably), or Graeber (who’s still being ushered toward the door)?

None of which is to say that universities are useless: The Academy has served to bring people who do similar thinky things into intellectual communion, catalysing the genesis and development of the ideas that make anthropology so potentially important. Were it not for Western universities, I wouldn’t know about the kind of anthropology in which I believe. And Hell, if it weren’t for universities, where would we train the revolutionary vanguard?

Nor is it the case that John Q. PhD can’t be a productive member of society: There are anthropologists who work for and advise the UN and various good-hearted and praiseworthy NGO’s. There are anthropologists who fight for the right to exist of native peoples (especially in the Americas). (In fact, American ethnography could be considered to have begun with Lewis Henry Morgan’s intervention on behalf of the Iroquois [in collaboration with, or perhaps at the prompting of a group of Senecas including Ely Parker].) And no doubt, there are many anthropologist activists whose professional lives inform their activism. But how much of this is because of John’s PhD, rather than just in addition thereto?

I tried explaining this to the old proff mentioned earlier, but I’m none too good with the English language and had difficulty making clear just what it was that I was getting at. I’ll paraphrase, for want of accurate memory: ‘Academia sucks, Bob, but at least it pays. It’s awfully hard to get money to do what you want to do outside of the university system.’ That’s just it, though… Humanising ethnography has the potential to be hugely important, and it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t take eight to ten expensive years of university education to learn to do, nor does it have to cost a lot. (I calculate that the cost of my year-long thesis research in Ghana was under $5,000, including plane tickets [more than half the total], food, water, rent, and electricity. $5,000 is nothing, as grant money goes, and is even doable for the working American who pays for her own research.) I want to encourage this to happen more and more outside of academia — that’s the only way that it’s going to happen at a broad enough level to actually matter.

The question then is: Do I stand a better chance at encouraging this by being an authoritative voice from within the Academy (’I'm a professional ethnographer, recognised by my peers, so you can trust me when I say that you, too can do this.’), or by actually doing what I want others to do, and being a DIY punk anthropologist?

I suppose there’s also the entirely valid question: Am I crazy? Is it really prohibitively difficult to do what I want to do without the support of academia?

Three further issues:

1. Intellectually, I’m still significantly immature. I learn and will continue to learn a lot through reading, but outside of the university, where are my idiot ideas going to get constructively challenged by other people who think about culture?
2. I love San Francisco. This is the first place in America that’s felt like home to me since the eighth grade. I haven’t lived in any one place for more than two years straight since I was thirteen. It’d be nice to really make this city home.
3. Where the Hell am I going to find £10,500 by 26 September?

At the moment, I’m toying with three ideas:

1. Going to SOAS.
2. Either turning down the SOAS offer, or deferring it, and just working on my homeless ethnography in San Francisco.
3. Either turning down the SOAS offer, or deferring it, and taking classes in documentary film-making at the City College of San Francisco, possibly while still working on that ethnography.

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