One aspect of grad school so far has involved sorting things out. Maybe I’m trying to, uh… modernize my life, or something. This sorting and classifying has proven productive: I’ve thought new thoughts and written new things that I might not otherwise have done.
Sorting school from life, first of all. School is not life. School is a job. Most importantly: I do not live at school anymore (on campus or in the dorms). Never mind that my social life revolves around school… I’m fine with that.
Sorting “things I’m going to study and write about” from “things I’m interested in.” I am interested in food and cooking, bikes, gardening, visual art of various media, language and literature, but I’m not necessarily going to study and write about those things (er, for my job). That does not, however, mean I have to give those interests up.
So I’ve sorted. And am constantly sorting, as new hybrids arise as a result of said sorting. But now I’m trying to find a little balance between the school-life dichotomy I’ve set up for myself. At orientation last fall, the Department Chair warned the incoming cohort that we would have blinders on for a while– our focus would become very narrow and we might have to give up our hobbies. But not to worry– hobbies and balance would eventually be returned to our lives.
I think she meant “after you finish your degrees” that hobbies and balance would return to our lives… but c’mon! We run the risk of driving ourselves crazy if we don’t find some balance throughout. I think people with families find that balance (hopefully) much faster than others of us, out of simple necessity (and by virtue of having a spouse/ partner saying “Snap out of it!”). But I have single (or at least, unmarried) friends that seem to find it as well.
This fall was the first time in 5 years that I haven’t raced my mountain bike. In fact, I haven’t touched poor Lucy (geared bike) or Ramona (single speed bike) since April! Tragic. I stopped because 1) I didn’t have time to drive up to 12 hours each way for races on the weekends, AND finish all the reading I had to get done and 2) While it was really fun to hang out with a bunch of 18-year-old boys when I was an 18-year-old girl… not as much fun anymore (no offense, guys).
I thought that I would miss the social aspects of racing the most (and I could replace those with other social activities), but in fact I missed the actual competition. I missed the nervous butterflies before a race and pushing myself until my vision was blurry. I missed the pre- and post-race rituals too: the pre-race eating, organizing, warming up, going over the course; the post-race eating, cleaning, stretching, and collective bitching and groaning about muscle aches and performance issues. (Hm, eating figures in twice there… surprise surprise.)
I also find that I am a lot less-healthy mentally without some sort of focused physical outlet. I don’t mean that I go off the deep end– I think I’ve hammered out my diet well enough in the past few years that I keep my moods and energy much much more balanced than in early college (I’ve also got a handle– I think– on that transition-time stress that plagues college freshman). I mean that I can’t seem to *think* sometimes. The wheels might be spinning, but the hamster is either comatose or dead. I can’t focus long enough to read a page of a book (often an extremely dense and less-than-fascinating book, but still). Thinking, for most people, is an important part of academia (though some of my colleagues might debate this).
In between my two brain-draining seminars yesterday (brain-draining in the sense that I feel like I want a cigarette afterward… and I’ve never smoked in my life) I went to the gym. It’s the same gym that I’ve been going to for 5 years (now 6). It’s the gym where I trained for my first Big Bike Ride, and all subsequent races and rides. I was worried that I’d have a panicked “Ohmygodimstillhereaftersixyearsandstillhavesixmoretogo!” attack, but I didn’t.
The familiarity of the place was comforting! Yeah, it was kind of gross and dimly lit, full of smelly jocks, anorexic girls, and other varieties of undergrads, but it reminded me of the fun things I enjoyed doing before work started to take over.
I did a similar routine to what I’ve always done (with a few exceptions). I spent 20 minutes warming up on an elliptical trainer (I know it’s lame, but real running gives me asthma attacks), and about an hour lifting and stretching. I felt more energized and focused afterward than I have since September.
[I told my roommate that I’d been to the gym yesterday, and she said “What, did they open a coffee shop there?” Har. Har.]
I also drink less coffee when I work out. Bonus!
Of course, being who I am (a planner), I start thinking “Gee, it would be so great to race again in the spring!” I mean, I could fit in workouts in between classes and studying like I did yesterday, and I would feel so much better about life in general!
So I started eyeing the race I originally wanted to do last May: the Mohican 100. I wouldn’t do the 100miler (I simply don’t have the time or motivation to train for that one) but what about the 100k? I could totally do that… right?
The problem is, as soon as I start imposing a regimen on myself, I’ll try to cheat (don’t ask me why, I just will). That has been the trick to eating well– I don’t deny myself a damn cookie if I want one. I don’t eat them very often, but as soon as I start saying “No, cookies are bad,” I start craving them. (That, and I have slowly developed, over 5 years or so, a deep-seated aversion to pre-packaged foods.)
So if I start saying “Mondays are a bike day, Tuesdays are swimming and rock climbing, Wednesdays are lifting, Thursdays are biking, Fridays are biking, Saturday and Sunday are rest days” (which, in fact, is what I was kind of thinking), will I start to think “to hell with it”?
I know I won’t be happy with just racing “for fun”– I want to feel that I did my best. And in order to do that, I have to train well. But will that take the fun out of it? Will I start to feel tired rather than energized (which has happened in the past)? Maybe I’m not cut out for physical competition… maybe it would drain too much of my focus away from other, more pressing things…
Or maybe it would offer a nice outlet, which I could seriously use right now.
Kati en Bici 
Activism and Collaboration
Published February 6, 2008 Anthropology , Commentary , School Leave a Comment(another response paper…)
George Marcus, in his article “Ethnography in/of the World System: Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography” and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson in the introduction to Anthropological Locations both urge for reconceptualizations of ‘the field’ and ‘field work’ within Anthropology. Concepts of ‘the field’ as being remote, exotic, and potentially dangerous construct the locations where ‘fieldwork’ is carried out such that they must fit this criteria in order for the work there to be legitimate. Unless one is conducting Malinowskian ‘field work,’ one is not a ‘real anthropologist.’ These conceptions also privilege a certain form of knowledge production, placing ‘the field’ and ‘the academy’ (granted that ‘the field’ as conceptualized above cannot exist without the academy, as it is an academic construct) at the center of this system of knowledge production. The naturalization of these perceptions masks the structures of prejudice and inequality that shape our disciplinary work, as well as shape the ‘knowledge’ (ie: representations, analysis) of the work we produce as anthropologists. I found two points from these articles of particular relevance to my own interests as an anthropologist: Marcus’s assertion that multi-sited fieldwork, as an alternative to ‘localized’ fieldwork, can serve as a form of activist research; and Gupta and Ferguson’s account of collaborative investigation as one of their examples of heterodoxy within anthropological research.
One of my main problems (points of discomfort?) with activist research is the claim many activist scholars make that you must align yourself with a particular political group or effort. I don’t align myself with a political group/ effort because I feel that they tend to have an ‘all or nothing’ attitude, in that you are either ‘with’ or ‘against’ them (which has been my experience in being involved in organizing and other activist work) and this attitude clearly has the tendency to mask the nuances of social interaction that anthropologists so relish. However, I don’t feel that being ‘unaligned’ should preclude politically active research. Indeed, research cannot help but have political influence, and pretending it does not only serves to mask the systems of power and exchange that are in play.
For these reasons I appreciate Marcus’s proposal for an anthropology OF (rather than IN) world systems. That is, instead of viewing social processes as contained within (and controlled by) an overarching world system, we must view these processes of interaction as constituting and producing the system itself, and therefore having the power to alter that system.
Studying these systems of interaction, through participation (and observation) within them, in multiple locales thus becomes a form of activism. By conducting research, we are becoming political actors. Marcus’s argument is further supported when we take into account the points made by Gupta and Ferguson that field site selection is an inherently political process (based on our personal experiences, likes, dislikes, and the social systems we are a product of– and produce ourselves). Therefore, our research cannot help but have strong political undertones which become overtones when the system of their (re)production is articulated.
Marcus alludes to, and Gupta and Ferguson describe the benefits of, collaborative research, particularly (in Marcus’s case) as multi-sited research. Gupta and Ferguson suggest collaboration as one of the heterodox (in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, then, capable of producing a new system– or at least making a change in the current system) examples of anthropological research.
In my personal experience, I find research very (very, very) difficult to do without collaboration. First of all, Gupta and Marcus are right– I am indeed a socially awkward graduate student. I find it nearly impossible to travel somewhere new and immediately begin making ‘contacts.’ It helps if I am working with a local academic or a nonprofit organization aligned with my topical interests. Furthermore, through collaboration with the people you are ‘studying’, you gain a more sensitive insight to the topics at hand. You also (hopefully) develop empathy with your subject, rather than attempting to maintain a falsely ‘objective’ stance. In this way, the research becomes explicitly political (rather than simply implicitly political), and the structures of such organization (and research, including the academy) are further clarified. The anthropologist, through collaboration with the organization she (or he) is studying, is more obviously part of the object of study.