Final semester & Epiphanies

If I manage to somehow secure a grant for my dissertation fieldwork to begin this summer, this will be my last semester of classes. Ever. !

Of course, I could take a class here and there after my fieldwork, when I'm back on campus to write up. But those would likely be audited... I'm pretty sure this semester's classes will satisfy my credit hour requirements. If I "take" classes in the future, it will probably be just sitting in on a colleague's course to learn about a new subfield or for pedagogical purposes. It's also quite possible (probably far too likely, in fact) that I won't get any grants from the last cycle of applications, which means I will have to return next semester and resubmit grants. I'm not sure what the credit hour situation will be; I think the funding would be there through a TAship, but for various important benefits (insurance, metro pass) I would need to be a full-time student.

Regardless of what the future may hold, the classes I selected this semester are unusually fitting (so far, and in light of what the syllabi promise). I'm TA'ing a class that matches my regional / thematic research focus very well, Indigenous Peoples and Movements of Latin America -- and I'll get to deliver a lecture on Maya literacy movements in Guatemala. The two classes that I'm taking normally are on Anthropology & Existentialism, which explores the root questions that led to the rise of our discipline and that continue to underlie our investigations today, and a class called Human Nature in Minds and Cultures, which actually approaches a lot of the same questions about identity (what is essential? what is existential?) but from a very, very different perspective grounded in experimental psychology and some slightly more cautious variety of evolutionary psychology. My fourth class, which I'm putting together myself in collaboration with one of my committee members, is tentatively called "The Anthropology of Remembering" or alternately as "Memory, History, Identity." I would combine both titles if I could find a clever way to do it. For this class, I'm basically trying to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of memory/remembering that will give me a foundation in memory studies -- and a helpful new angle to consider my research (and proposals).

The great thing about all 3 of these classes is that they overlap considerably -- which is doubly wonderful because they're also directly relevant to my research interests. This means that I get to spend my last semester focusing on research development (while calling it "class work".) And at the same time, the reading selections are well outside of the kinds of stuff I have been reading for the past year or so, which means I get to stretch my grey matter in some new or seldom visited directions. In the past two weeks, I've digested the results of psychological experiments that detect the innateness of perceptions of animacy and intentionality (e.g., when we see an object hit another object and set it in motion, do we perceive a motive in this action? Was the initial object operating of its own accord?); had a crash overview of post-Enlightenment German philosophy (and now I'm trying to understand Heidegger. They say his idea is optimistic but I keep seeing nihilism peeking through the door); considered "stone age sociology" and the seriously disappointing limitations of the archaeological record; understood the foundational principles of studies in artificial intelligence just well enough to decide that they're fundamentally flawed, but not well enough to fix them; and revisted (for the third time) funerary canibalism among the Wari' of Brazil. I have also slowly and deliberately made my way through a couple of great edited anthologies on memory - one at the social level, primarily from anthropological perspectives, and the other a review of Sir Frederic Bartlett's contemporary impact on memory studies (mostly individual, but I have a couple of chapters to go and they may engage the individual-to-social transmission question).

The more I delve into this "memory studies" stuff, the more I realize it's pretty darn close to what I envisioned cultural anthropology to be when I first switched over from archaeology. I wanted to understand where ideas are born and how they're communicated and changed. The brief foray into family planning in Thailand was primarily my "fix the world" moment, which naturally failed: there are no easy answers. Population control is an epic failure and a violation of the most basic human rights, while family planning is a fantastic product of rationality and compassion with the potential to allow people to pursue 'modern' consumer lifestyles without sacrificing parenthood. That's basically my thesis, in a nutshell. Perhaps I'll delve into greater detail in a later post -- I have to talk about this stuff to a bunch of strangers this weekend, anyway.

My path from environmental/social policy research in Thailand to alternative knowledge production in Guatemala isn't too hard to explain. The more I read about memory studies (and realize how we re-interpret reality and selectively reconstruct our memories/pasts in order to preserve our sense of self and our vision of our future), the easier it becomes to see the linkages between my past research interests and where I am now. It began with an epiphany. Two epiphanies, actually.

I use the word "epiphany" in two ways: first there's the typical epistemological epiphany, which is probably identical to mainstream uses of the word. These are the epiphanies of sudden comprehension, like the moment when I learned what multiplication and division were (I can still remember it clear as day -- I was sitting with Drew Wilson under one of those triangle-shaped wooden obstacles on the middle school playground. He had learned it from his older brother and tried to explain it to me, and suddenly it just 'clicked' and I understood. Do they still wait until 4th grade to teach this stuff???). I get smaller epistemological epiphanies all the time when I'm learning a new language, and the various parts of grammar 'click' into place. Hurray for order in the universe!

There's also what I call an 'emotional epiphany', which is what happens to you when a statistic becomes a real, recognizable emotive force. I tear up whenever I think about children not receiving toys for their birthday or christmas because I can remember visiting a cousin's house when I was little, and my mom telling me not to tease him for not having many toys because his parents couldn't afford to buy him many. The thought of teasing him hadn't even crossed my mind, but neither had the realization that kids just like me could - and often did - go without toys. Call me a materialist or a slave to consumerism if you want, but I find it deeply unsettling and *sad* for any kid to go without some toys - especially Legos, because you can rebuild them into as many different toys as you can imagine. Whenever I adopted a family from the Angel Tree in undergrad, I would buy the kids Legos instead of army men; they could then build army men or race cards or knights and dragons or robots... :)

Another example of an emotional epiphany was the moment in the Holocaust Museum in DC when I stepped into the room full of shoes...
I had heard murmurs, whispers about this room while waiting in line for a ticket; so I was partly prepared. But when I arrived and walked onto the little bridge...
I think the reason it hit me was because shoes are so mundane. There's nothing beautiful or ceremonial about a pile of shoes. We don't look at them and think of commemorating the dead. Yet the jarring cognitive dissonance of seeing an enormous pile of shoes and realizing that each pair represented a victim... that these dinky old leather shoes are all that remains... that these were human lives, each one a world, full of experience and knowledge and love and imperfection.

Reduced to shoes. Fucking shoes.


...


Walking over those piles of shoes made the Holocaust real and meaningful for me in a way that no film or story or historical facts had ever done.* The shoes - in all their mundane, material concreteness - turned the statistics into lives. That emotional epiphany left me a total wreck for about twenty minutes as I bumbled around in the corners of the last exhibition room before stepping back out into the wide, open entrance to meet the rest of my party. Even now I'm surprised at how strongly I react to the memory... gods, how can we kill innocents so readily?

*In retrospect, the stories and historical 'facts' were certainly necessary for the particular trigger to have any effect. Any artifact without context is virtually meaningless; it has no value apart from intrinsic material. Context is what separates the Holocaust exhibit from the shoe rack by the front door.


Hmm...well, as I said, there were two epiphanies that led me from Thailand to Guatemala. But I think I've written enough for one post. I'm feeling drained now... it will be good to sleep.
The only line from the Bard I've ever particularly cared for:

"Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast."

Amen.

Stay tuned for the story of the two epiphanies, as well as various kitchen productions from the past week :)