That sounds silly NOW, at the time I was going on the faith of my advisors, who it seems figured anthropology would be a good fit for me.
Or, you know, that's what I thought they were thinking.
Or it could be that they were thinking that as a Women's Studies MA with a focus on Linguistics, who wasn't really interested in women's studies or qualified for Linguistics proper, there weren't many other places for me to go.
When I finally found out what anthropology was, after reading several books, as part of my duties as a Teaching Assistant for an Introduction to Anthropology CLASS, I was kind of mystified.
Basically.
Anthropology says.
Go to a strange land. Study the people of that land. Report back.
Anthropology says.
What qualifies you to study this land is the fact that you are an outsider.
You will have insight as an outsider that natives cannot or do not have.
(Hypothetically, this is an insight you and your cohorts will appreciate. Possibly the natives will also appreciate. Possibly not.)
For the entire of my PHD, I struggled with this concept. And TO BE VERY CLEAR, not everyone agrees with that definition and a lot of anthropology is changing. But the basic premise, I would argue, has stayed the same.
I struggled and bent and twisted my goals as a researcher and writer until finally I decided I'd cried enough tears in my advisors office.
And I was done.
And, after that, I didn't think about anthropology a whole lot, until very recently, when I landed here...
San Francisco, CA.
I am living in a land where phrases like "start up" and "platform" are as common as coffee and sunshine. Where you can buy avocados ripe from the grocery store.
I am very recently transported.
And this is calling into question all sorts of things like:
my concept of a reasonable sum to allocate towards rent
my expectations of avocados
my understanding of January weather
my understanding of the insight of anthropology
It is going to be a very good thing, I think, to be an inside outsider for a while. I'm kind of loving it so far. I'm kind of loving being lost and finding my own way.
Plus.
Can I say?
I'm loving it here.
San Francisco, you are a lovely place.
I'm not sure how much of what I'll have to say over the next few months will be anthropological in nature, but I'm thinking about that word a lot so I thought I'd put that down here.
As sort of a record of a bit of a twisty turny past present thing I'm in these days.
Which I'm also kind of loving.
Missing everyone on the east side.
xomariko