I commented recently to a friend of mine that my sister (decogrrl) is a great interior designer in part because her identity is not wrapped up in her designs. She is really committed to using her excellent artistic and design senses to help people achieve their own visions of their space. I’ve always admired that in her.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today in conjunction with thinking about two or three recent encouragements I’ve been given, people say they know I am doing well, or that I’ll achieve something or whatever. It’s sort of a funny thing, because these are primarily expressions of faith, the people who say them don’t really know anything about my academic abilities. But today I was realizing that what such encouragement reminds me is that I have a life and an identity that is greater than my academic one.

I think that maybe this is one of the most difficult things to remember when doing fieldwork away and alone. I have heard the criticism of some modern ethnography that it is too much about the ethnographer, but now that I have done fieldwork, I have a better sense of how and why this is. Fieldwork really strips away all the parts of your life that don’t have to do with ones academic goals. So even though for me, my identity has never been fully wrapped up in my academic ability, here I am a “researcher” or a “student” above all else. Especially as the end approaches, I am very conscious that what I achieve here will be a major component in defining the rest of my career. And because while I’m here my whole life is my career, it’s hard to keep track of the fact that defining my career is not the same as defining my self or my life.

At the same time that fieldwork narrows my experience of self to my academic identity, it is the least-academic academic activity I have ever done. I don’t speak to other scholars, I don’t write or read academic papers/books, I am cut off from the academic community at my school. The dissonance between the sense of fieldwork’s consuming importance and its disconnect from academic life leaves me feeling ungrounded and disoriented. I experience this primarily as a loss of questions. As a researcher, the loss of questions is alarming in the extreme. After all, what am I here for except to answer a series of questions? I became an anthropologist because I had a driving desire to answer a seemingly unstoppable font of questions about human organization and behaviour. To have that go away is strange and anxiety provoking.

But what I’m realizing now is that I think the anxiety is provoking the loss of questions, not the other way around. I have kept a chronological set of notes about my activities, but I also have a folder of “thoughts” that are less routed in daily activities. I write these sometimes when reading through notes or interviews, or contemplating some event or observation. Re-reading them, I realize that the academic and the questioner is still there. So, I’m holding onto the encouragements to remind myself that I’m more than my work, and I’m holding onto my thoughts folder to remind myself that I still have critical thinking abilities. And I’m using this blog as an outlet for the journey of self that fieldwork inspires, but which comes across as solopsistic and self indulgent in ethnographic writing.

Filed under: academics Anthropology