It's been nearly a month since I got to Delhi and unlike in Gulbarga, where I was before, here I feel a little lost. There is nowhere that I have to be everyday, no one I have to meet regularly. Things have to be accomplished, but not necessarily in any particular order, or by any soon-to-arrive moment. I am master of my own schedule, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with it. The past few years on campus have been so goal oriented--working towards term papers, exams and proposal deadlines. I chugged along happily for the most part then... a little tug-boat on her way to some not-so-far port. Now I feel like a sail-boat adrift on some windless ocean.
It's quite common, I'm told...this ethnographic ennui...this feeling that nothing is happening when all sorts of liminal-taboo-transgressive-totemic-PoCo-PoMo-metareflexive moments were promised in all those fascinating ethnographies written by others who went before you. I guess I just need to dig my own little groove here; set myself tasks that need to get done everyday. Else, this spiral of unaccounted hours and days threatens to overwhelm the next six months.
Here's hoping for some structured sanity.
2 comments:
Hm. If waiting doesn't work, maybe you could start poking your interlocutors with sticks. That should get 'em moving.
"Transgress, damn you! Let's see some liminality over here. I didn't fly halfway across the globe to fer nuthin'!"
And then you can write all about it. You'll be credited with starting a neo-interventionist school of cultural anthropology. The possibilities are limitless. Get poking!
I hear ya' sister; and a huzzah to Megan ;)
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