A Vogon poem to mark my departure

As my plane took off from Raleigh-Durham International, I was drowned in a deluge of sentimentality. I thought back to the last poem I'd heard and remembered the godawful verses read at Obama's inauguration. Thus inspired, I penned these wholly unremarkable lines.
(To be recited in a stilted fashion...in the manner of a history teacher reading roll-call ...Bueller... Bueller...Bueller...)

Goodbye.
Goodbye fresh air.
Goodbye my wide expanses of green.
Goodbye my quirky friends
Who come bearing scotch and baked brie.

Farewell my men.
Farewell my wenches.
Farewell my oracles, my God, my Godot.

Somewhere, Asad is mocked,
A post-processualist cursed, bones sexed,
Soroush probed--I am not with you.

Somewhere, someone unscrews a bottle,
Chops some celery,
Makes a Bloody Mary--I am not with you.

Somewhere, a party is missing its jester, it's bearded lady,
A man is missing a wife,
A cat has one lap less--I too am alone.

I must not say goodbye.
The dot and feather shall reunite,
And I will walk again with you.
--Feb 5, 2009

On the Yellow-Brick Road

Coursework: CHECK; Comps: CHECK; Dissertation Proposal: CHECK; Grant Proposals: CHECK; Funding: CHECK! Fieldwork: Almost there. So, I'm finally on the threshold of Anthropological initiation: fieldwork. I am not quite packed, but I am ready to head out to India to start what I hope will be a year's worth of productive research. Will be starting off in the South, then heading due North in August.
I've decided to use this blog to write of my adventures as a novice anthropologist. I will name no names and will keep details of "data" out of my posting. I'd just like to use this space to talk about the little things that I might encounter in these the salad days of my anthropological career. (Lions and tigers and bears! Oh My!)

Ok...Let's get down to the business of democracy.

It's day One of the Obama administration, and it's time to return to our democratic duties in earnest. I speak of critique, lampooning and mockery . And I am serious. To be able to make fun of those in power is a keystone of a healthy democracy--it keeps them honest, it keeps us sane (or at least that's the intention).

Obama may be the darling of the masses right now, the hopes of us left-wing liberal sorts pinned on him. We wait, our tongues lolling, for him to enter a phone booth and emerge with a flowing red cape and a spandex suit. But let's not ride too long on this sentimental hobbyhorse. There will be mistakes and foibles and not-so-sound intentions, and it is not for us who voted for him and supported him to now also defend him. Foibles must be pilloried, mistakes speared and intentions prodded. To do any less would be to renege on the social contract of democracy that for centuries has rested on the expectation that those in power must be held accountable.

So it was with great joy that I welcomed the Daily Show's scathing remarks on the Obama inauguration. Bush may be gone, but hey! we have someone else to mock now!

My gut reacts pleasantly to the elections

So, after an excruciatingly long campaign, America has elected its first African-American president. We've heard all the adjectives by now: "historic", "seminal", "inspirational", "thrilling" etc. But I did not anticipate feeling the way I did the day after the elections. I woke up on the 5th of November feeling inexplicably good about being in America. And the first thing I thought to myself was, "I don't think I'd mind being an American citizen now."
For many years now I've been decidedly unenthusiastic about applying for citizenship here. The idea of putting my hand to my heart and pledging allegiance to the United States made me very uncomfortable. Sure, I love my American friends, I love the academic institutions I've been affiliated with, I love my Midwestern cat, I love my home, my garden with its view of pine trees and maples, now turning vermilion and gold. But feeling a sense of belonging to a place, a land, a people is vastly different from feeling any affinity for everything a nation stands for...and for the past eight years, this nation has seemed to stand for all the wrong things.
But on November 5th, it seemed like America came closer to its ideal than it had ever before. Sure there are still inequities here, there is still corruption of the highest order, and domestic and foreign policies that sicken the soul; but there is also that sense within me that here, now, we have a chance for redemption. I think to myself, "If this country can elect a person called Barack Hussein Obama to the nation's highest office, if the majority of its people are capable of growing past the basest of xenophobic reactions, then this is a country I would like to be a part of."
If someone had asked me a few days ago if an Obama presidency would make me reconsider my stance on citizenship, I would have shrugged and said 'no'. But, unexpectedly, his victory has given me a sense of optimism not only about America, but about the nature of humanity and its capacity to see difference, accept it and think beyond it.

Musings of a bored grad student

I sit writing in my lovely little office on the third floor of Alumni. It's a glorious autumn day and through my window I see giant oaks, their leaves still green as the summer. But here and there a little golden leaf drifts down, the sun catching its final dance. But reminding me that there is beauty beyond the realms of nature is the Corinthian pillar that stands so close to my window. Its curlicue tops almost within reach--the only thing that redeems this otherwise unremarkable building of grayish yellow. All of this seems like an indulgence amid my prosaic pursuits of the day: more drafts of pithy abstracts and proposals that attempt to play mind-games with over-worked reviewers. The pointlessness of this exercise is not lost on me. How bizarrely conceited I feel...pimping my research, worrying about my Dickensian writing, dotted as it is with passive -voice and an over abundance of clauses.
I crave moss-covered silences. I crave a place where my deadlines and my rejected proposals do not chase after me; where the stillness of a moment is not interrupted by the guilt of unaccomplished goals, the pestering of tasks left undone. I am no longer the Ulysses who craved the roiling waves of an open ocean; I want to linger with the Lotus Eaters, content in the languid warmth of each day.

Spore sets our view of humanity back 150 years.

The new video game ‘Spore’ is the talk of the town in gaming circles these days. At the heart of this game (created by Maxis of SIMs fame) are evolutionary processes. The game starts with a strange planet where a little microorganism has just landed piggy-backing on a meteoroid. The fate of this little critter rests in the hands of the player who has to choose various mutations, deciding which direction this organism takes in its evolutionary path. The game has been commended by biologists for introducing the concepts of contingency and randomness as important factors shaping the evolution of any particular species.

The problem is that the game doesn’t stop at biological evolution. Tied into this game is a fundamental presumption that societies also follow these progressive evolutionary patterns. Once the organisms in this game have reached a level of sentient intelligence, the players have the option of moving them on a path of supposedly increasing cultural sophistication from “simpler” tribal societies of hunter-gatherers to space-travelling species.

This view of societal “progress” and “evolution” sets our view of humanity back a hundred and fifty years to the time of early anthropologists who presumed that non-European, non-urban cultures were naturally more primitive and less-evolved. These early thinkers placed tribal populations the world over, who were contemporaneous to urban Europe, at an inferior intellectual strata, marking them with labels of “savage”, “barbaric” and “backward”. It was a teleological view of the human species with more "primitive" peoples climbing a ladder of progress towards technologically sophisticated civilizations.

Spore gets things wrong at two fundamental levels. One, its very premise—of placing cultural and technological difference as a difference in rank as opposed to a variation in type—is faulty. Anthropologists in the 20^th century have worked over-time to correct these presumptions of their predecessors only to be confronted by techno-geeks in the 21^st century falling back on the same fallacy. The second way in which Spore messes things up is by presenting (biological) evolutionary time as being of the same scale as cultural and technological change. Evolutionary time spans millennia; any given mutation requiring unimaginable quantities of time to transform into visible special differences. Technological changes within human communities, on the other hand, are incredibly fast and short-lived in comparison to evolutionary time. For the creators of Spore to speak of technological change in the same breath as evolution gives players a distorted sense of time, with eons of evolution occupying the same scale as decades of technological change.

As a gamer, Spore is incredibly exciting to me. As an anthropologist, it makes me shudder.

Priding and Parading in New Delhi

Never in my life had I even imagined that I would participate in a Queer Pride parade in India. But it's happened. On June 29, 2008 New Delhi (along with Bangalore and Calcutta) witnessed a spectacular show of pride on the part of the Queer community and their supporters. There were Gays and Lesbians, Bis and a good number of Transgendred and Transsexual folks. And many, many straight people who'd "come out" in support of the Queer community.

The organizers initially had hoped for a turnout of around a hundred people. Amazingly, though, the group that marched from Janpath to Jantarmantar numbered a little more than a thousand! Provision had been made for those who wished to remain anonymous: Rainbow striped masks were available for anyone who wanted it. I showed up at Janpath with a friend expecting to see a small sombre group of masked individuals. Instead, we found ourselves in a festive sea of smiling faces, chanting and hooting, waving rainbow flags and carrying banners up high. I expected police aggression and some right-wing Hindu groups to show up and set things on fire...but all I saw was immense enthusiasm. The cops looked amused and happy, the spectators looked genuinely interested, the press was respectful and we encountered no hostility as we made our noisy way down one of Delhi's busiest streets.
My friend and I walked with a banner that read "Delhi be Proud", and chanted "Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isaai, Hetero, Homo Bhai-Bhai" (Hindus, Muslinms, Sikhs, Christians, Heteros, Homos: We're all brothers!), a take on India's favourite national diversity slogan, and sang "Hum honge kameyaab", the Hindi version of "We shall overcome". We also called for the legalization of Queer behaviour (the offending Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code being the object of our collective ire).

Finally, we stopped near Jantarmantar, paid our respects to those whose circumstances would not permit them to participate in the parade and lit candles in a silent vigil. When everyone began to disperse and we walked back down for some coffee, we saw the street strewn with rainbow flags, we passed outrageously made-up hijras twittering and laughing about the few incredible hours we had all just spent, and all seemed right in the world.