Do I have a 3rd eye or something?

As I was engaged in conversation with colleagues recently, I was reminded of how discomforting it can be for others when one occupies what appear as contradictory categories. I grew up blue collar, but spend most of my time in a predominately white-collar social/academic environment. My family, we have been homeless, jailed, on welfare, in gangs, thieves, confidence artists, and, to boot, we fart in inappropriate places. But somehow, I am finishing my PhD at a prestigious University.

Ironically, this discomfort that others feel has been especially true within the shiny chambers of Anthropology -- where the blue die in the white collars normally runs out of the fabric once fieldwork becomes sweaty and labor-intensive. While anthropology is a study of the people, it is generally not made by the people or for the people. The point is that many anthropologists are walking contradictions and should be the last to take offense at my own contradictions.

Many anthropologists would argue that the purported goals of their projects (e.g. to improve our knowledge of others to make this a better world) and their sympathies (not empathies) for “their” disenfranchised subjects are genuine and objectively true. All the while these world-turners produce texts and analyses that are never going enter mainstream knowledge or foment political change. For the most part, anthropology is a selfish endeavor that satisfies a general human curiosity about ones neighbor, but does little else.

My favorite anthropologist once said that to put things anthropologically was to make great things from small ones. Although this critique is about methodology, it partially explains Anthropology’s inherently limited power for changing anything. Despite our grand theory frames, we study small things and so we change small things.

Perhaps what is perplexing is that many anthropologists, despite years of unsuccessfully changing anything, still hold on to the dream that one day, one day change will come.

I hope to change this notion. But then again, my training allows me only to make small observations about what I think of as a great problem-- and nothing else.