Ethnographic Perspectives on Laxyuup Gitxaala

The following is a paper I presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Montreal. November 2011.

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The question is easy: What are the changes undergone in archaeology under a collaborative setting, and why is it worth it? Experience speaks for itself in the moment, but the following is a representation of the transformation undergone in archaeology as experiences across time and space collide in the field.

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Part I: Katrena Leslie
Here is Katrena Leslie, our platform upon which we moved and lived across the water in the Gitxaala territory. And the boat floats, it bobs up and down, it rolls and leans. The people on board do as well, some tossed more violently than they expect, others lulled to sleep, and a few lulled to sickness. But Katrena Leslie is not inert, she is not some welded piece of steel propelled by diesel. She takes on as many roles are there are persons on board. She is a table around which planning and meals are shared at once. She is a location, central and mobile, pivotal in her role as mediator between perspectives and goals. And she is our guide, her belly full, like a well-packed backpack, of tools and data, books and food. And with her at our sides we were able to move through the territory, finding and visiting and experiencing disparate sites of knowledge with her as our constant. Katrena Leslie, she helped us see, from top to bottom, accumulated ways of knowing, oral histories beneath the ground, and caked on all our faces, evidence of having been and having done, and having seen.

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Part II: Lach Klan

So now we start moving across the territory. We begin as I did in Lach Klan, the village, the central home of the Gitxaala First Nation. And we, all of us involved, have been here, walked upon the anthropogenic deposits upon which the houses of our hosts and friends sit and have sat for many years. The island landscape is the space we navigate, but no matter how far we wander in kilometres and miles, we are never far from the village. Though physically inhabiting distinct geographic space, we are transported, in moments, far from the active practice of archaeology. The flat leaves of devil’s club are reminders, opaque windows through which the beam of the total station travels in space back to the people who call this home. The leaves and bushes and fallen trees were reminders of our purpose, to supplement a way of knowing. In these moments and otheres we carried Gitxaala in our pockets, as the global positioning handhelds might well have been called Gitxaala Position Systems. Anthropology and Gitxaala are old acquaintances, but now become more and more colleagues as their components are at once and always moving and contributing to what makes up the Laxyuup Gtixaala.

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Part III: Mapping

And we mapped, oh how we mapped. Got it. Yep. Got it. Face the prism toward me. Level? Let’s shoot in the next station. And so on across the sites.

Each laser beam from the total station a vision, each vision a point. The maps are a living, yawning thing, moving point to point across a landscape big or small. I learned on a skiff one evening from my friend Greg, that the people used to navigate their ocean routes moving point to point. Each point a point of reference. And so it is with topography, each point a way of visiting and remembering a place. And each map is a record of visiting, a physical (or digital) memory of a place, and a reference for the future. To map, for us, is to situate ourselves. Like a spider we stretch a web across a landscape, each point drawing us closer and closer to an understanding. Manufacturing an artifcatual world, a base upon which to live our work.

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Part IV: Practice

Let’s move to the real meat of it now. The practice of archaeology. The object of study, the culture area, the regional specialization. Archaeology takes place upon the map, upon the land, upon the anthropogenic evidence of time immemorial. Each percussion core, each ping an intrusion into the past. Archaeologists are time travelers, which is not to be cliché, but rather literal. Far from fiction, the practicing archaeologist, with each scrape of a trowel, passes from the present into the past and back again. It is the hermeneutic. It is the empirical.

But to examine what is empirical, is to get at that experience of discovery, of finding and unearthing. In examining the empirical in collaborative archaeology I find we are never confined solely to a square. We are never so myopic as to see only the silt in the screen. Nor are our practices so confined. Far from specialized we are mappers, and collectors, we are excavators and screeners, we are finders and fishers, explorers in residence, we are the makers of fires and pies. We are the screen tossers and the joke tellers. And some of us are less graceful than others. We are all these things at once, amalgamations, characters inhabiting a plot we write ourselves.

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Part V: Fishing

What better after a long day of swallowing flies than a fresh-boiled crab? Nothing. Except maybe halibut stew. And so we come to fishing. We come to the anecdotal, the fantastical stories of halibuts reeled in by hand. The personal feats of touching live crabs. The unsure looks of a man tasting urchin goo for the first time. Fishing, and stories about fishing, occupied a primary space alongside Katrena Leslie. Indeed it enveloped us from all angles. Each return to the kitchen was the beginning of a rising tide of fishing stories. And once again, as water seeps through the stones of a fish trap, the fishing stories permeate our lives and experience. We are transported in time, suddenly glimpsing and embodying bits of practices ancient. Five more minutes of five thousand years of history played out on Katrena’s decks and with our hands. Not ethnoarchaeology, not experimental archaeology, the collaborative is experiential archaeology. Katrena hosted the sea creatures upon her deck and there we mingled, learning names and gaining insight into character. Names and knowledges we’d carry with us into the excavation units, into the auger’s bucket and into the corer’s tube.

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Part VI: Midden

Fish eaten and bones discarded. Shells picked clean and crushed underfoot. Such is the creation of midden. Midden, the heap upon heap of heaping helpings of human being. The excavation units come alive with it. Shells pouring out of the walls and clacking as they hit the ground. But the fishing allows a new vision. The shells, the shapes, the hues, the sizes are all suddenly familiar. They are not discard but living and slimy and revealing ways of life that have come and gone and stayed. Surely we cannot uncover a salmon bone without tasting tasty sockeye. Same goes for urchins. And as our vision becomes embodied in our tongues, so too does it become refined. Slowly, like eyes adjusting to the dark, a collaborative vision is born in archaeological practice.

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Part VII: Abalone

Enter abalone, iridescent, shimmering and shapely. The shell of value, the shell of controversy. The shell now supplementing understandings of statistical significance. Abalone lives deep in the archaeological and Gitxaala imagination. It crawls upon the wet rocks and hides. But there are those with vision good enough to see. They bring experience, they bring memory and practice and a pinch of good luck to these places normally unseen. In our case the underground. Each fragment of shell that emerged from Ks’waan was another piece of evidence tying together the labour of archaeology, the land we worked on and the fishing practiced. EU NS1 filled to the brim with abalone shells, overflowing and soon filling the house basin. Work slowed and was never the same. We saw, we learned, we experienced and we found. Surely such experience cannot be insignificant.

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Part VIII: Transformation

Archaeology has undergone transformation in Laxyuup Gitxaala. Like salmon running we’ve been pooled and trapped behind the stone walls of an archaeological feature. The Gitxaala have created the world, shaped it and know it intimately. In collaboration we come to inhabit it, swim around and move from border to border. When the tide rises we can drift out and away and come back again. When the tide is out all we know is intersection between ourselves and others. The stories told in collective gatherings, around shared meals follow us into the field where they articulate with the same landscape we ourselves interact with.

And all this upon the platform. The platform its own feature upon which experience is free to transcend the person, the work and the memory.

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My thanks to the Gitxaala Nation for allowing us to visit and work in their traditional, unceded territory. This research made possible by Charles Menzies and the Laxyuup Gitxaala 2011 summer team: Greg, Teddy, Russ, Naomi, Kenzie, Kisha and Andrew. Thank you all for your participation and a fun summer.

Arriving

Welcome to the Northwest, where eagles sing and scream, where sea planes soar over harbors and the greenest greens you've ever seen tower over towns. 

I've arrived here for fieldwork. To head out into remoteness, to dig, to talk and to think. This thing we do, anthropologists, this thing called research is an interesting place to visit. Apart and strange, outside the university the researcher is a baffling presence; hailing from far away places, transient, lonely, with vague purposes even remoter.

Arrival is process, one of making place, making a place. All beginnings are arrivals.Arrival is the beginning of the creation of memories. Memories that come to construct the familiar.

Arrival is experience. Touch and feel and sense; new smells of ocean and the sounds of eagles flapping. Seeing, becoming part of landscape by contributing to it, by taking it in, literally embodying. Arrival is moving and pausing. 

I've arrived here, in the Northwest, ready again to set out anew. To the ocean, to floating scapes of sea and land and group. I'm here to see how archaeology arrives, by boat and plane and skiff. By tool and question and boot. By poetic narrative, perhaps. Tonight archaeology arrives and tomorrow it stays and the day after it leaves again. My job is to see and experience and write it.

Listen:

Obscura

sitting back in the blackness, pupils wide as pennies, the spring breeze blows the trees. and the classroom shudders.

So it went.

...

Beneath the surface, moisture started pouring into the corpse. First, after a few days of rain, the soil saturated, the wooden box began to warp. And mud and worms and the occasional critter discovered this tasty trove. And they ate of its meaty parts. And the they defecated on the corpse. And soon, what was still left of the corpse was plump and crawling with bacteria. The eyes fell apart and holes opened up throughout the torso exposing the empty cavity where the organs had once lived. Nothing went to waste, some was eaten and what was not simply decayed more and more until it was no longer flesh, or goo, but soil. And this was the story of all pieces of this once-was person, from being to corpse, to goo, to ooze, to soil. The bones took much longer. And trees pushed roots through the cavity to disassemble the skeleton until no recognizable order could be found.

Eventually, nothing was left except fertile soil and compost. And that was that.

Musings on Trains

And the people come out of the small towns,

and the cows come out of the cow towns,

and the ghosts come out of the ghost towns,

to wave at the trains

speeding by their backyards

and barnyards

and ghost-yards.

Hi train. Bye train. Predictable as the sun and the moon,

the Empire Builder barrels down.

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Howard talks a lot;

It's hard to get a word in edgewise.

But who needs words and points?

When the green is growing as the mountains rise up.

And the valleys open-up revealing rivers flowing.

Scene-scapes flying past the panoramic glass,

And Howard knows it all.

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A Native American smuggled hooch on board at Havre.

North Dakota.

He shared and was generous,

but he got somewhat mad rather quickly.

He just wanted to meet people, here and in the towns.

To Glacier west he was headed.

He wanted to meet me.

He'd never see any of us again,

not me nor Harvey.

"Please, do this for me," he said,

brandishing the pint of cheap whisky.

The 4 P.M. sun shone through the bottle.

Just a little bit more.

I declined. Drunkenness in transit,

whilst in the midst of Montana

seems a perilous business.

He would do it, he says.

I had to go.

-------

I sat next to a little boy,

in blue pajama pants,

who liked to kiss his mom.

All the while she stared off into the distance.

She was looking for signs of life.

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I met an old man

whose son

had a daughter

who met the president.

Obama, that is.

He told me of the changing landscape in Ann Arbor.

And of playing the flute,

In the Army band,

In Germany,

For John F. Kennedy.

He told me of a man,

Who tore down a silo,

An old, old silo,

And used the wood,

Polished by years of falling grain,

To build floors.

He was on his way

to see his old college roommates

in 'Frisco.

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The sun lays down a silvery glaze o'er the ponds.

It is morning in North Dakota.

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When the lights go dim,

the noises come out.

Creeks and rattles and clicks.

And clacks.

Listen: there's an eerie horn,

sounding as a ghost in the distance.

-------

Standing in my bare feet,

on a train platform,

in St. Paul.

I stretch my legs.

Spontaneity in The Lounge Car

I spent this evening singing softly. With newfound friends. On a ukulele a she-hippie did strum and I tapped a drum, homemade, sometimes brushing.

And our song rose and fell and reached its climax through meows and yelps and rolling tongues.

And there were no words, but the words were sung and some words were barely words at all.

And the melody drifted up and down a single arpeggio, inspired by a single string. With harmonies and rounds and reiterations bursting through spontaneity.

And Spontaneity. Randomly joining and listening and laughing. Feeling goosebumps as madness drifts to order and back again.

And its all music. Bringing us together in all that we have to share. Without names or stories or destinations we share. Music. Spontaneity. Travel and the Train.

And we've only been rolling a few hours. On this Iron Horse, the Empire Builder, crossing this majesty which is crumbling.

And we share our humanity. Whatever that is. Hard to define, but nonetheless lived out in our clamorous music. A strum, a chord, a rattle and a word coming together by chance on the train traveling through time and space, and the moon rocks with our song in the sky. And Ani keeps ringing in my head.

And we all crane our necks as la luna, she rises and casts here silver carpet upon the Columbia at twilight. And it falls to our feet. And we can step off this Empire Builder, through the empire and into worlds that have yet to be built and that are haphazardly built to some wild perfection and pass fluidly into some shared oblivion, like water into steam, which permeates the air and thickens the air and the community and condenses on the walls and runs down the walls and pools upon the mighty hooves of our iron horse. To fertilize and bring new life come the morrow.

And this is the train. And this is travel. And this is why I left and had to go back and will soon leave again.

And I write:

"Spokane. Take me as I am.

On this nostalgic car

Hurtling through a dark abyssive void,

going and coming and roaming and going

And moving, with no way of knowing.

And a girl strums softly on a ukulele.

And outside, in the window,

beyond my reflection,

there is only blackness.

And a line separating the lighter from the darker,

separating rolling hills from tree tufts.

And I watch the moon wandering in the window.

Back and forth, as right and left

its lunar wandering, meandering.

Whilst witness to this celestial dance,

soft conversation ebbs and peaks and murmers.

We fly back in time,

the moon following.

On this nostalgic car,

the train at night."

And I dream of a life on these tracks. In my own private car, living on the rails. Passing through city after city, meeting these travelers, munching nuts from foreign lands and digging it. Playing music and sharing. And sharing.

The Journey.

We the Godless

We the Godless, often struck wordless: God bless you, God willing, God speed, Thank God, God damn it, Good God, I swear to God, For the love of God, My God, God forbid.

We the Godless, Expressionless.

We the Godless, Without morality. Apparently. For God created all that is good and all that turned evil, and to be Godless is to be liminal. Betwixt and between all. Here we hunt alone, for things and people and goodness that is unattainable to us.

Here we hunt, liminal.

We the Godless, Stateless. In senses figurative and literal, for these United States under God have no room for us. And as the Babe was born in squalor of yore, so do we find our Godless, harmless, intellects shunned into settings poor.

We are evil. Immoral. Cysts on society sound. Or so we are told.

We are sick and derranged. Sinners doomed to eternal sufferings. Or so we are told.

We are naive and cowards. Fearful of His wrath. We deny Him outright, blind to his outreach. Fools. Or so we are told.

We are corrupt and profane. Rapists, murderers, scourges. We are atheists. Or so we are told.

Ad nauseum, mind you, we are told.

In person, in words blunt and brutal. Or hints passive and aggressive. Or by means of subtle looks. Through billboards and by exclusion from religious expectations.

We the Godless, Unimagineable to some.

We are poor, helpless, foolish, lost little lambs. Baah. We the sheep, sans sheperd. We need saving. We need to see some grace, just a trip to mass, just a book of the bible, sometimes just a verse. Or so we are told.

These things we are told. These things are cast upon us. And only in irony does one accept these accusations. If there is a true collective godless identity it is a tolerant one. A thought full one.

We the godless, Inherently contemplative.

Nevermind the crimes committed in His name. Crusades and murders and rapes to the Holy Land and back to Rome. Bombs dropped by godful presidents of now and then.

Nevermind the deliberate outcasting by the righteous godful who refuse to look or recognize possibility.

Nevermind that we are meant to live in fear, silence and in perpetual moments awkward.

Friendless, Unrespected, Untrusted. Hated.

We the godless, Hated.

For what? For nothing. For actions neither passive nor aggressive. For seeing. For sight neither righter nor wronger. For appreciating people and those things that are good and beautiful and bad and ugly. For experiencing human life.

We the godless. Guilty for seeing, appreciating and experiencing.

We the godless. Human. And guilty of it.

On the airborne exploits of my dreams

I spend my nights dreaming

of things really real.

Fuck the fantastical.

I don't fly, I fall.

(If I'm mid-air at all.)

Untitled, 11 July 2009

the Desolate in suburbia.

our bear Welcomes you.

The Wealth Human

Take the grocery store. Ultra Foods. Chicago Heights IL on a nameless, hot and sunny July afternoon.

A bustling place with all sorts wandering through for any number of reasons. One item or hundreds. Myself, I can only be overwhelmed and philosophically sickened by the preponderance of shelves, those stuffed with stuffs.

But checkout. The exit is where the magic happens. The culmination driven by impatience. An impatience bred by line-making and standing. O the queue! Bitterness from inactivity and monetary transaction. Or the screaming children. This perhaps explains the bitterness and stoicism and frowns I witness. A testimony I make while sitting idly with my beloved grandmother near the exit.

I think. Cart after cart, followed by face after frowning face. All downtrodden as if immune to that odd contortion we call a smile.

I feel like they are all simply bodies moving.

People watching in the international terminal at an airport, for example, is simply bodies moving. But with seeming purpose. Destination and origin envelop their movement. Baggage trails. I see context, if liminal.

But watching these bleak bodies pass at the grocery store is somewhat disturbing. These bodies, unwitting Proles perhaps, pass through liminality only within their economical purpose. Their baggage, only product. Consumption in the raw.

A capitalist nightmare, a perversion of the human in motion.

Distraught, weary and detesting faces which epitomize robotic forms being led by their vessels of consumption. Pulled along through an incomprehensible plethora of things to have. Unable to find what they need or want. Only to buy what was come across.

Choice, thus, becomes an illusion. For choice is beside the point in this case. So long as a body takes and transacts.

Then, passing through to another side, the out-side, a body is led onto the black asphalt lot. Treeless, void and bleak. Naught but intense sun and rows of reflection. Shiny machines which transport and consume only further. From the black of pavement to that black non-solid torn from the depths.

No wonder they seem bitter. No wonder I see bitterness?

But is it wrong to consider them a "them?" What makes me so different? Having passed myself through the same bulk hell. Was it, perhaps the quaint moment? Sitting beside my cherished mother's mother? Waiting silently on a bench, as through at a bus stop of yore? A moment of pause in a matrix of motion? There I was, something apart, no cart. Existing, if briefly, idly in a place of rapid transition.

And sure, these passing bodies are soon to gain some purposeful, non-economic purpose. Home, family, work or wherever their place has belonging and is needed. To once again live and not simply give and take. Live thriving in the moments, pauses and ease of less hectic places.

But why, as the organism demands sustenance, leave that for such a state? When once, subsisting was full of pride. Full of value and need.

Not of supply and demand.

Shame. That the other way, the quaint way, is poverty these days. That those who make and take only what they need, that they are foolish for taking and making so little. Silly poor!

Yet, poor in wealth material is not to be poor in the wealth human. A wealth in which the contorting lips become smiles, beaming and reassuring in their simplicity.

The wealth human. Seen through its absence, trailing wire vessels, in the sagging faces of the passing persons in the exit hallways, at a giant grocery store. On the southside of Chicago. Illinois, USA. Earth, solar system, Milky Way.

Untitled, 2 July 2009

I have visions of my past, my childhood. Underneath the porch where our things were. I see colors and shapes and textures, bright and brilliant but impossible to commit to sober memory. I see shapes like clovers and flowers. Pedals of colored plastic. Rough and shiny smooth. I've seen patterns. Strings of these colored plastic visions.

I see the brown of the house across the street. The black and browns of the decaying siding. Its old, something so familiar which barely exists any longer, unleashed only in stupor.

I see green, a sick, pale, fluffy green of Henrietta's carpet. The mottled browns of cheap furniture. I feel home, young, innocent curious and safe.

I see orange and yellow. Weathered plastic punctuated by cold rusted steel.

These are toys. Memories of childhood. They are remembrances of feelings of home and warmth. Nostalgia. Nostalgia of a time long since forgotten. Memories of memories I never had. Memories that remain but wisps afloat in my head. Smokey and intangible but nonetheless haunting. Not haunting but enduring.

Thing, place and feel.

My eyes blank, the world slips away for an instant. Then, flash. Light and nostalgia swirling. At once diffuse and intense. Any sudden movement of mind sends it running. Sends it diminishing into the black. Where the world appears again. The now. My world of short memory occasionally accosted by visions of that un-remembered.

Now form begins again. My mind from darkness to fleshy form. From memory, from nostalgia to thing. Now it is pink and wrapped and moist and any other manner of physical, medical description which is recognized by all.

A short trip. It ends but it doesn't. Just a cover for reality. Or a peek behind the veil of "reality."

Indecipherable. I can agree on that. An un-understood understanding.

A literal blow of the mind. Nevertheless, I live in reconstitution.

Hiatus

Intellectual sucubus. Chew on that one for a while if you will.

The fallout, as it were, from the completion of my B.A. in anthropology has consisted largely of an intellectual vaccuum. Indeed, I've gone from waging a subversive media war on the Butler University president and administration, completing a thesis (all while expanding my photographic portfolio) to naught more than landscape maintainance and playing a punching bag for pent up suburban angst and self-righteousness.

When I first returned home from my four year forray in academia I longed to be Jon Irons once again, that oddly memorable guy-with-bandana/guy-with-camera/anthropology-cult-figure. For, you see, at home I am instead Jonathan, loafing academic, argumentative and jobless (though far from a failure in the eyes of my parents I must admit).

Next, I experienced a brief reprieve, becoming a Jon Irons of a different sort. A relic of pool seasons past, wisened by years of rescues and guard staffs coming and going, noted explorer (apparently staff members will, from time to time, "pull a Jon Irons" and dissappear for 6 weeks or so). In my seventh year at the pool I claimed a new position, supervising supervisors. But, in a few weeks I began to bear the weight of long sunny days, angry entitled suburbanites and stepping up to be the bad guy. Not to mention that the humanihilsocialist perspective is far from customer service friendly.

Thus we arrive at my forced attempt to claw my way out of this inspirational hiatus. I've spent what little cognitive surplus I've had on contemplation of my future, my rapid rate of disenchantment and Vonnegutian perception of the world.

I suppose at this time I am attempting to figure out exactly what a world without enchantment looks like. The highs and lows are fleeting and intense. This inevitably translates into erratic and raw imaging and opining.

So here ends this hiatus with the realization that I must learn to flex my intellect without the immediate stimulation of academic workloads for the time being. Here ends this hiatus with the creation of new perception. Here ends my hiatus with an intellectual spring fillings newfound voids and topping off trusted resevoirs.

Listen: Poo-tee-weet.

The Decay of the American Dream

I saw a woodpecker today, pecking.
Peck, peck pecking,
On a wooden fence.

Peck, peck, pecking on a white wooden fence.

I said, to the woodpecker,
Why, you are mis-taken,
You, pecking on that white wooden fence.

There are no grubs within,
No homely hollow to harbor your heavy head,
Tired, from pecking that white wooden fence.

There is no inside,
Only the otherside,
A woody illusion, deluding your birdy brain.

I pleaded with the woodpecker, as he pecked,
Peck, peck, pecked that white wooden fence.
Move on! Make haste!

The woodpecker paused,
He fluttered off.
I do not think he heard.

My plea, drowned out by that futile peck, peck, pecking,
On that white wooden fence.

The Crossroads of Archaeology: Navigating the World Between Disciplines

I was nominated and chosen to deliver the student address at Butler's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences spring awards ceremony. The following is the speech manuscript.

As an aspiring archaeologist I sit at a contested point between endeavors in the humanities and the sciences. A great deal of critical commentary in recent years has concerned the negotiation of the archaeological identity. Are we scientists practicing within the rigors of replicability and objective method? Or, are we humanists, enveloped in a futile struggle between subjectivity and authority?

The professional discourse is still undecided. But, what being in this college has imparted to me in four years is the importance of resisting disciplinary constraints which compel us to choose either or.

In my honors thesis I look at archaeology through an ethnographic lens, examining the culture of the archaeologists themselves. I use perspectives from socio-cultural anthropology, photography and the sociology of science.

Interdisciplinary is what some call a buzz word. But, I think this is more than trendy borrowing from an array of disciplines. In its best form, interdisciplinarity engenders an organic perspective of open-endedness. As liberal artists we’re asking the big questions about identity, authority, and what it means to be a responsible human in an increasingly contested, post-modern world. By being interdisciplinary we need to wander the world between disciplines. There, we not only learn useful tools and perspectives from other worlds, but can begin to see the limits of our own.

We should not be threatened by the so-called intellectual anarchy in the space between disciplines. The separations and borders within the scholarship are by no means natural, predetermined or necessary. They are artifacts protecting our capability of rationalizing the world through a narrow perspective.

When I began to approach archaeology, I was guided by my passion for the field and those practicing in it. In my attempt understand knowledge in this field, I needed to adopt methods from cultural anthropology and photography to understand it. I was guided by my curiosity and not by strict archaeological methods.

It is this way of navigating the world, led by properties of our passions and by adopting a pragmatic method, that we will escape a narrow focus on disciplinary knowledge. In the borderlands, having escaped the comforting net of our discipline, we can see sameness and difference in new ways; a perspective which transcends separations in the academy.

So what is the tangible benefit for liberal artists? Whether we spend our lives in academia, or step out of the ivory tower, I think everyone can benefit from a success bred by seeing the world as full of influences instead of constraints. We learn to critically resist objectivism, dualisms and the status quo; things paramount to making a difference.

This may not translate to the world at large, this so-called professional world. But what more is this common sense professionalism than an excuse to ensure job security and work towards that cushy American dream life? What more is it than an excuse to forget the areas in-between?

Interdisciplinarity and the liberal arts demonstrate that limitless intrigue epitomizes learning; not GPAs, test scores and degrees. It demonstrates that we cannot and should not bound our pursuit of knowledge to the conventional means of evaluation and compensation of the "real" world.

The real world remains blind to the possibilities of the in-betweens, it remains a world of either-ors, of categories. But there can be no end to this learning and investigation as we tear down boundaries one after another. We, as students of LAS, should change definitions of success and professionalism with this in mind. We should take and cherish this lesson through economic highs and lows, begin to challenge the present and mold the boundless potentiality of our futures.

Hand in Hand

In an introduction to photography class I had to make a total of 20 images of a mundane object over two weeks. I chose a fork. Of all the images, the one here was my favorite.

When I look at these forks I see them reaching out as two bodies almost yearning for each other. The lighting is not terribly dramatic in contrast but is nonetheless intense. There are few shades of gray here, this scene takes place in a world of dualism; nears and fars, goods and bads, illumination and shadow, what we can have and what we can't have.

Breaking through the constraints of the black and white appear the spears of the forks. They shine reflecting and bending the light. And though they are so identical, reaching and reaching in the same direction, stretching and longing for each other, so much comes between them. They reach into an infinity that will never meet.

When I look at it I feel the drama flowing, the anticipation and aching of reaching out and grasping for something inanimate, dependent totally on external forces and situations outside of their control. Its a dynamic stasis, perpetually retreating and advancing in their cemented state.

And then, in the middle of all this waiting and tension, the two spears touch. Just barely to their points touch and overlap, finally coming together. Its an electric moment as the emotions and sameness meet and flow through each other. Its an explosion constantly reoccurring every time the eye passes over the center.

From the simple black and white comes aching and anticipation and the evocative meeting and touching. These forks live through this dualism and pre-destined separation hand in hand; A simple touch, an interlocking and tantalizing grasp.

Intersection

Here the perpendicular and the similar collide. Streets meet roads and topsy meets turvy. Intersection is at once the collision of the unfamiliar and the recombination of the predestined. Through intersection we gain perspective, as travelers of the perpendicular combine baggage, exchange, affect and move on. They are not so much rare, these intersections, but rather fleeting. So fleeting, in fact, they go unnoticed.

However, to take notice is to undestand the world better. Experience the intersection and you'll see the products of the different paths and how they reflect upon each other and themselves. A one laned approach is not the way to understand the world and its people.

I've often grasped aimlessly at the word to describe the fabric of the anthropological community. I have called it misanthropy before. In the adminstrative circles diversity comes up. I think a more apt word is intersection. Here, where Clarendon meets Clarendon, perspective and exchange and reflection abound. To gain a holistic perspective then, is to live intersection.

The National Sole

I made the mistake of watching one of the cable news channels this morning for, say, 10 minutes. In that short time I saw this video some 20 or 30 times. The president, despite regaining a pinch of respect for his puma-like reflexes, nevertheless made a fool of himself once again. He quite literally shrugged off the incident, said he couldn't understand why it would happen, but that it was the sign of a free society.

Even the attention-whores of the media caught on that this act was more than protest, but outright disrespect. It seems that the sole of the shoe especially is considered quite unclean and profane by some Muslims.

Still, its not every day that dignitaries like the US president have articles of clothing hurled in their direction. Or is it? I think the reaction today was more chuckles and less sock, I mean, shock. Apologies. I suppose I would expect no less at this point in history. It's fairly obvious these days that our president and the national image he represents are far from the reknowned reputations of yore.

Perhaps this discussion is moot, for a lame-duck can only expect a reputation as such. But, I think this is some baggage that the next administration will have to deal with. Obama will not start with a new slate, but rather some sort of corroding, eroded, malformed semblence of a slate. Obama is no Christ either, he cannot conjure up some heroic and instantaneous reconstruction.

It's going to take a while to leave the shoes of Bush behind and clear a new path.

On Scholarship

Scholarship is a funny thing. Most academics I know don't hesitate to slip a few complaint about their workload into a conversation, or facebook status. Indeed, chronic procrastination leads to moments like the one I recreated above as I drew painfully close to the end of a 5 hour writing session. And what do we do it for, I mean, I plan to do this sort of thing for the rest of my life. It sure as hell ain't where the money is.

On an unrelated note, I wathced Little Miss Sunshine with my roommate earlier today, before beginging the session represented above. One of the drives of that dark and hilarious film is: do what you love and fuck the rest. Okay, so maybe it wasn't such an unrelated note. Joke's on you.

After finishing my paper today, I realized the burst of joy I got in writing my works cited page. To me there is little more fulfilling than organizing and compiling sources after writing a brilliant conclusion. And for that, its worth it. Fuck the rest.

With Regards to the Vegetables

There's a carrot growing inside our house, you see,
We think it ties the room together.
In a cup, in our kitchen,
There it sprouts the greeny green.
It should feel rather honored,
Having avoided a delicious demise.
For, in our home, there is but one rule,
That nonsense is the only sense,
That discontinuity must breed with the eclectic.
Thus was born a friend for our cast of oddities,
On Reginald, on Dennis, on Joesph and Gopher.
There's a carrot growing inside our house, you see,
We think it ties the room together.

Hygienics

Things I cannot live without: the alcohol induced burn of mouthwash.
If it don't hurt, then it ain't working. (that's what she said)