a breath of fresh air

These readings came at a time when I have seriously begun questioning my feelings/position/future in academia. I am an anthropology major, and this means I've had to digest a lot of heavy material within my major and within other subject matters such as historiography, as well as in this class. I enjoy reading and I also enjoy a challenge, but at times, I catch myself saying over and over, Is this person serious? and Who CARES?, This guy must really have a lot of time on his hands..and This is complete bullshit. Over the past year, especially throughout this past semester, I have begun to think that I am going to graduate with a degree in something that is overly concerned with theory and not applicable to the real world. Cliche as it may sound, I've always wanted to pursue a career where I know that I am actually going to make real positive change in people's lives/ policy/ what have you, and I simply can't stomach the fact that I may end up living in the intellectual clouds of academia, inaccessible and in fact, quite laughable to the rest of the world. Like Ellison, i fear that academics "suffer from the worst side effect of our powerful and necessary skepticism: we have made theory and action relative strangers to one another." I've been having this frustrated conversation with my father, who is a sociologist working at Yale, from time to time, and he's concurred with the angst I'm experiencing.

However, my dad tries to reassure me, as do the readings The Something We Can Do and The Humanities and the Public Soul that anthropologists and other scholars can and do have a positive effect on people in the real world, on the public who are not academics and privy to all the social theory we twist our minds around in college. I think that poring over scholarly literature can tend to have the effect of intellectual snobbery, and aggravation with ignorance. Ellison and Domke's pieces call out this snobbery and emphasize the importance of making knowledge accessible to the public, as it is a medical doctor's duty to turn his/her jargon into meaningful and helpful diagnoses and advice for the patient. Actively working with the public will help. I also think of The Web 2.0 video as a great example of public scholarship, as it makes the ideas of changing ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics, etc. with the emergence of the internet as a scholarly medium an understandable and interesting topic to all by using an innovative method, music, and the medium of video. Works like these, and Ellison and Domke's assertions give me hope for my possible future as an anthropologist as I seek meaning in the work I do, like a breath of fresh air.

if these clothes could talk..

This girl looks like she might smell...
For a general overview of the young woman standing before me, she is wearing a white t-shirt, black (maybe blue?) shorts, and sneakers. Her brown hair is pulled back into a short, stubby ponytail at the nape of her neck. It looks a little messy, perhaps a little sweaty. Her skin is slightly tan, and she doesn't appear to be wearing makeup. The t-shirt is more or less fitted, with the words "I'M THUMBODY" and a blue thumbprint with a smiling face on it - a cute play on words. Sticking out from her t-shirt at the shoulders and bottom is a white ribbed tank top. Her shorts appear a bit wrinkly, as well as a little too big for her. There is a sewn-on yellow military insignia on the right leg. On her feet, she wears a pair of white and green Nike running sneakers, that appear to be stained with dirt or mud. Sticking out from the tops of her sneakers are white ankle socks. From the sneakers, her slightly disheveled and sweaty appearance, and from the thick straps of a sports bra sticking out underneath the ribbed tank top, I can assume she just went to the gym, for a run, etc. not too long ago.

I stank.
I just got home from the gym, and I'm wearing my typical workout clothes. I'm pretty cold, because my clothes are damp with sweat, and because the past week or so has been unusually cool for May. My hair is pulled back into a tiny ponytail (it's in an awkward growing-out stage) and is badly in need of a wash. My shirt is pretty old; I think I bought it my sophomore or junior year of high school... I thought it was cute, and I've always liked to wear clothes that get a reaction out of people. Now, I rarely wear this shirt even to work out in, but it happened to be at the top of my dresser drawer since I just moved back to my parents' house so I wore it. I'm wearing a beater (I know it's a horrible name for a shirt) underneath the t-shirt, because it makes me feel more comfortable when wearing shorter shirts that might ride up when I'm exercising.
My shorts are a gift from my boyfriend, who just recently got out of the Marine Corps. Last summer, he was based in North Carolina, and he brought me these shorts when he came home for a visit once. I was thrilled because I can always use an extra pair of shorts to work out in, and also because I wanted to display my pride in my big bad marine. However, I was quite dismayed when I saw that the shorts were a size large. Does he really think my ass is that big? The nerve! I was quietly perturbed at my sweet boyfriend who was thoughtful enough to bring me home some shorts. Of course, I realize now this was extremely bratty and silly of me, and the shorts fit just fine if I roll them a couple of times. They're my favorite shorts to exercise in (I still like to show my pride for my marine). In fact, they are at the moment pretty wrinkly, because I wanted to wear them over any other pair so I dug them out of my dirty laundry. Gross, I know.
The sneakers I'm wearing are my favorite of a few pairs of running shoes I have. They're old (for a person who works out or runs almost every day), about two years. I bought them because they have my favorite color, green, on them. They're pretty dirty, and my mom and my boyfriend constantly make comments that I need to buy a new pair. I agree, but I love these sneaks, and I don't mind so much that they're so dirty... it shows their history. They're weathered. They've carried me through countless runs, bike rides, and hikes up mountains, through the woods and mud. I think they can carry me through a few more. Besides the sentimental value, another pair of these babies will cost me over $100, and that's just not happening any time soon.
These clothes now need to retire to the laundry basket, possibly to be picked out once more for another workout before finally seeing the inside of the washing machine. Gross, I know.

Catching up in an disorderly fashion...(Wed. 5/7 Post)

The Emergence of Genetic Reality and The Web 2.0 present different forms of communication and transfer of knowledge. The strengths and limitations of the form of a book or otherwise printed text is at once the same: its authority, or its presumed reliability. Our culture puts a great amount of faith, trust, and prestige in the academic text; this can be illustrated by how an argument is made instantly stronger with the insertion of a cited statistic, or the requirements for college papers to use academic sources as opposed to unreliable internet sources. It is helpful to have an authoritative form, for many of these printed texts, such as articles in academic journals, have gone under extensive scrutiny by peer review boards. Copyright laws also ensure a certain amount of reliability. This helps to provide for some sort of common ground of trusted knowledge. However, this authority can (and is) certainly taken advantage of. In Telling the Truth about Damned Lies and Statistics, Best points out that not only do many people read a claim or statistic in an academic text and accept it without question, but they repeat these claims and statistics in their own papers or conversations. Many of these claims, Best calls them "mutant statistics," are highly implausible and are unfortunately taken for granted. I'm going to ask my fellow classmates (hopefully without self-incrimination), have you ever inserted an academic citation in order to bolster an argument in a paper which perhaps takes the intended claim slightly out of context or without being 100% sure that it is actually reliable information (accounting for biases and slants)? I read another interesting article that calls into question the authority given to written history, A City of Shadowy Outlines. It is an ethnography of Bedouin tribes in central Jordan, where the author runs into great trouble in attempting to document histories of tribal boundaries because the tribes themselves relied on an oral history as opposed to written. It seems to the ethnographer that he cannot find a reliable account of their histories, because each tribe speaks from a different perspective. This brings to light the assumption that written histories are "true" perhaps because the face behind the writing is erased. However, every written account comes from a certain perspective with different racial, ethnic, political, social class, and gender ties and motivations. There are benefits of having some sort of authoritative transmission of knowledge such as the printed text, but there are also many risks in accepting the information blindly.

As with printed text, the strengths and weaknesses of an online forum like Wesch's youtube video are the same: its innovativeness. The internet provides for new and interesting ways to present information. The Web 2.0 is a discussion about implications of the web's innovations by utilizing these very innovations: an artistic video with an awesome soundtrack, meddling with and altering websites. It captures and excites the audience, as well as making it more accessible to a wider range of audiences than the traditional, authoritative printed text. However, Wesch points to the possible negative, and indeed dangerous, implications of these innovations. The scene in the video where Wesch edits and deletes the entire Wikipedia entry illustrates these risks perfectly. In fact, I just looked up "innovativeness" on Dictionary.com to make sure it was a correct form of the word, and who knows who edited that entry? At the end of the video, Wesch declares that the new possibilities made available by the web will require us to rethink many things, among them ethics, rhetoric, privacy, etc. There is a cultural lag in how to deal with the amazing possibilities that the internet opens up.

Every medium used to communicate research will have both positive and negative implications, and I'm not sure I can say which is more valuable. However, I think for my project with squatting, using the internet as a medium might be preferable as I find its ability to be more accessible to a larger audience very important, and can be more fun and intersting as well.