The First Time I called Myself an Anthropologist

I was getting these two precious little hand-made drawings framed at a local framing store today (it only took me 4 months to get it done!). The guy who was doing the framing is a local legend - an artist in every sense of the word. We were having a wonderful conversation, and towards the end of my time in his shop I mentioned I was going to live down in Arivaca for the summer. He asked why and what I do, and I paused for a nano-second and then responded, “Oh, I’m an anthropologist. I’m going down there to do an oral history project on ranchers.” His reaction was a pleased gasp while clasping his hands together and smiling broadly. He went on to talk about how he minored in anthropology, had always loved it, read a book about the yanomamo tribe, et cetera et cetera.

When I uttered that sentence, it’s not so much his reaction that made me happy as was my realization. A lot of people seem to have run into anthropology at one point in their lives, and have realized that it really is a topic, in all its humanist glory, to be in love with. Since going to school, when people vocalize this love, often times I don’t agree. I think about the shitty grunt work and the mind-numbing tasks and the difficulty of being a student.  When I say “I’m a graduate student in anthropology,” there isn’t much to love. When I say “I’m an anthropologist,” I can connect the dots. I can visualize a time in the not-so-distant (in cosmic vision, anyway) future when I am doing what I love, when I am acting out the mind-expanding fantasy I first had when taking anthropology classes - the type of fantasy all those other people had but never ventured further into the field to make real. From now on, I will say I am an anthropologist (or, if I really needs to be realistic, I will say I am an anthropologist in training). I am an anthropologist, god damnit. Without the degree (yet), without the TA-ing (yet), without reading the entire canon of Foucault and Marx and Gramsci (ugh, yet), I have everything that’s important to be one. I have the love - even if grad school tries to take it away.