the move

Moving across the country is tough. It is overwhelming to move ones entire life, including two cats, from Point A to Point B using just a small SUV and a moving crate. My husband and I have lived in our current apartment for 5 years nearly to the day. The amount of stuff we've accumulated is absurd and I am secretly a little disgusted with how much of it isn't in daily use. I've always favored simplicity of environment but there are things one needs to have safety and security and to be equipped for a moderately active adult life in the PNW meaning our modest apartment has been packed to the gills. As we are moving from over-cast and waterlogged Seattle to high and dry Flagstaff, a major reassessment is taking place of what we need, what we may need and what will just be silly in the high country of Northern Arizona. Three umbrellas? Probably unnecessary.  Tsunami survival kit? Absolutely not. 15 assorted coffee mugs? Two slow-cookers? Envelopes and crafts from our wedding invitations (circa 2010)? Multiple china sets from the grandparents? All too much. I grew up in a household of some excess and, unfortunately, some waste. Things came and went with such a frequency that I have a slight revulsion towards the consumerism that so drives our country and characterized my childhood. All these remnants of a consumer culture, duplicates and multiples of kitchen appliances that perform the same task, an army of half full bottles of household chemicals, obscure wedding gifts we never appreciated, board games bought and used once, have significance but I'm not sure that meaning will transfer to our new life in Flagstaff. Not only are we moving to a different geographical region, both our life roles will be shifting from worker bees to full-time students, a change that will bring about unique needs, long since forgotten, and render obsolete whole facets of our lifestyle. I have the closed-minded habit, as my husband so well-meaningly points out, of declaring myself 'above' culture sometimes. Once something is 'figured out', anthropologically speaking, I sometimes lose interest and struggle to locate purpose. I feel this way towards things like social media and technology, for example. I appreciate the fact that these are two very 'constructed' divisions of our lives and this makes me a little more independent from them than the next person. I am not advocating this is the right way to live, as I sorely miss out on many benefits of both, but it does allow a degree of freedom from social constructions and this freedom allows for meaningful contemplation. I crave this freedom from other things as well, gifts for example, and can theoretically argue against holding on to a useless gift by a sort of 'caveman' logic of only the crudest repertoire of 'things' being necessary. Contradictory to this so-called logic (for it really is not all that logical, I admit) is my admiration for Marcel Mauss's The Gift, which I read in my very first anthropology class ever. Mauss teaches that a gift is so much more than utility and prospect. It is a social act, as is its receipt. And so, here I sit, with a great number of gifts and other social accumulations that I can both argue for and against keeping. As if intellectually I wasn't in enough of a bind, pragmatics are pushing me against severe spacial limitations. What cannot fit in our moving crate should be considered to go in our car with us. If not, it is considered to stay with our parents, whom I'm sure are anxious about these considerations themselves. In sum, moving ones life, neigh, a life built together with another life over 7 years, in addition to two mini-lives that require their own unique outfit (cat food, litter box, treats, harnesses, beds, toys) is a practical challenge as much as an intellectual one. In reducing our lives to what can be reasonably shipped across the country we articulate values, morals and beliefs that truly speak to who we are. For fear of this, packing our apartment is a somber exploration of what life has made out of us, be it rich and meaningful or excessive and silly.

Family Life

I'm leaving my job in a few weeks, a job I've been at for over 3 years now. I've only touched on a few issues worth exploring in my blogs, of the many many hundreds possible, but perhaps that is how research in social science goes; water water everywhere with too many drops to drink. Lately I've been digesting situations I encounter at work more from a researcher's perspective and less from a worker's perspective. Critical distancing from work issues has not been something I've been able to exercise as much as I'd like because of myriad ethical boundaries that must be respected. A lesson learned; the 'nosey' anthropologist's work will sometimes be viewed as suspect. Now that my days left are numbered, interesting people, relationships and norms are seeming to surface through from the aqueous warp of desk jockey drudgery. Ethically, I haven't been able to fully engage this field as a researcher while I remain committed to a professional bias. I always thought law was boring, and I'll admit I still do find it boring but gosh darn if boringness doesn't produce its own rich meaning eventually (and with enough analysis). Thankfully, I work in family law, which isn't terribly boring, and I assist attorneys on cases of child custody, divorce, separation, child support orders and modifications and parenting plans, all involving their fair share of drama. One accumulates a lot of peripheral knowledge about american family life working in this field and I really feel the urgency to make use of that information what I can. Law pays well and is very emotionally involving and intellectually satisfying so there proves little incentive for legal professionals to leave the field to apply their knowledge elsewhere and they have precious little time outside of practice to work with that knowledge in fresh ways. I feel there are many latent anthropologists among us, family law layers in this case, that could contribute greatly to our body of research if they used their experience to educate others on not the law but the social effects of the law. I secretly wish more professionals,  like attorneys, would step out of practice and into social science research but for now I happily carry that burden with me to grad school.
     Now, I have never been particularly interested in family life, my first real job out of college just happened to be in the family law field and I was drawn to it for no particular urge to learn more about american families. In fact, my perception of family law matters prior to my job was that of messiness, so-called broken homes and a lot of import placed on child rearing, which I feel varies so widely cross-culturally that the law should have little say in how 'good parenting' is interpreted. The law has a big say in it, however, because whenever two adults come together to raise a child, conflict is bred, no matter the compatibility or resources. Indeed, parenting plan disputes rage regardless of how much money one or the other is willing to part with or how much time either parent wants to devote to the child. There are simply too many variables in raising a child to warrant any predictability or simplicity in parenting plans. One of the things I identified early on in my job as something to look further in to is the involvement of health issues in family law cases. Health can come into play in any number of ways but I am continually surprised at just how much health is used in rulings. There exists extreme prejudices against those of ill health in family law cases and there is something profoundly regressive about such contingencies. The verdict? It is good to have a clean health record if you plan to enter into a family law case and if you are unhealthy in any way or have been in the past, plan to fight a little bit harder and a lot more cautiously with a substantial increase in paperwork. I can't quite argue that this complication is unfounded; parents with health issues do face more challenges to effective parenting and when the effectivity of a parent is compromised it would ne natural for the Court to lean towards the healthy parent in awarding visitation. What is difficult to digest about this is the lack of resources and/or support for disabled parents or parents with near permanently ill health. I don't equate these to because some people who are ill for long periods of time still do not self-identify as being disabled and that is a stance that should be respected, as should the stance that being sick or disabled does not have to compromise parenting actions.  With the way parenting is treated as more of a human right than a privilege in our culture, I wonder why there isn't more help to access this right for disabled americans. Then of course, immediately upon wondering this, I have to also question why there isn't more support for any and all rights for disabled americans. It is this sort of double-bind disability brings about that makes it a fascinating contradiction in logic. Parents of all abilities have the right to struggle in their roles, in the end, because parenting is a challenge by its very nature, even in ideal circumstances and struggles will come about nonetheless. So it remains, disabled parents face more challenges to parenting, a fact that is self-evident, but they also can face prejudices from the Court during family law cases because of that disability. Troublesome though it is, this is a problem that I suspect will not welcome solution through legislation alone but will require a profound reassessment of what it means and what it should mean to be a parent. It involves more than resources, good decision making, responsibility and morality; indeed, it involves the entire physicality of a person.