on restoration

So, it has been a while since I've written anything for this blog. The last month or so, involving packing up and leaving Seattle, driving for three days to Arizona and then my pre-week of orientations and other trainings and finally, my first week of graduate school, really was (free) time consuming. Today I wanted to pause, reflect and 'fill my tanks', as an anthropologist is really no good unless his/her soul is rested and heart is open. I read another anthropology blog, Savage Minds, written by mostly graduate students, post-docs and younger professors. A recent post from Rex, a Savage Minds blogger on August 23, 2013 was about 'filling your tanks', intellectual tanks that is. What does this mean? More importantly, what does this mean to graduate students? While I resist the urge to spout volumes about my newly minted life and identity, and in defense I think the first week is just as important and mind-opening as the last, I will share what I know now, after just 2 orientations, 4 online training modules, 1 academic lunch, 1 meeting with my advisor, 1 TA session and just 2 actual graduate classes, because I will never be able to return to this naivety, to this land of freshly fallen snow.
     First, as my schedule depicts above, my classes are just a small portion of my actual responsibilities/endeavors. I knew this going in, of course, and I think most graduate students in a research-based academic field will agree with me here, it is the reason why I choose graduate school over any number of alternatives. Our tanks need filling specifically because of this structure of never ending 'things' to do that go above and beyond simply earning the degree, which was a big motivator for getting an undergraduate degree. Undergrad was very fulfilling; there is just something priceless about the beginning years of one's anthropological trajectory, a time of reading the classics and just getting ridiculously excited over them and learning of sub-disciplines and bodies of research that you would have never imagined existed (neo-liberalism in emotional pedagogy anyone?), as Rex points out. It is also a time of few resources and connections, not always being taken seriously and a pervasive and haunting sense that you are still at least a decade away from actually becoming what you now know you have to become unless you want to live an empty and meaningless life. So, when you finally do make it to graduate school, and for me that was exactly 6 years after first contact, 'filling the tanks' means not letting the enormity of a fully academic life swallow you whole. As Rex declared so refreshingly, simply reading a little outside of your sub-discipline can be enough to replenish and renew intellectual energy. There sometimes surfaces a great guilt from reading outside your sub-discipline of anthropology, partly because it is so broad a field of study that topics, theories and methodologies can sometimes separate two specializations dramatically and partly because sub-disciplines are ever-expanding and interdisciplinary work is applauded. For me, that reading right now is An Anthropologist at Work, edited by Margaret Mead about the life and writings of Ruth Benedict. While part auto-biography and part auto-ethnography, it doesn't represent a research interest but rather allows the reader a way to reflect upon their own life and writings. It's a big book and a little slow going but I picked it up to plod through when I learned Ruth Benedict was a poet as well. It has been a while since I've written any poetry but it could, perhaps, be my way of 'filling the tanks'. That and this blog, which I started to build up my writing skills specifically for the graduate school application process and will continue it to 'deal' with the consequences of being a successful applicant.


References

Rex, “Fill the Tanks,” Savage Minds, August 23, 2013, http://backupminds.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/fill-the-tanks/.

Ruth Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work, trans. Margaret Mead, Cambridge, 1959.

the big (fat) ugly #truth

 When I first heard about evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s recent tweet; 

 ‘Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.’, 

my first reaction to this was ‘how could an evo-psych (i.e. an academic, scientist, researcher) even say that?!’. But then a few ideas clicked together, as they always do in an anthropologists mind, and mixing in a little biological anthropology and basic social awareness,  plus what I know of our media’s obsession with the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality (has anyone else had the chance to be entertained by American Ninja Warrior?), my reaction modified itself into, ‘oh, that is exactely something an evo-psych would say’. I am not sure whether this last thought was spoiled with contempt or simple amusement but it settled my ruffled feathers for a bit; even though I am neither overweight or working on my dissertation I pretend no omnipotence over cake and pie and no loft over writer's block. I am susceptible to natural human urges, as we all are,  and do not feel that this threatens my potential for academic greatness in any way although I do understand his conjecture here.

     Evolutionary psychology certainly is the discipline, of any, to point the finger at human behaviors but usually does so in an incredibly open-minded and productive way. However to suggest that a primal desire for high-energy foods can in any way forecast our motivation to get a Ph.D severs Miller’s tweet from the discipline and its Darwinian allegiance. True, social Darwinism posits that natural selection can, over time, occur due to social pressures like mating choices and kinship patterning. Obesity is not seen absolutely everywhere as a necessarily poor social determinate, however. If we understand obesity as simply a matter of will-power and personal choice alone then we, theoretically, cut out a huge portion of the U.S. as candidates for advanced degrees (doesn’t sound like a good plan, even in theory). This is fine for Miller and his work but really problematic for actual normal living beings who are, say, obese and applying to Ph.D programs. Personal choice, research is beginning to show, is not all that is involved in the global obesity pandemic. I read a great article, shared by the Neuroanthropology Interest Group on Facebook via Jeffrey Snodgrass over at Colorado State, on some plausible global and environmental forces in the obesity crisis, including SES, quality of food and even controlled temperatures (Berreby, 2013). Most strikingly, lab rats were found to have gained average weight over the last few decades despite ever-rigorous attempts at complete control over their environment, diet and exercise included. These rats had absolutely no will-power or personal choice to blame for their weight gain so Miller’s suggestion that will-power is what is crucial to both maintaining a healthy weight and defending a dissertation is encumbered a bit.
     Further into the article, I start to worry. Artificial light, allowing us to eat at night when our ancestors couldn’t, controlled temperatures in buildings, which don’t require your body to expend any energy (i.e. calories) in maintaining thermoregulation and BPAs (yikes!), that alter cells’ energy storage mechanisms all are offered as possible causes for the obesity crisis. This article is a little disconcerting in effect but it offers some refreshing resistance to the argument that will-power is directly linked to weight and that, ever so indirectly, weight is linked to an inability to earn a Ph.D. Needless to say, I suspect any applicants hoping to work under Miller and his colleagues, regardless of their weight, may question whether or not this theory is the kind of theory one wants to back up for the sake of their advisor as it takes such a radical position on what is a really a multitude of issues lumped into one. A Ph.D does takes will-power, this cannot be argued against, but it also takes open-mindedness and the ability to not jump on every passing bandwagon, making Miller’s statement, like his theory, seriously doubtable, if not laughable. Oh, and one more thing Miller; brains love carbs. #truth.

References:

Berreby, David

            2013   The Obesity Era: As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us, Aeon, published 6/19/13, accessed 8/5/13.

Miller, Geoffrey (@matingmind). "Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth." 6/2/13, 1:23pm. Tweet.