Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

Sometime you don’t really realize what sort of a rough patch you’ve been through until you’re through it, and it’s only now in retrospect I realize how hard I’ve been working. It has been such a relief and a blessing to be done with it all and have some time to really relax. I gave my last paper of my massive paper-a-thon on Friday. A lot people had problems with it – mostly because it was hastily and sloppily written – but the discussion turned out to be quite interesting.

I’ve spent most of this week relaxing – I feel I deserve a little sleep. Or, as it turns out, a lot of sleep. In fact I spent a good part of this week asleep. On Friday I went to bed at 1 a.m., got up at 10 and ate something, and then went back to bed slept until four. I’ve done laundry, cleaned up my house, cooked some, and generally lurked and been domestic. It’s been fabulous. I am so happy.

I’ve also turned my attention to taking the glowing-white slag of metal that is my last three months of intellectual activity and forging it into a razor-sharp, vorpal blade of a dissertation. I essentially only have two chapters left to write – one in which I synthesize and present my census data, and the other in which I describe in detail the negotiations that I followed for most of my fieldwork. I’ve felt a lot of trepidation about tackling these topics. Like most anthropologists, I feel a certain anxiety that I ‘didn’t get enough data’ – particularly on the census, given the fact that the two most characteristic features of the Ipili are there extreme mobility and penchant for secrecy. The negotiations – which were for over US$50,000,000 – were extremely difficult for me to go through personally. They sort of failed and I watched people’s careers being slowly destroyed. In fact it’s only now, three years later, that I feel I can really step back and deal with all of my material. Sometime you don’t really realize what sort of a rough patch you’ve been through until you’re through it, and it’s only now in retrospect I realize how hard I’d worked while I was there.

As it turns out, I don’t think I need to worry about ‘not having enough’. I spent most of yesterday afternoon indexing 130 pages of genealogical data, and I’ve correlating it to aerial photography of my village! So while whatever bugbears about certainty I may have might not go away, I can at least rest assurred that I am the only person in the world who will ever be convinced that my data is not convincing. In fact now, at the end of a long period of publically presenting my work, I am looking forward to writing too chapters which require a lot of leg work and sorting through my notes. Collating data seems like a welcome grind after being forced to conceptualize my argument at an abstract level over and over again.

I’ve been meaning to write my annual ‘spring is here’ entry in my blog but my temperment, like Chicago’s weather, hasn’t definitively tilted towards the uplifting and so I think I’ll wait until we’re both done equivocating before I wax lyrical.