how i became an anthropologist

one of my departmental colleagues is teaching a class for new sociology and anthropology majors and minors this term and has invited everyone in our combined department to write a narrative about how we came to our field of study. even though i'm on leave this term, i did it. it was fun to write, but i probably took way too much time to do it (4 pages, single spaced!). i'll chalk it up as my writing exercise for the past two days. here are a few excerpts:

Though I’ll briefly mention that, when asked to write a report in fourth grade on what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said “archaeologist (it’s possible that I’d just seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for the first time, and I know for certain that the photos of archaeological finds in my grade school’s library books depicted glittery gold and jewel-encrusted things that are, I now know, totally unrepresentative of what archaeologists actually do tend to find), I feel like the most logical place to start this reflection on just how I became an anthropologist is to tell you that I spent my undergraduate career at a college a lot like College X [where i teach] (and not too far away from it, either), College Y, just an hour’s drive away. My college search was kind of all over the place—I applied to big state schools and little liberal arts colleges, not really knowing what I wanted or where I’d find a second home, which is (beyond academic concerns) what I really wanted. I visited College Y a few times and had a gut feeling that this was the place for me. When I started my first year, I remember picking classes based on what I thought would be interesting to learn about—Philosophy, Psychology, Women’s Studies and yes, Anthropology. I had the good fortune of having parents who trusted my instincts and didn’t push me in one way or another when it came to choosing an course of study. My mom would say that if I loved what I was pursuing (and also got a solid and well-rounded education), that a career or job path would follow. Maybe this isn’t the most practical advice, but I’m grateful every day for the faith they put in my abilities and decisions, and I like to think that they took a good risk that paid off!

p.s. this is a great reminder for me as a mom.

I applied to a handful of Anthropology Ph.D. programs during the winter of my senior year at College Y. I got a few rejection letters and a few acceptances. The only campus I visited during the application process was University X, where I set up meetings with some faculty members whose research interests overlapped with mine. I convinced my then-boyfriend to take the day off to drive me there and back. Compared to College Y's town, University X's town seemed like Mecca to me—bookstores, coffee shops, two Indian restaurants! A few months later I was accepted at University X, though without financial support in the form of an assistantship from the Anthropology department. A few weeks after that, I was offered a research assistantship (from one of those faculty members I met face-to-face on campus who also had an appointment in Women’s Studies, the department that granted my assistantship. Take-away message: face-to-face meetings can yield unexpected and invaluable results), which made the whole grad school endeavor economically feasible. I cried some very happy tears after that phone conversation.

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My life has changed a lot in some pretty fantastic ways over the past few years, but these changes, especially motherhood, have made a continued commitment to West Africa as a fieldsite increasingly unfeasible. Fortunately, Anthropology is a flexible discipline that allows us to ask questions about what people think and do in any and all cultural settings. This term, I’m on my pre-tenure leave from teaching and have started working on a new project that returns again to my interest in women’s reproductive health in the US and carries over ideas about the relationships between reproductive and productive work from my dissertation research. In this new work I want to examine the transition to employed motherhood for women returning to paid work after the birth of their first child (where do you think that idea came from?)....Next summer I will start the fieldwork for this project in University X's town (where I still live), which will be comprised of interviews conducted with a cohort of women during their second or third trimester of pregnancy, and again after their return to work within their baby's first year....I am also really interested in how child care decisions made with a first child in early infancy affect long-term patterns of care within the family (especially how mothers and fathers share, or don’t share, child care responsibilities), but those answers are a long way down the road!