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the Final Paradigm Shift and the Anthropology of Despair
2003-10-12 4:30 pm
Instead of silence and calm at the core of the tempest, there is instead an even greater storm raging, and it allows me not a moment's rest...They ask for innovation, for groundbreaking scholarship. I am more than willing to engage in this, but can i possible have anything useful to say? Even if my goal is realized and i finally become a professor of anthropology, will i be the anthropologist i expect? Or will i be lost in a sea of mediocrity, amidst the academic refuse thay unfortunately characterizes a great deal of my colleagues-to-be.
How the hell did i ever even become a physical anthropologist? When did i reach a point, at which i care in a pathological- stomach ulcer inducing manner, about my potential contribution to the understanding of the evolutionary biology and culture change of humanity? Humanity?
Humanity!?!?!?
Me? studying US? I suppose, after i think about it calmly, as a species, purely as an aggregate of biological populations, we are rather interesting, and not terribly irritating. Especially the dead populaitons.
Ah, the dead ones, my great preoccupation and sore point (as a couple of friends you probably attest to). The Great Advesary has invaded everything around me and in me, I suppose my academic life should be no different. My (very unofficial) exegesis of life, culture, and evolution of sexually reproducing organism is what i've coined thanatocentric. All is governed and driven directly or indirectly, by death. I have thus reduced anthropology, all social science, and evolutionary biology, to the relationship between secondary and tertiary levels of organic matter with entropy.
I take it this is not the type of innovation they're looking for.
Does this explain why Testocles is holding court in California? Or that Joan of Arcadia is deemed "quality programming"? Or that Dubya still has a 55% approval rating?
i leave it to you, my brain hurts, and this bibilography isn't going to build itself.
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