Twilight zone: 2 June 2012

Song of the day: Black swan-Thom Yorke

So today a week ago was the big day and I had my wisdom teeth removed. The first thing my hazy eyes were exposed to as I awoke from my twilight sleep was a little bottle containing the root of all pain and discomfort, four very large and taunting wisdom teeth. They were beautiful and I couldn`t believe that they were once a permanent fixture in my mouth. A blurry hand removed the teeth from my view and a euphoric rush took hold of my muddled up brain activity, the long anticipated after effects of sedation. After the whole ”staring into the white bright teeth” episode I couldn`t help but wonder why all Anaesthesiologists are not starry eyed and Milky Way minded sedation junkies. The experience was a very peaceful one as I cannot remember a single cut, pull or drill and had a fridge full of jelly and a handful of pain killers welcoming me at home. Apart from the lovely psychotropics and the soothing jelly, I received a really strong dosage of love and this caused me to have a brief and somewhat rash thought that rang something like this; “maybe there is no metaphysical agenda behind our existence as humans and that we have been given this plain and position of existence so that we can merely understand the beauty and complexities of love and friendship.” Rash yes.

“Trust your struggle, you don’t need a man to justify the existence of sexism and I don’t need white folks to affirm my lived daily reality of racialized sexism. Subjectivity is a powerful place. What happens when the specimen that you have under the magnifying glass speaks back? When the subject of the anthropological study raises their hand in class and says no. Keep speaking out as the experts of your own experiences, tell your truths, step back and allow others whose voices are not often acknowledged take up more space. Know that there are multiple narratives that all exist at the same time, the truth of another should complicate your own, but not invalidate,” ~ Kim Crosby

I saw this quote on Facebook a few days ago and I wished that I had seen it the day I decided to take Social Anthropology. Then again I don`t think anything can prepare one for the Janus-like nature of Anthropology. We are taught to study that which stands out to us, which we find significant to our particular research question. The problem is that the research question is usually discovered whilst writing up the ethnography. Fieldwork feels like being dunked into a stream filled with different narratives and existential frameworks and in the tumbling and gasping for air you will eventually have to reach for one that you can hold onto knowing that you are on solid ground. The point is that it seems as though certain aspects of concentration need to be chosen and elaborated on but these become redundant and in this deconstruction the narratives of the unspoken and the ‘mundane’ become lost and discouraged. An almost activist stand is taken by the anthropologist which rips its counterpart to shreds, which I have a few times witnessed to in fact be some form of activism. There is so much emphasis placed on the phenomenon, geographical location and culture being studied that only a feint background buzz remains, one that meagrely mimics that of individual consciousness; which is in my (undergraduate) opinion the heartbeat of conveying and interpreting understanding. I believe that the exceptional late Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this problem and attempted to rectify it by method of the theory and application of Practical Consciousness.