I have taught the history of anthropology since 1978, give or take a year (who’s counting?). At the beginning and the end of my career, I have had to cope with the same question: why should students have to study the history of the discipline? The rationale underlying such a question has shifted radically, though. The 1980s were the heyday of positivism, the conviction that social “sciences” like anthropology should actually be scientific, that is to say as much like Physics as possible. Students in physics didn’t have to study the history of their discipline; so why anthropologists? As positivist convictions faded in favor of a focus on “reflexivity”, studying the history of the discipline began to make more intuitive sense to students . . . until recently. Now that “decolonizing anthropology” has become a fashionable enterprise, students want to know why they are being asked to read the writings of dead, straight, white European males, assigned by a (not quite dead yet) straight while European male professor. Worse, these authors are often accused of complicity, if not active collaboration, with the colonial enterprise.

Understandably, many “senior” anthropologists (we even have our own organization in the American Anthropological Association) have reacted defensively, loudly proclaiming (not entirely without reason) that this is a caricatural misrepresentation of the discipline. Such declarations of innocence, preaching as they do to the choir, are of relatively little effect. Instead, I would suggest that anthropologists of my generation should take full advantage of their long engagement with the discipline to cast a critical and analytical eye on the changes we have experienced.

Indeed, I have found my capacity to take a long-term view based on my own experience in the field has critically informed my understanding of Islam in West Africa. The relatively recent engagement of Muslim youth with what they consider to be a more rigorous practice of Islam, a new kind of emphasis on Islamic piety, has understandably captured the attention of a younger generation of anthropologists working in the region. With a few notable exceptions, what these scholars miss is an understanding of the modes of Islamic piety and practice that the new paradigm seeks to replace. The fact that I lived in and studied a Muslim community before these new paradigms were established has provided me with a different perspective, one which I occasionally refer to as “the revenge of the geezers.” In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was in the field, expectations of piety tended to mirror social hierarchies. Elders were presumed to be more pious than youth, men than women, persons of free descent than persons of slave descent, those who had performed the hajj than those who had not. This was an evaluative grid. Needless to say, the behavior of individuals did not necessarily conform to expectations, for better as well as for worse. More important, such expectations were ambivalent and context dependent. An elderly woman of slave status who had performed the hajj might on most occasions be a model of religious propriety, but on occasion would join other women of slave descent to sing and dance obscenely, behavior that was simultaneously a stigma and prerogative of slave status. New uniform standards of piety rule out such ambiguities, underpinning if less openly other hierarchical paradigms of distinction. My task as an anthropologist is neither to reminisce nostalgically about past forms of piety or to celebrate (or deplore) the advent of new ones, but rather to analyze sympathetically the costs and benefits of each, the implications of what has been gained and what has been lost.

Having lived through fundamental changes in the discipline, I feel similarly equipped to analyze the recent (and not-so-recent) transformations in anthropology. I have seen whole domains of study, once central to the discipline, disappear from view. Kinship theory is the most obvious candidate. It used to be the defining discourse of sociocultural anthropology. The easiest way to tell an anthropologist from a sociologist in those days was to mention matrilateral cross-cousin marriage and to watch for signs of bewilderment. Nowadays, I get the same look of incomprehension from graduate students in the field. From Morgan to Lounsbury, by way of Kroeber, Radcliffe-Brown, Murdock, and Lévi-Strauss, the analysis of kinship terminology remained a fundamental, if quite arcane, preoccupation of many if not most practitioners of the discipline. It really seemed to matter whether you were a partisan of descent theory or alliance theory. Then, all of a sudden, these discourses faded into insignificance, at least judging from the pages of American Anthropologist.

At the same time that kinship fell of the anthropological map, the focus of the anthropology of religion changed almost as radically. When I began researching and writing about Islam in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, I was acutely conscious that my work was peripheral to the field. The anthropology of religion was all about cosmology, witchcraft, shamanism, ancestor worship and the like. The anthropology of Islam, especially in Morocco and Indonesia (in the wake of Clifford Geertz), was only beginning to emerge as a legitimate sub-specialty. The situation has now entirely reversed. The anthropology of Islam and of Christianity are quite at the center of the anthropology of religion, with witchcraft and shamanism relegated to the margins.

The shifting focus of anthropology reflects changes, not only in anthropological theory but also in the world at large. Contemporary critics point out that this focus on unfamiliar kinship or religious systems was profoundly shaped by colonial domination. Colonized peoples were divided up into discrete local cultures or societies, each with its discrete systems of thought, kinship, religion, economy, or politics. The fact that these supposedly discrete societies were often relatively recent groupings of populations of diverse origins responding to shifting political and economic realities was entirely masked by such systems of classification. Anthropologists, at least the best of them, were hardly unaware of this messy history; rather, they chose to bracket it methodologically in their quest for cultural coherence. These understandings reflected a colonial vision of the colonized world. Worse, the emphasis on radically unfamiliar systems of thought, kinship, religion, etc. served implicitly to exoticize colonized peoples. This is not to suggest at all that anthropologist consciously set out to impose such a colonial vision, that they were apologists for colonial rule. Particularly after the Second World War, some anthropologists quietly (too quietly!) and others openly opposed colonial domination. Even so, the colonial paradigm of small-scale self-contained cultures was a framework that anthropologists—though not the colonized subjects they studied!—took entirely for granted, a way of thinking about the world that, at the time (but no longer) made intuitive sense.

It no longer makes intuitive sense because the world, and not only the discipline of anthropology has changed. The dissolution of the old colonial empires, the failure of massive development schemes, and the triumph of neoliberal economic ideology have thoroughly dislocated the rural communities that anthropologists identified as exemplifying particular “cultures”. As more and more villagers move to towns, the kin groupings that were the glue of rural societies fade into irrelevance. Kinship increasingly takes the form of networks rather than “descent groups”, unilineal or otherwise. These shifts are accompanied by the rapid spread of global religions, Islam and Christianity, that in different ways often actively and self-consciously reject “tradition”.

Anthropologists who have grown up in the wake of these shifts are acutely conscious of the colonial biases of their predecessors, but at the same time incapable of grasping why their predecessors would take such biases for granted rather than contesting them. At the same time, their own biases incline them to throw out the baby with the bathwater. One cannot understand the past of colonized peoples without understanding the importance of the kin groupings, religious ideologies, and political economies that have since disappeared. When I was in the field in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, kin groups were phenomenally real and not simply fictions of the colonial anthropological imagination. This is hardly to suggest that they were accurately represented and analyzed in anthropological writings. Our understandings are bound to shift, for better or worse. But the forms of amnesia that some contemporary scholars seem to abdicate erase, not only the history of the discipline, but also the history of the colonized peoples in whose name we perform such an erasure. I have become increasingly impatient with the self-righteousness of some critics, but also some defenders, of the anthropological tradition. Over my long career, I have had ample occasion to become aware of some, but certainly not all, of my blind spots and to try to correct them. Understanding that my predecessors were often incapable of perceiving what, in retrospect, seems obvious to us makes me feel increasingly humble. What else will future generations find that we do not notice, although it seems plain enough to them? If aging has brought me, not only a long-term perspective but also humility, it has in its own way been a blessing.

Robert Launay (BA Columbia 1970; PhD Cambridge 1976) has taught anthropology at Northwestern since 1976. He has conducted field research among Muslims in northern Côte d’Ivoire, about whom he has published two books and numerous articles. He is now working on the early (16th-18th century) “prehistory” of anthropology. His latest book is Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder (University of Chicago Press 2018).

Anthropologists and Aging

This account was created to more easily group together posts by various authors as part of a series on anthropology and aging. See each post for the name and bio of the individual authors.

Source

This fall, with my AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) card in my wallet, I attended my third new faculty orientation and learned about the policies of tenure and promotion at a university where I have been teaching since 2018. That’s because I only recently made the transition from a non-tenure track instructor position to assistant professor. Anxious to get to know and bond with my new cohort, I chatted with the small group of other recent hires. Compared with my new colleagues, it was clear that I was coming into this position with more years of experience, and a fair bit more baggage as well. How did I end up here? My story speaks to the structural constraints on faculty members in “the sandwich generation” and on solo parents in academia. It is also the story of hard choices and toxic departments.

Although I’m technically “middle aged,” I am the child of older parents and have much older siblings. This meant that growing up, I was always acutely aware of age differences in my family and of the process of aging. As my parents and siblings have gotten older, I have found myself dealing with the difficulties of aging, even though I have been lucky not to face significant health issues due to aging myself.

I got my Ph.D. from NYU in 2004 and spent my first three years doing research and teaching postdocs. Then, I began my first tenure-track position at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. I enjoyed my time in Alaska and relished the chance to spend 8 months in the snow and ice. Growing up in Louisiana, I had only dreamed of such wintry landscapes as a kid. Despite being happy in my position at UAF, I applied to a position at Louisiana State University in order to be closer to my family. My mother, whose health was rapidly declining due to COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), begged me to apply—plying me with stories of how wonderful it would be for our family to be together. I quickly found myself short-listed and traveled back to Louisiana for a campus visit. I recall describing that campus visit to friends as being similar to a first date: it was a great fit for my research, but there were also numerous red flags. Several faculty members asked what I knew about the department history and were anxious to stress that the “Dark Times” of the department were over. I had not heard about those “Dark Times” before my visit, but in retrospect, I should have done my homework.

My first year at LSU went fine, and then my mother’s health started to decline rapidly. She spent time in and out of hospitals. I would teach, drive two hours to be with her, work as much as I could on the hospital couch and then drive back two days later to teach again. I developed high blood pressure, heart palpitations, chronic migraines, and insomnia. I started taking prescription medications at night, just to manage. As my third-year review approached, my parents moved in with my brother and I tentatively made a bid on a house in the same town. Once I passed my third-year review, I closed on the house. I then spent a semester conducting fieldwork in the French Caribbean. During my fieldwork, my brother suffered a massive stroke. The next few years, I juggled my research and publications with helping my father take care of both my mother and brother. I eventually asked for and received a retroactive tenure clock stoppage. The department chair at the time promised to support me so I could progress in my research and writing while balancing family responsibilities going forward. That was an empty promise.

Despite all the challenges, I still managed to publish what I was told I needed to for tenure, and all my annual evaluations had all been fine, so I assumed everything would be OK. When my tenure vote came up, all but a few members of the department voted for me. Colleagues began to congratulate me. My sabbatical request was approved by the Dean. Then, the new department chair, a physical geographer known to dismiss all research that didn’t fit with his vision of “science”, wrote a letter recommending I not be given tenure. I appealed, noting the multiple procedural errors that those who had been privy to the process shared with me, as well as the department’s history of conflict and bias. The Dean upheld the department chair’s recommendation. I appealed to the Provost, with the same result. I filed a grievance with the Faculty Senate. They agreed my grievance had merit, but the head of the committee spoke to me off the record to let me know that their decision would likely not be taken seriously by the university. It was not. He gave me the name of an attorney, and let me know she would charge a third of my salary, if I decided to pursue a legal case. I consulted with a different attorney, but opted not to pursue legal action. In the end, I decided to leave academia and search other employment in Louisiana, so I could remain close to my family.

While all this was going on, I also pursued, in fits and starts, my dream of having a child. Finding myself single at age 40, I turned to a series of medical interventions and infertility treatments. I later learned how many of my anthropologist friends went through the same struggle. At the time, however, I struggled alone, feeling like I had no one I could confide in. I finally had my son at the beginning of my terminal year at LSU. Four months later, my mother passed away. In her final days, she confided that she felt guilty for convincing me to come back to Louisiana and ruining my career. As much as I savor spending her final years together, I admit that I consider my decision to move back to teach at LSU the biggest regret of my life. But it wasn’t her fault. I should never have been put in that position.

My attempts at finding non-academic in Louisiana were fruitless, so after 6 months trying to make ends meet on unemployment, I took a visiting position Kansas State University. I packed up and left with my 14-month old son and started what looked like it might be a new life. My position was renewed the next year. But the year after, they could not get permission hire a visiting assistant professor, only a temporary full-time instructor at a much lower pay rate. I half-heartedly applied. One of the few other positions available that year was a non-tenure track (but permanent) Instructor position at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, only 45 minutes from where I grew up. The advertised pay was ridiculously low, but the position itself was appealing, so I applied and was offered the job. Although I was able to negotiate a higher salary, and summer teaching, it was still much less than what I had been making before.

With a tight budget, I scrimped and saved to make ends meet as my son completed a year of daycare. My first semester went well, and then my father’s health took a turn for the worse. He had 2 long hospital stays in spring 2019 and almost died. My siblings and I struggled to make decisions about his end-of-life care that respected his wishes. He pulled through and an underlying condition was discovered and treated. His health miraculously improved by the summer of 2019.

When my son started Pre-K in Fall 2019, I began to breathe a little easier. Then COVID hit. Suddenly, I found myself homeschooling my 4-year old while trying to work from home. I was afraid to put him back in public school until he could get fully vaccinated, because we spend time each week with my father and it was obvious that even a minor illness might be too much for his body to handle. I was eventually able to put my son in a Forest School program, where he played outdoors with a small group of kids a few mornings a week. I taught via Zoom in the outdoor space at a nearby library. It seemed like a good situation, considering the terrible alternatives.

Still, by Spring 2021, I felt like I was losing my mind. At one point, as my son was having a meltdown while I tried to teach via Zoom, I told my class, “Welcome to pandemic life. It’s a shit show!” It was. I had no time for myself and even with financial help from family, I was not able to pay all my bills. I put off needed repairs on my house and cut corners on everything I could. In Fall 2021, I proposed a new course on Careers in Anthropology and used that opportunity to revise a resume and start to apply for non-academic jobs again. The shift to remote work gave me hope that I could stay in Louisiana and find work that paid well. Then, my department got permission to replace a tenured faculty member who retired during the pandemic. I applied and was offered the position. So, here I am again, starting on the tenure track once again. This time I’m in a supportive department that seems remarkably conflict-free. My son is back in public school and I feel cautiously optimistic. I have plans to return to the field this summer, for the first time in six years. Unless something changes, I will go up for tenure not long before I turn 60. Will I be able to get promoted and go up for full professor before I retire? Will my health hold? We’ll see. If the last two and a half years have taught us anything, it is that life in unpredictable.

My story of struggling to balance the needs of my family and the needs of my job (and being penalized for it) isn’t unusual. I especially wanted to highlight the importance of taking into account the structural constrains on those with caregiving responsibilities. This is a problem throughout academia, not something that is specific to anthropology, but as anthropologists we should be able to understand how these structural constraints create an uneven playing field and take positive steps to address them. We must take into account the stresses that faculty—especially female faculty, faculty of color and contingent faculty—endure in trying to balance eldercare and childcare with our professional responsibilities. We must work harder to make it so that people aren’t penalized for being the caregiver in their family.

Kathe Managan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. She has published on Guadeloupean language, identities and ideologies. She is currently writing a monograph on Guadeloupean Creole Sketch Comedy and National Imaginings and conducting fieldwork on the role of heritage languages in tourism in Louisiana.

Anthropologists and Aging

This account was created to more easily group together posts by various authors as part of a series on anthropology and aging. See each post for the name and bio of the individual authors.

Source

We have a tendency to perceive the passage of time as traced by the path of an idealized academic career. In this vision, an academic career is perceived as an obstacle race, or perhaps an elimination race—with well-defined paths and obstacles carefully laid out before us. As we inexorably move down this path, we are so focused on the goals and obstacles ahead that we forget to notice as our life—and our youth—comes to an end. After the conquest of the doctorate, which already kicked many of the contestants out of the race, the survivors next compete for positions as postdocs, adjuncts, and assistant professors—always hoping they will make it to the finish line and land a coveted position as a tenured full professor. Everyone shares the same dream, but only a few will ever reach the final stage of this elitist competition.

The big problem that we face as scholars is that this system shows no signs of abating. Only a select few can ever hope to achieve this increasingly unobtainable goal, yet the system gives us all the same false hope: that we might one day become one of the select few. That one day we will become that special someone: receiving generous travel grants, prestigious scholarships, project funding, requests for international co-operation, and offers to publish with other leading professors in books put out by prestigious publishing houses. Although, in recent years, it has become increasingly possible to find jobs applying anthropological knowledge outside of the academy, I came of age at a time when the discipline only seemed to exist in university departments. For many of my generation, an academic career seemed like the only possible choice.

What is most insidious about this system is that, even though it is designed so that only a select few can ever succeed, it gives us the illusion of hope by dolling out small rewards over time: scholarships, post-docs, adjunct positions, etc. In this way it works much like a slot machine at a casino, making sure we win just enough that we don’t quit the race. Thus, the discipline of anthropology—as currently institutionalized—creates both the desire fore an academic career and the illusion of being able to fulfill such a desire if we are smart enough and work hard enough. By doing this, it steals from us any sense of aging or of the passage of time.

One of the side effects of this situation, and perhaps what makes our educational systems most resemble “brain factories,” is that the development of our academic careers is tethered to our biological cycles. Even if I’m not that “old”, aging in academia is a topic that has always been close to my heart. I have a family (wife and child) and I started my anthropological studies quite late compared to the age at which other scholars normally begin their career. Now I find myself in that stage of a career in which it is necessary to move around the world and be ready to adapt myself to the various calls for position, which usually vary from six months to the year. This is a system designed for relatively young people without family commitments (especially not those with school-age children). This has made me aware of how academic careers are designed so that different chronological ages are supposed to proceed apace with certain stages of this race. My own experience of a mismatch between my age and my career has made me especially aware of the fact that I am getting old and that, with each passing year, I have less energy than I had the year before. I am also less willing to use this limited energy to chase fixed-term contracts.I would rather devote my time to the things that matter most to me: my family and my research. When combined with neoliberal reforms which have undermined the welfare state, I find myself increasingly anxious about my old age.

So, if this game is rigged against older scholars like myself, why don’t I just quit? The short answer is that my experience doing field research, as well as the relationships I have established with the students I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years have been rewarding enough to keep me in the game. These few precious pearls I’ve collected from my experiences have been enough to make up my mind not to withdraw from the competition just yet. Moreover, the fact that—while writing this post—I had to switch my glasses to bifocals for the first time in my life, reminds me that time passes for everyone, me as well.

Marco Lazzarotti started his education at the University of Pisa, where he obtained his B.A. and first M.A. in Archaeology. After graduation, in order to expand his horizons, he went to Taiwan, where he studied Chinese language and later obtained a Master Degree in Cultural Anthropology at the National Taiwan University. After that, he decided to move his family to Sierra Leone to contribute to a noble cause as well as to expand his horizons and anthropological perspectives. He is currently lecturing courses at the Department of Ethnology of the University of Heidelberg where he obtained his PhD on 2018.

Anthropologists and Aging

This account was created to more easily group together posts by various authors as part of a series on anthropology and aging. See each post for the name and bio of the individual authors.

Source

Expectations for academics are sometimes based on stereotypes. One idea is that people reach the apex of their creativity and intensity before diminishing energy and relevance after the age of 60. I suspect that “relevance” has more to do with academic trends than with research productivity. Less energy may be a genuine problem, but I’d like to focus on a few positive aspects of becoming an older anthropologist and newbie historian. Although my early career was plagued by years of shifting unstable positions and contingent work, I recognize that now I speak from a position of unique privilege that allows me to be optimistic.

I’m approaching 70 but not retired. For the first time in my academic life, I am relishing all of it: the research, writing, and teaching. My PhD is in linguistic anthropology but my endowed professorship is in Japanese studies and not tied to any department or discipline. Given that social sciences and humanities are incrementally closing or shrinking, I worry that when I retire the professorship will return to its first home, the business school. There is great interest in Japan among our students, but no other Japan-focused research faculty in any department or academic discipline. I’m trying to hold down the fort. I teach a range of undergraduate courses that I created to attract students from across the university, on topics such as ghosts and goblins, food and drink, and ancient culture. Developing and teaching them has been more enjoyable and enriching than I expected.

Being older allowed me to revise perspectives on research and writing, and to reframe my place in an academic institution. For decades I tried to follow the written, spoken, and unspoken rules for getting a tenure-track job and advancing through the ranks. I was never part of the anthropology prestige kula ring and struggled as an outsider adjunct and researcher, and began with zero cultural and economic capital. There were personal sacrifices when I was younger, often occurring in tandem with lifecourse events that normally occur later in life. Between the ages of 20 and 41, both parents died and I had serious health problems and multiple surgeries. The grief and physical pain had a negative impact on my career trajectory and productivity, but they didn’t damage my spirit as much as the ongoing bullying, hostility, and passive aggression I have received from university colleagues.

My dissertation research in Japan was on interactions in workplace settings, which I audiotaped and videotaped. It was exhausting at every stage. Years later I did research on the Japanese beauty industry, fieldwork that was taxing and uncomfortable. In contrast, recent fieldwork projects have been smooth and incredibly enjoyable. I didn’t anticipate that people would be kinder and more willing to talk to me. Perhaps I looked intimidating when I was younger? Now, strangers readily initiate conversations, and offer me treats and small acts of welcome.

I worked in a Japanese company in Osaka for some years prior to graduate school, and early career trips from the US were for goal-oriented research. But when I am in Japan now, it is less fraught with demanding tasks or self-expectations. I don’t worry about language fails, behavioral faux pas, or lacking a fashionable wardrobe. It is not bad being a chubby drab elder who is accepted into new spaces and encounters. Fieldwork also provides an emotionally cleansing retreat. When I faced an unexpected divorce after 27 years, returning to Japan soon after the shock afforded a familiar and comforting space to reflect on my life. The fieldwork was on symbolic uses of an ancient ruler and entailed visiting small towns that celebrate her in various ways, from beauty contests to menu items in restaurants. Aside from simply being a highly pleasurable topic, not having the pressure of worrying about tenure or promotion enabled unexpected detours and chances. Some were fruitful, some were not. But all of it was good. A few years later, the fieldwork visit just months before the COVID pandemic was also one of the best times ever, and stimulated me to complete a new book. I realized that I had always felt slightly guilty going off to do fieldwork for months at a time and leaving pet care and household upkeep to the ex. I now enjoy going to Japan without the baggage of either personal or professional anxieties.

I spent fifteen years in an anthropology department that had little regard for my research and teaching. A few people mocked my writing on the beauty industry in Japan– in particular my article on mammary mania! A bioanthropology chair once refused to let me take a semester leave when I received a prestigious Japan studies fellowship, saying “It’s not like it’s an NSF.” In a recent anthropology department people showed no understanding or interest in linguistic anthropology. As I began to have increasingly historical perspectives on subjects ranging from elevator girls to medieval wizards, I realized that biological anthropology/archaeology dominated departments were never a good fit for me. I’ve seen more than one anthropology department, observing the demise of humanities programs, distance themselves from that part of our discipline by stressing its scientific aspects. After decades of dedication and service to the professions of anthropology, I moved to a history department around five years ago. My new colleagues in history are receptive and supportive of my eclectic research and teaching interests. They are open-minded and encourage experimentation with new ideas without much discipline angst.

Getting older means I can safely take risks that were unthinkable in the past. I decided to incorporate my love of art and visual culture into both writing and teaching. Academic publishing is often a narrow enterprise with rewards reserved for expected and limited types of products, but now I can safely step out of that cage. A friend invited me to contribute a chapter to her own experimental book project on the Yamamba (mountain witch). I created a Yamamba art piece and wrote about it, finding it satisfying to write something without front-and-center theory or obligatory citations. Of course, it may not fare well in the academic bean-counting system. In my classes, I ask students to create zines, visit art museums, and analyze Japanese food dramas without worrying that colleagues will see these activities as lacking academic rigor. This semester I am trying something I’ve never done before, a student-curated exhibit on kawaii (cute) objects in the art department’s gallery.

We face more challenges the longer we stay on campus. All that hidden labor—letters of recommendation, article peer review, grant committee proposal vetting, journal editing, reading book manuscripts and writing promotional blurbs, campus committee work, and helping with tenure and promotion cases – greatly expand and become more time consuming. I think of these duties as work, while research, writing, and teaching are pleasurable undertakings.

Laura Miller is the Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of History at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She served as the President of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (AAA) and the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs (MCAA), and has published widely on Japanese culture, history, and language. Her book in progress is Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan. A previous contributor to the blog, see Laura Miller’s contributions here.

Anthropologists and Aging

This account was created to more easily group together posts by various authors as part of a series on anthropology and aging. See each post for the name and bio of the individual authors.

Source

As one gets older, one’s experience of time simultaneously collapses and expands, creating a parallax effect. Amidst the daily routine of the school year, time seems to pass ever slower, each semester much like the next, erasing any sense of the passage of time. At the same time, the years breeze by at an ever faster pace, unnoticed, until they are brought to one’s attention with a sudden shock of realization, such as when you see a picture online of a high school classmate with grey hair and wonder, “How they could have gotten so old?” Currently, I am still only “middle” aged, not yet “old,” but part of what it means to be middle aged is to become more acutely more aware of the passage of time and its effects, to become more aware and reflective of the aging process and its impact on you and those around you.

Of course, such an experience of time is far from universal. I consider myself fortunate to have the kind of job security which allows my work to feel repetitive. My friends still employed on precarious temporary contracts—with no guarantee that they will be renewed from one year to the next—do not have the same luxury. Not having children also sets me apart from some of my peers. I get the impression that those who do have kids often get to experience time vicariously. For young kids, a year can feel like an eternity. I can also think of ways that gender, ethnicity, and disabilities might color one’s experience of aging. There are also studies showing people in their late-sixties and seventies have a better sense of their personal wellbeing than those in their fifties. For all of these reasons, when I began writing this post I decided that I didn’t want my own thoughts on aging to have to stand on their own, but should be part of an ongoing series in which I solicited a variety of contributions. This is the first post in that series.

My initial request only received a handful of submissions, which I will post here as soon as the come in. I hope, however, that others reading these posts might be inspired to come forth and join the conversation, sharing their own experiences as well. You don’t need to be (or even feel) old to contribute. None of the first round contributors are even retired. That makes what we are doing here a bit different from the excellent series of interviews with retired anthropologists over CaMP Anthropology. You just need to be willing to talk about how aging has affected your career as an anthropologist.

Having blogged here about every other stage of my academic career, I didn’t want to treat this topic any differently. But I soon found that this would not be possible. Last year I became a full professor, and given how rare such positions are these days, and the fact that many of our readers are still in the early stages of their career, I can’t help but be aware that this sets me apart in a way that wasn’t the case when I first started blogging seventeen years ago. Moreover, the longer I live in Taiwan, the less connected I feel to North American anthropology. Even attending online events in North America can be difficult because of the time zone difference, and in the age of COVID I find myself less eager to undertake international travel for conferences. When I do attend international conferences, I’m more prone to choose smaller or regional events rather than huge mega-conferences like the AAA, even if that means I miss out on seeing some of my friends.

When I was first hired, I thought I might just be in Taiwan for only a few years before moving on to a job somewhere else, but not only have I stayed on and built a life here, I have even become a Taiwanese citizen. Having put down roots I now feel it would take much more psychic energy to even think of relocating somewhere else. Even though I’m still young enough to switch jobs (or even careers) if I wanted to, I’m comfortable enough where I am that it would take either a big carrot or a big stick to get me to make a change at this point. Moreover, even if I wanted to move, it wouldn’t be easy. Most job hires are either for someone far more junior, or for someone far more productive and ambitious when it comes to publishing and research grants. I have ambitions, to be sure, but they have had to be scaled back from the wild fantasies of youth to something a bit more age-appropriate.

More than anything else, what really made me start to accept the fact that I was getting older was my experience with chronic hip pain. As we age, we need to take increasingly more intense care of our bodies. To just maintain the same level of personal fitness I had in my thirties seems to take exponentially more time and effort with each passing year. I’ve always been reasonably active, but when hip pain began interfering with my sleep, work, and ability to sit through a meeting . . . I realized that I had to make some radical life changes. My own health became my top priority. I’ve chronicled this story in a series of blog posts on my personal blog, so I won’t repeat it here. Let’s just say that I’m in better shape now than I probably have been at any other time in the past twenty years. I feel lucky that I was able to figure out how to overcome my hip problems (at least for now), but I have to remain ever-vigilant to prevent them from coming back.

Nor is it only one’s own body that one has to take care of. I have also had to adapt my lifestyle to better take care of my aging parents. Although my parents are still remarkably active, the sense of time running out is hard to ignore. Every month, my parents seem to loose another one of their close friends. Suddenly, my choice of a career twelve time zones away from my home on the east coast feels like it was a huge mistake. My colleagues with aging parents in Taiwan can take the train home every weekend, but I can only go home over summer and winter break. And that was before COVID made travel even more difficult. I once wrote about how fortunate I felt having found a job near my fieldwork, but with so much time spent back home, I now rarely have time to do new research. Fortunately, I have a huge backlog of unprocessed data, unfinished projects, etc. that will me busy for the next few years. I am also focusing more on mentoring and collaborative projects.

Not being in a precarious position means that one has the luxury (within limits) of re-defining one’s own career priorities and goals. But adjusting your career to be more age-appropriate might mean giving up some of what attracted you to the discipline in the first place — the joy of being in the field, the pleasure of attending conferences, etc. I’ve also tried to be more picky about what kinds of service work I do, but there are only so many times one can say “no” to requests for contributions, talks, collaborations, etc. before people stop asking. And one has to try to do one’s best to pull one’s weight so that the burden doesn’t fall on junior faculty. Getting older means you need to slow down, yes, but you can’t afford to slow down too much.

Finally, getting older has also compelled me to try to be more focused in my intellectual pursuits. In the past two decades I must have downloaded several thousand PDFs I will never read, not to mention all the lists I have made of books and films I will never read or watch. I would need several more lifetimes to get through it all. The way I’ve learned to manage my anxiety about all these unread texts is to (a) keep telling myself I don’t need to know everything, and (b) try to have a limited number of projects I am working on at any given time – focusing my reading on one of those projects. Also, I’ve found listening to audio books, podcasts, and even using text-to-speech software allows me to listen to things I might not otherwise get to. Dense philosophical or ethnographic texts are not well suited to such distracted listening, but it is great for popular nonfiction and well written history books. (I do wish that there were more ethnographies out there which were not only available as audiobooks, but also written so that they worked well when read aloud.)

This post has been hard for me to write, partially because confronting one’s own age is never easy. There is a school of psychiatry that sees our repressed existential dread as being as fundamental to who we are – replacing the role that our repressed sexuality served for the Freudians. I’m not convinced by such arguments, but I do think we would be well served to talk more openly and honestly about the aging process and what we expect or fear in our old age. I would even say that writing this post has been therapeutic, allowing me to put into words a lot of what I have been going through these past few years. I very much hope that I can convince other people to do the same. As I said at the beginning, there are a wide variety of factors that affect how we experience getting older, and we need a diverse range of voices to join us in this conversation.

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

Anthropologists and Aging

This account was created to more easily group together posts by various authors as part of a series on anthropology and aging. See each post for the name and bio of the individual authors.

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