With the job-search season having run its course, I looked forward to a relaxing summer, just enjoying the lull before my postdoc and next year's job-search cycle began. I wanted the time to mentally stretch, play with some new projects and ideas, go horseback riding, even flex some atrophied social muscles after the intensity of job hunting and dissertation writing.
I continued to look idly through the job listings on the Web only to keep my feet wet (and computer mouse rolling). Pretty much the only jobs listed in the summer are last-minute one-year visiting teaching posts for the coming year. I could browse carelessly through these, since -- happily -- my 2000-1 plans were set.
But last week there it was: the first anthropology job advertisement for the fall of 2001, the early bird of the season, with an application deadline in September 2000, posted early to catch us before summer hiatus.
It was an unwelcome intrusion -- a cold drenching rain in the middle of summer vacation. The depth of my aversion startled me. Maybe the job hunt parallels childbirth in that you forget the pains after the baby comes (or we would all be only children).
You throw yourself into the wonder of the new baby/job, embrace your new life as a parent/scholar. You forget the struggle, the anxiety, and the seemingly endless waiting of the "time before."
Before I saw that ad, I didn't consciously remember all the stress of being on the job market. Or I'd repressed it in cheerful anticipation of a productive fellowship. If anyone had asked me I'd have said, "No, the job hunt's not so bad." But my gut-level reaction to the ad was a more honest, horrified protest: "No, please don't tell me it all starts again so soon!"
My adviser calls my experience on the job market this year (a few first cuts and a couple interviews) a wonderful success -- an alarming idea since I didn't actually get offered a permanent position. Success is relative. Merely surviving with your sanity and confidence intact can be considered a glowing accomplishment.
Achieving a living is of course a practical necessity, but now that I've unearthed the information that student loans can continue to be deferred during a postdoctoral fellowship, I'm feeling much more relaxed about that.
I'm hanging onto the spirit of my summer vacation. I scaled back the "to do" lists on the wall beside my desk. I filed that first job advertisement in a deep folder "not to be opened until late August." I have (mostly) re-achieved job-market-stress denial.
I started out on the job market last year looking to have some fun along the way. I'll admit now that that was fairly ambitious. In retrospect, perhaps "fun" isn't quite the right description of the experience.
Actually, one part was almost fun. It was the interview trip I took to an Ivy League university a couple days after my dissertation defense, the first break from my work, my computer, and my students that I'd had in a long, long time. Oddly, it felt like an exhilarating vacation. But I don't expect that was typical for me or any other job candidate.
Even under the pressure of projecting my best scholarship, I really liked the people I met in my academic interviews and the conversations we had. Discussing culture, theories, teaching, and ethnography is fun for me. Clearly I'm in the right field; I belong in anthropology. These are my interests, and this is my community. If nothing else, I've learned this much.
At last year's American Anthropological Association meetings, I actually witnessed heated panel debates on the use of footnotes. Do you use them or not? Who are you writing for? How accessible versus how "scholarly" do you want your prose to be?
I found the debate highly entertaining -- a sign that I was thoroughly ensconced in anthropology or just pretty weird (or both?). Who else would care about footnotes or about people talking about footnotes? Yet academic trenches are dug, and reputations are won or lost on such details.
Although it is easy to forget in the fractures and normal in-fighting within the discipline, anthropologists are pretty much on the same page regarding interests and values. We study culture in myriad ways, often because we just can't help it.
I remember the application essay for college when I was 16. If we could go back in time and have a conversation with any famous figure in history, who would we pick and why? I rebelled against the question.
History and social circumstances are not made up of "great men" and events, I argued. I would seek to meet the common men and women who live "ordinary" lives of everyday concerns. What did they value and how did they live? How did they make sense of their experience? What richer picture of the society and culture could I get from their tales of the leaders and events that I might have read about in school?
At the time, I had never heard of "sociocultural anthropology." But there I was, already smack-dab in the middle of my chosen field of study, blissfully unaware of the deeper meaning of footnotes. I just wanted to hear and tell stories.
Not many other fields would let me join a circus for two years and write about it for my Ph.D. Not many would recognize the deeper cultural issues: How do multiculturally diverse societies manage themselves (or not), how does our imagination affect our practical lives, and why do so many people fail to rebel against inequality? These are some of the questions I want to explore -- in the circus, on a polar ice cap, or anywhere else.
Career birthing pains aside, I'm doing what I want to do -- researching, teaching, and writing about the issues that intrigue me. In and around the job search, I AM having fun.
