I am here in Washington D.C., getting ready to get on a shuttle and go to another city, after interviewing job candidates at the anthropology meetings -- otherwise known as the AAA. The anthropology meetings are actually a lot like the American Historical Association (AHA) meetings -- which will be at the exact same pair of hotels, the Omni and the Marriott, in January. In fact, the last time I came to the AHA, it was at this same set of hotels too. It is also a particularly difficult set of hotels: the Marriott is actually two different buildings, pinned together, which means that the floor numbers do not match up. I remember this vividly because -- yes, you guessed it -- this is where I also interviewed for jobs, 'lo these many years ago, and where I met with the Zenith hiring committee. When I found them. Since I was on the right floor on the wrong side of the hotel.
So today, while my anthropologist colleague and I were taking a break from interviewing to go to the book exhibit and get lunch, I was having a series of flashbacks. But hotels being what they are, I was often filled with uncertainty: was my memory from this hotel, or a similar hotel in Chicago -- or was it Atlanta? San Francisco? Maybe it was the ASA in Philadelphia six weeks ago -- or the Minneapolis Hilton, last March? Truth be told, I have clearly been to too many professional events lately, and they are starting to run together in my mind.
But here's another comparison: a large crowd of anthropologists looks very much like a large crowd of historians, except that there are more men wearing pony tails and facial hair. There's the fashionable, queer pony tails and facial hair, of course, but mostly I am referring to the "I still have counter-culture values and don't much like to shave" pony tails and facial hair. Which at least gives them a kind of rugged look. But historians (except for the French historians!) often just have that "I bought my suit off the (wrong) rack" look. I remember walking through through the lobby of a conference hotel with a queer studies colleague during an AHA one year, and she started to sing in a low voice to the tune of the old movement song "We Are a Gentle Loving People," "We-e-e are a scruff-y, ill-dressed pee-e-ople." And it is true. Historians, as a group, are not stylish like, say, English and Comp Lit people. Go to the Shakespeare or Chaucer cash bars at the MLA and you will be struck by how very stylish they are. Medievalists, who traverse the worlds of history and literature, would confirm this impression, I think.
But enough about fashion, or the lack thereof. The other thing I love about being in Washington is that I have spent a lot of wonderful time here, with people I loved and with work I cared deeply about. I have been coming here to do research off and on for at least twenty-five years, so I have a great affection for certain places. Like the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building, where I spent weeks doing research for my first book. Sometimes, for fun, I would take the FBI tour when I had read so many documents my eyes were spinning in my head. Or the Library of Congress, where I spent weeks doing research for my second book, and where I am still grateful to the librarians who opened up as quickly as possible after the anthrax scare in 2002, because they knew people with very little money for their research needed them to open. Or the National Archives, which I return to again and again for every project. To me, these libraries and archives represent the most uncomplicated connection to being an American citizen, because in their boxes and on their shelves are the keys to so much we still need to know. And the idea that you can actually get to know a group of archives well, over decades, and that a set of memories about my professional life can have become so located in a place not my home, is also kind of astonishing to me. I won't ever live in this place, I am pretty sure, but the Radical of America lives in Washington City all the same.
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7 comments:
When I was applying to graduate school, it was pointed out to me that there was only one major department in the field that would tolerate my pierced ears. So I went there.
Suffice it to say, musicology never went though a counterculture ponytail stage.
This is really lovely, Radical.
And inspiring, too, as I look with a mixture of perplexity, awe, and apprehension over the edge of the precipice that is -- or will be, as of tomorrow -- my first earnest archival endeavor. My archives -- or the archives that I will learn eventually to call mine -- are of a very different ilk than yours are, but in them, too, resides the radical notion that there is much yet to know.
Thank you, again, for sharing your love of your work.
I am going to be singing the "We are a scruffy, ill-dressed people" for the next few days, thanks to you. That is friggin' hilarious, and SO right on the mark!
I am heading to DC soon enough for a conference myself, and the gf will join me for tours of the Supreme Court, Congress, and White House. We have done the monument and museum thing, so hopefully this will be new fun.
I have had an especially bad week, so thanks for making me laugh (and sing) out loud!
A wonderful post. From now on I too will sing, "We are a scruffy people . . ." as I walk through the tweedy crowds at the AHA.
http://www.wesleyanargus.com/article/5677
thought this might interest you as a radicalprof @ wesssywess
Great post! But my friends and I never wear tweed at the AHA or anywhere else. We wear black. We're the ones you don't realize are historians!
Nothing can be more pathetic looking than a group of political scientists. Thing of a group of folks who have bought their suits of the (wrong) rack desperately trying to demonstrate to you through conversations that are obscure, the obvious (sniff) fact that they are the most well dressed people ever.
Or they have published a text book in it's 8th edition and are wearing late last year's Armani. Political scientists, as compared to Anthropologists or Historians, are pathetically fashion challenged.
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