December 2006

Its come to me more than a few times writing this weblog that all we can do is present.  Present ideas, theories, plans, and do a part of communication.  One of my anthropologist friends reminded me often to do both parts of communication; namely listening and talking.  Communication is not a one-way media and if you’ve ever done ethnography or dabbled reading about what cultural anthropologists actually do in the field; you’ll note that they really get into the whole observation thing.  A noted anthropologist once coined the term Participant Observation and that person is considered to be one of the movers and shakers in modern anthropology even now.  Franz had it right and we all knew it because there is really no way to gain an understanding by simply reading some other study.  You have to go there and participate.  You also have to observe.  I like to think its active observation in which you… participate.  Got it?  Good!  Its communication and interaction and learning.  Anthropology touches so much and so many and I’m always amazed even after years of not doing it actively that things are blended through my anthropological filter even still.  As my lovely wife is fond of saying,

You can take the person out of archeology and anthropology; but you cannot take the anthropology out of the person

And its true; so true.  I still feel like some kind of fieldworker engaged in my own observations and participations.  Work comes and goes, people do too. I see things roaring past me at their speed and I remember the level at which archeologist friends of mine became detached and remoted themselves from the haste and hurry.  We all wanted a slower drain.  Culture moved way too fast for us and we felt more able to deal with the prehistoric garbage collections of which we were specialists at retieval, analysis, and cataloging.   We all go in directions and tangents and change our focus points.  I submit that culture for archeologists moves to fast and it becomes too much to deal with to track it.  So archeologists beg out.

Its an interesting paradigm shift that once or twice a year that they clamor for contact and head off to professional and scientific gatherings (beer busts).  There they get all the social “rubbing of the elbow” they miss on a regular basis.  But soon, its over and they head out.

When I left all that behind, I traveled to of all things technology.  Seems amazing in retrospect I ended up there.  Someone asked why I did not just go into paleontology.  Because I was digging critter bones before so why not just do it a different way.  I always laugh under my breath when some well-meaning friend or almost friend seems to know what we did and then pronounces he or she knows it so well, that he will prompt good advice to me to move into paleontology.  No.  Its not the same.  Go read about each one.  See and grok the differences.

Now I find myself hunting the job yet again and I feel its okay.  The scattered clouds are gathering and I can feel those frustrating and stubborn transient realities clamoring about me.  But I have good Participant Observation skills thanks to Franz and Malinowski.  I learned how to deal.  I’ll just head off for awhile into my own fieldwork which is job hunting and I’ll carefully and artfully hide my steps.

Perhaps we all think of retrospective things at the end of each year.  This has been a difficult year with friends dying, others moving on to other beats, and me leaving one thing which now I wonder why I went to at all.  As I mentioned to the CFO at Levanta, “you were able to sever me twice in the same month and with 5 years inbetween.  Must be empowering (insert smiley icon here)”. Smiley icons all around.  ASCII rules.

Blog tags are always interesting.  I have a number of so called categories or tags or whatever that I can choose.  Sometimes I pick one when the post I am writing seems appropos to some special area or place.  Other times, I feel like playing a bit and not even selecting one.  But the special one for has always been Anthropology.  It takes me be back, makes me smile, even brings a tear and a wish to my somewhat aged mind and heart.  We all know that things come and things go.  Jobs arrive and they depart.  I just did the same with my job at Levanta.  Officially, my days are up on 15 December; but for all intent purposes, I’m done.  I’m unemployed (again) in this silly place.  Back in the day, the prehistoric hunter-gatherers would travel some distance to find rocks and food, sex, perhaps climate change, perhaps small scale environmental differences.  I know this because I rode in the desert on a horse with no name. 

Seriously, I traversed the western rim of the Mojave Desert in this rather wondrous place called the Antelope Valley.  I don’t remember seeing Antelope there ever; but I believe there were some.  What I think is known best about the Valley is the rather unusual ecology, the dry lake beds, the pinch of environment between foothills, mesas, and mountains.  Up the foothills, we enter a zone where the vegetation is changing.  Suddenly greener trees come at you.  There are big granite boulders scattered all around mighty Oak trees that were once acorns only.  In some dim past, the acorn landed, grew, became the mighty Oak.  Perhap sone of the granite boulders has a acorn processing station on it used by those temporary inhabitants.  I found a lot of them; but my main interest was not this kind of food processing.  Oh no.  I wanted to find back then flaked stone technological sites.  Places where the cunning hunters sharpened, found, made flaked-stone tools.  Along the way, I found beautiful and isolated rock art caves, places in the desert where I would swear no living human foot had ever touched, and an indelible mark on the side of my brain that forever is an archeologist.  There is the right side and left side and then there is the side which wants to travel the road less traveled.  For me, that was this path where the prehistoric peoples traveled from place to place, hunting and gathering, socializing, perhaps story telling.  And blogging.  Oh yes, dear reader.  These guys blogged.  Their wordpress or movabletype was different though and the medium was darker and perhaps in a cave or rock outcrop.  But they told a story, made a rhyme, recorded an event.  I saw many rock art sites out there in the Mojave and they all struck me as mysterious and incomplete.  Kinda like the blog entries I write

So anthropology came along and was a haughty mistress, well sexed, and wonderful.  She was demanding and required me to pay a penalty of dedication to the cause.  But I willingly paid it because I could travel that road less traveled and see those sites (archeological and otherwise??). 

Now I look back and see myself stepping on those small stones, changing the pattern of the stones in my stream.  Enter current day.  I am unemployed basically and its Christmas time.  I have a wonderful family and friends.  A few friends.  I’m gonna go looking for work and I plan on finding work.  Will it be another startup?  Who da f**k knows.  My friend DaveR and I both agreed that doing the startup thing was much like spinning a wheel of chance.  Each time you could believe that the one you were going to was the best.  Perhaps it was. 

But the small stones urge me forth.  Perhaps I’ll just stand here for awhile and remember that anthropology that brought me here.  Of all the so-called sciences, anthropology understands it the best.  It gets it.  It grabs me still. 

Alright… Who picked up all the small stones I already stepped on?