The Wily Filipino

Conferences and "The Community."

Ran into the old grad school crowd in DC: Peter (with whom I was on a panel), Leif, Sara, Josh and Michelle. There seems to be much less of the Ithaca diaspora here this time; I wonder whether it's something of a backlash from the debacle of last year's conference (see the posts of 10/21, 10/22 and 10/23). But as I walk through the sterile gleam of the Marriott, with its hotel rooms costing well over a hundred dollars each, and $160 conference fees, I am always struck by how we anthropologists insist on meeting at places like this that graduate students, or most important, our informants -- we almost all "study down" anyhow -- wouldn't be able to afford. (I barely could, myself; Bulletproof Vest happened to be fortuitously house-sitting in Vienna, VA, at the end of the Orange Metro line, and so I got to cancel my still-expensive reservations at the hotel a few blocks down the street.)

Of course, conference attending does not at all preclude any meaningful engagement with the people with which we study and work. But such an annual ritual regularly throws into relief the distance between the hotel's deep carpets, and the staff people of color refilling the water glasses and changing the sheets and (depending on the anthropologist) the relatively benighted people we study. Or maybe this distance is an artifact of a kind of anthropological arrogance; heard many times during last year's debate was the refrain "And we're anthropologists, of all people!" -- as if we were somehow, by the sheer nature of our work, naturally capable of a deeper social commitment than any other scholar. Or, as if anthropologists couldn't be as selfish and backbiting as the rest of the academy.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the mini-crisis, in the last decade or so, within Asian American Studies as well: that many younger scholars, armed with techniques and vocabularies of French origin, were increasingly estranging themselves from "the community" through which the discipline was given birth (and, even more criminally, abandoning the ideals of social justice and empowerment). The crusty, grizzled activists, on the other hand, were sitting on wilted laurels, presenting (if at all anymore) papers that were largely descriptive and devoid of analysis, their undisciplined quality transformed into the exemplary virtue of Sticking It To The Man. All of this, of course, are inaccurate generalizations.

But I do remember, for instance, a conference in Seattle when a graduate student presented a paper on the generation of Filipino immigrants who arrived in the '20s and '30s, with a gently critical view of their ideas of patriotism and belonging. One of the many grayish-haired people in the audience stood up immediately at the beginning of the Q&A session and uttered these three fateful words: "You weren't there." The dialogue, if one could call it that, immediately shut down. But it is symptomatic of how the field, in its extended period of adolescent pains, is both deeply rooted in counterhegemonic '60s principles and commitment to "the community" [cheap shot here: it's all just lip service] and at the same time still struggling for legitimacy in a minimally, politely "multicultural" academe [cheap shot here: to be accepted in the eye of the (white) beholder].

All this intellectual handwringing (and for some, damaging to their careers) has been arguably unproductive, but at least the issue is repeatedly brought to the surface. Anthropology, perhaps in contrast, has traipsed along its own merry way, only a few decades removed from sleeping with the colonial enemy (and the repeated cries of penance that followed it). But in the end, the perhaps inherent, queasy disjuncture in any hotel conference may be attributable to the very real gulf, in any discipline, between university and "the community." I am not necessarily someone who would claim the student body as the community which I serve (particularly the students who I know take an Asian American studies class because they think it's an easy A!). For me, it must be more -- a wider and deeper involvement with "one's people" outside of the manicured quads of the campus -- though my time and energy always seem to be lacking in this aspect. Of course, the main justification for these large hotels seems to be the logistics of accommodating a few hundred panels anyhow, with which no university would dare burden itself.

Posted by the wily filipino at December 5, 2005 05:07 PM