Frustrations (Not the Fun Kind)

It does seem to me that with every topic I study from prostitution to climate change to transnationalism to toxic waste to education to children labeled as sex offenders and beyond, that no matter what the topic, I feel as though I'm getting too bogged down into the details and attacking a symptom to understand how it works. It's a very top-down approach, when what I want to be discovering is the heart of the cause of these symptoms, and the rhythm at which it beats. Again and again within the anthropological discourse from every class and research project, I've found at least one author (and usually many more than one) among the readings who lament the lack of inter- and intra-discipline discourse that shares the findings of a particular nuance within one of those segments of the larger picture. As I read, I feel as though I am being given one puzzle piece at a time for a jigsaw puzzle with over a billion parts. Somehow I get the feeling that even if I had all the pieces and hundreds of people to help me assemble the great picture, the image itself would distort the true workings going on beneath the cardboard backing.

Even if these three narrowed topics I've chosen could be selected from either through coin toss or long deliberation, I can't help feeling that if I were to spend years of my life focused on only one of them, my efforts would be wasted. There is a greater dialogue that needs to be happening that has some potential to reshape the ways in which we operate as a society. If I think locally, is there a place where I could best target that which is a smaller form of the greater cause? Would I recognize it if I saw its face?

We talk within academia about capitalism in terms of it as a corrupt system, but never use the word corrupt. Are we so frightened by what happened during the Red Scare to voice the problems inherent in this particular system? This is not to say that other models of governance and societal structures have been without their problems. Socialism is a nice idea in theory, but so is democracy.

Then again, we use capitalism as the scapegoat even if we are unable to fully frame it in those terms. While the system itself is inherently corrupt, drawing on our instincts for competition and sexual dominance/fitness, and only works within an ever-expanding framework of growth that must create hierarchies of inequality and marginalization, are we not to blame, as a (mostly) global population for buying into it? (Pardon the pun.)

*sighs*

"Few serious attempts have been made to bring the literature together or even to follow-up on previous studies" wrote Davis and Whitten (1987: 88). While this was written over twenty years ago, and was specifically about research in human sexuality, it could very easily apply to almost any anthropological focus, or really, any true academic work. Not only do we fail as researchers to truly come together--in part, due to the competition inherent in academic fieldwork and the vying for grant and research funding--but we fail to take our discourse to a higher level and apply it. I wish I had the health, the stamina, and the mind to know how to accomplish this. Even if only on one topic within the larger scope of research, academic, public, or private. If I could manage to bring even a small group of minds together, discourse on an issue facing us as a society whether local, national, or global, and be able to work together to seek out the cause(s) and find reasonable, sustainable, real-world solutions, I would feel as though I had accomplished something.

After all, even switching to local, organic apples in schools, acts as the drop on the water that creates water to change the pond.