A Picture of Vanity

As so often it seems when reality and fantasy come face to face, I have to make some choices. I can’t have my cake and eat it too.  We have limited funds for the wedding and must apportion them wisely. Photography has proved particularly troubling. We want to conserve money and keep costs low, but don’t want to sacrifice quality. 

I have a number of friends who are amateur photographers, they have good cameras, take lots of pictures, and take good pictures at that.  I’m sure that they would be willing to capture the day.  But then, I want them to enjoy the wedding, not feel obliged to document it.  And with that I’ve swiftly eliminated the least expensive option since don’t want to make our friends work our wedding.

Simply deciding to hire a photographer, however, has not proved so simple.  While I want to economize, I’m drawn to the most expensive photographers.  Their photos are achingly beautiful.  The weddings look charmed; everyone glows, as if some diaphanous veil of happiness and beauty had settled on the party.  And the brides, they look stunning.  The photos star silky dresses, curls and coiffed hair, bright eyes and brighter lips. 

I look at these pictures and I want them. I want to look that beautiful.  I want to have these pictures so that I can look at them later, when I’m older, when I’m gray and wrinkled, and say to no one or everyone:  “Once I was beautiful, once. See, I was beautiful, once.”

Looking at these beautiful photos has forced me to stare straight at the depth of my own vanity.  I want these pictures not because I want the night to be captured, or so that I have pictures of my family and friends, or even of my future husband, or the two of us on this special day.

I want the nice pictures out of pure vanity. I want to look beautiful and to be captured looking gorgeous.  Up close and personal, it is not a pretty picture. 

The question remains, just how much is my vanity worth? 

- Pen

Use Your Imagination

Walking towards the Anthropology building on Friday morning, I glanced down at the blue book I had just purchased with which to take a language exam for my program. It was the first time in my graduate career that I had to use a blue book.  Looking at it, I was struck by the words “USE YOUR IMAGINATION” plastered above the bold “BLUE BOOK: EXAMINATION BOOK.”  The former phrase was placed in a box, and stood out from the rest of the administrative appearing text of the book: lines for name, subject, date, course number, etc.

 

“Use your imagination” it said.  It seemed so odd, on the front of a blue book, to be called to imagine.  Exams seem precisely not the site for imagination. Exams are the moment when knowledge is being evaluated, not creativity.  While of course there can be some creative labor in the way in which materials are connected or in the structure of an argument, in an exam, there is a rubric for evaluation, and you are invited not to imagine what the answer is, but to answer the question according to previously established guidelines, whether that be by solving an equation, identifying a passage, or comparing two images. 

 

The demand for imagination seemed not only out of place, but even a little offensive.  While I am deeply invested in the creative work that academic labor requires and engenders, I also recognize that the structure of the exam is not one that cultivates imagination or creativity.  The exam, including the convention of blue books, is an archaic form that perpetuates rigid ideas of what constitutes knowledge. Even the exams that I will take at the end of this year, in which there will be no blue books, are not about using my imagination, but about demonstrating a particular grasp over a canon of material.  Granted, I am in a program that allows me to define and redefine what that body of material is, but the point remains, that I will be required to exhibit knowledge about the texts, theories, and techniques that are on my lists. 

 

The call to imagine masks the truth of the exam, pretending as though the blue book is a conduit for imagination and play, rather than a hierarchical tool for the regurgitation of learned materials.  Exams have their place, their gate keeping function can be critiqued, but the evaluation serves a function as a manifestation of competence.  However, it remains a structure of exclusivity, authority, regulation, and domination.  Pretending as though the exam is the locus of creative work with the exhortation to be imaginative not only cheapens creative labor, but masks and denies the disciplining function of the exam. 

 

The irony, though, is that I was taking a translation exam, and, as I struggled with vocabulary and grammatical structures with which I was not familiar, a little imagination was useful.  If only I had written the passage as I imagined it to be, rather than the mangled version I coughed up, perhaps it would have been more successful.  

The Gift

This really should be the inaugural post, and if not for my desire to explain and to provide context, it would be.

 

In planning the wedding, I have been dreading the subject of the gift registry. Should we register for gifts?  We don’t need anything, and given the state of the economy, it seems a burden on our guests to ask for a plate worth more than our couch. Further, the entire wedding industry, registries included, have become so excessive, so much about conspicuous consumption, gross expenditure, and the accumulation of material goods, that perhaps, as a political move, we could decide simply not to engage with that.  We could provide charities or causes that are important to us and suggest donations to those good organizations doing excellent work. 

 

But I remained uncomfortable with the thought of forcing my priorities and interests on others.  And I knew that for certain guests, grandparents and older aunts among them, that very materiality of a gift mattered.  It is not the same to donate $50 to a literacy program or an environmental organization as it is to purchase a serving bowl that will be used, year in and year out, on a regular basis, on holidays and everyday, and that will be a part of our lives together.  The thing matters. 

 

I was at an impasse.

 

Meanwhile, this week I’ve been reading The Gift, by Marcel Mauss, where he discusses the concept of the gift.  Or, more properly, the gift economy.  In some societies, the giving, receiving, and reciprocating of gifts are the basis of the economy.  However, this exchange is more than economic; it incorporates legal, moral, political, aesthetic, and religious elements.  It is a foundational element of the society; colloquially, it is the glue that keeps things together or the oil that keeps the parts moving.  The gift is not voluntarily given; rather, it is crucial for the maintenance of peaceful social relations. As he points out, “to refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept, is tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality” (Mauss 13).

 

The system is a self perpetuating one.  A gift is given, it is received, and it is reciprocated in time. It is imperative to reciprocate because the receiver of the gift is placed in the debt of the giver.  The gift entails an obligation; it has strings attached.  In order to repay the debt, to remove oneself from that relation of obligation, the gift must be reciprocated. 

 

Significantly, the exchange is not immediate, but occurs over time, during which, through these obligations, debts, and ties, the two communities, tribes, or even individuals, are linked in a social relationship.  It is through this endlessly oscillating cycle that social relations are maintained, kinship established, and daily life can continue.

 

Upon returning to the essay, making notes, and considering these thoughts on exchange with respect to my own work, I was struck with the link to the wedding. 

 

The problem perhaps with the modern registry is not that it exists, but the way it places the focus on the desires and wants of the couple, rather than emphasizing the way in which each gift entails a relationship between giver and receiver.  A relationship not merely to be marked with a thank you note, but one that endures over time.  The thing itself does matter. More precisely, it matters not because the specific plate or bowl does, but because in that act of accepting, a relation is forged, a community is created, a bond is strengthened.

 

So, we will register for gifts, for things that we would like, for items that will populate our daily life. But we will register not for these things as things, but for the continued links they provide to those who are important to us.

- Pen

 

Mauss, Marcel. 1990 [1950]. The Theory of the Gift.  trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton

the beginning

This is my first blog post ever, joining the blogging masses just 7 or 8 years late. I suppose I like to take things slow. What was it that precipitated this particular move? Why now?

I find myself in a peculiar situation: I am currently a graduate student in Anthropology. I’m planning to take my qualifying exams late this spring. And I am getting married in June.

In the next nine months I will prepare for, plan, and undergo two incredibly stressful, productive, and formative events; one in my career, the other in my personal/family life. It seemed a good idea, you know, to pack all the big events into a two month span, you know, for kicks.

I saw these two events looming in the future as parallel. They both require incredible preparation, emotional, intellectual, logistical. They both mark then end of one phase and the beginning of another. They are both rituals that have deep and storied pasts within the society of which they are a part. That said, I was not considering them together.

Until this week, when they intersected suddenly, while reading for a field statement, when I had a revelation (please excuse the hyperbole), about the wedding.

This blog is the product of that union. In it, I will attempt to weave together these two elements of my life. I will write about theory, and about the quotidian, about details of the wedding, and anthropological concepts. It will be a space to consider how my personal life, the relationship I have with a wonderful man and the life we plan to build together, can incorporate my academic life, the theories and questions that drive an academic pursuit. And it will probably be a space, as most blogs are, to vent, to complain, and to comment on the vagaries and quirks of this modern world.