Already getting that blue feeling—that everyone knows what they’re doing and is on a level I’ve never been at and (it feels) never will be.
Thoughts of this grim nature accompanied my initial few hours at AAA 2015. For me at least, there’s nothing like a conference to trigger an existential crisis: “Am I a real anthropologist? Do I recognize myself in any of the people and events I see around me? Am I at home here? Or am I hopelessly lost?” The best thing about anthropology can also be the worst thing: there are SO many different interests and niches represented, that sometimes it’s hard to feel like you have anything in common with the people sitting next to you.
Perhaps it’s a testament to anthropology’s versatility and creativity that so many of our interests evade easy classification.
It demands a lot of you to be able to present yourself and, in truth, redefine your identity as a “professional anthropologist” every time you introduce yourself. The pressure is at once terrifying and cathartic. You have to prepare the pitch-perfect “elevator speech” style delivery they teach in business schools, and present yourself accordingly over and over again to the REAL anthropologists, under the implicit assumption that your worthiness to be present is being constantly evaluated. There’s a kind of performativity at work here, and I have to be honest when I say that I feel very fragile during these kinds of performances.
My suggested remedy for this so-called imposter syndrome is to simply abandon your conference strategy and game plan for about an hour or two, and just pick a panel in the program that looks INTERESTING, even if it has nothing to do with your “professional anthropologist agenda,” or the identity you established in the last introduction you made. In my own case, at least, doing this worked wonders for lifting my spirits and giving me a general sense of peace with AAA 2015. I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to slip out of the professional persona for a while, and to enjoy a panel for its own sake, not because you should be there, or because you are calculating how many minutes of hand shaking and stimulating intellectual discussion you can have with the speaker afterwards, before he or she rushes off to the next thing.
We all have commitments that bring us to the AAAs, and panels of interest that we have bookmarked in the preliminary programs months before the conference itself. But in addition to all of this, I think a little spontaneity is essential.
The best parts of AAA 2015 for me were unplanned: going to see friends present their papers; tagging along with professors to a panel they recommended that I otherwise wouldn’t have noticed in the program; meeting people I ran into whose names I recognized from twitter and the #AAA2015 hashtag; pausing at the screen outside a room listing the panel being held within, and being intrigued enough to simply slip in and listen, unannounced and unplanned.
The first day I arrived in Denver, I felt lost in the worst way, wandering through the enormous Colorado Convention Center, a building so large that it was still possible at times to make a wrong turn and find yourself in a huge, empty hallway, even though there were thousands of attendees, as always. But by the second day, the immensity of AAA 2015 promised infinite diversions from my existential anxieties.
Another perfectly easy way to get out of your head at an AAA meeting is to stop trying to “present yourself,” and instead just ask as many questions as possible of everyone you encounter; curiosity can take you much farther than sticking to a rigid “this is who I am and what I study, this and only this” mentality.
One of the biggest advantages of having so many anthropologists in one place is that you can find yourself talking to people doing research you might assume has nothing in common with your interests, but in fact turns out to be very interesting and possibly even helpful. These kinds of conversations can be utterly informal; every single panel I attended (predictably) ran over time, and thus the window of opportunity for an official Q&A period was always missed. If you sit in the right panels with the cool people, however, you may get lucky enough to q your a’s in the hallways, at the bar, or at the local vegan restaurant down the street, as happened in my case. And the best possible form of bonding is over scarves, of course—I happened to be wearing the same scarf as one of the presenters I talked to, and I think we’re best friends for life now!
While I encourage abandoning the idea of AAA meetings as a series of stressful, obligatory, strategic encounters to increase your odds of getting into a program or getting a job, I’m well aware that the pressure to network is still an important, albeit un-programmed, part of the conference experience.
And for junior scholars like myself especially, it can be hard to know how and where to make meaningful connections outside of the familiar cohort of your classmates and professors. This is, after all, a conference attended by thousands, so it’s natural to feel overwhelmed. One thing that helped me in this area, however, was getting involved in a mentorship program through CASTAC (AAA’s Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing). As my interests are in the anthropology of medicine and science, CASTAC was an obvious avenue for me, but I’m sure other interest groups offer something similar—and if they don’t, they should! I can’t recommend this experience highly enough—I was paired with a wonderful mentor via email, and in Denver we were able to have an excellent discussion about mutual research interests, and I got some much-needed advice about how to survive grad school application season.
Because my interests fall somewhere in the intersection of political & legal anthropology and medical anthropology, and more specifically, in autism as a social and diagnostic category, I spoke to many anthropologists who study disability, and these conversations reinforced a prevailing problem of AAA 2015 for me: accessibility. On multiple levels—economically, linguistically, spatially—access to AAA 2015 was far from open or equal. Unless you have generous institutional funding, the cost of an oversized red name badge to let you into the inner sanctum of the conference is seriously prohibitive. Unless you can speak, read, and write at some level of English, you will have little to no support for experiencing the conference fully. And if you need assistance to physically navigate the conference space, you will have to insist and demand upon your right to be there. It will not do to romanticize this conference experience as unproblematic. The setting of Denver itself, I’ll admit, was an enchanting distraction: you were always stepping out into Christmas lights, feathery snowfalls, and a vista of distant mountains.
I won’t pretend that AAA 2015 was a perfect experience; but I will say, at the risk of sounding recklessly optimistic, that if you felt the way I felt at the beginning, don’t give up.
I don’t believe that most anthropologists, real or unreal, give a damn about whether you’re dressed in “business casual” or if you can recite your CV backwards and forwards to them on command. To grossly misquote Baudrillard, a conference on the scale of AAA 2015 can make anthropology and your place in it feel like pure simulacra. But if you’re constantly consumed by the fear that you’re not a “real anthropologist” (as I initially was), you’re simply doing the AAA meeting wrong. I don’t claim to have the one and only formula for doing it right, but I know abandoning any pretensions to reality was a good first step!
Featured image by MomentsFor Zen (flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). All other pictures by the author, Elena Sobrino.
