It's all so Pedantic!

I did have to look up that word, just to be careful - yes I'm aware of the irony in that. What am I on about though?

Academia.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe my degree is awesome, and am enjoying my classes. At this 'final stage' though I'm doing my best to think practically, you know: What comes next? What can I do? And then so often in lectures, even seminars in trying to stimulate intellectual thinking, they just get so caught up in definitions.

This is true for when I went to see my supervisor, Daniela. She's so nice, and it was a reassuring meeting (if not overly productive), but she pointed out that I had used the word "tribe" in my revised proposal, and asked me to be careful when I do so. First she asked whether I had come accross it in my readings, but I didn't know how to answer. Possibly. It's quite a common word, I'm sure I've seen it lots of places. Specifically though? I don't know. So she pointed me toward a book called "The Notion of Tribe".

"It's only a small book" I was told, and so I took it out the library. It was small, in terms of size. Small font, too. I read the first chapter (in the space of a couple of days - I don't rush), but I actually didn't understand too much at what it was getting at. I kept checking the contents for the topics it covered, trying to decide something that I may get more out of, but then just skipped to the conclusion. Still not a clue. Well, that's not quite true. I did have an inkling as to what the problem with the term might be, and as always its in the historical usage. Anthropologists weren't always what  they are today; they used to be a colonial tool, believeing that only Europeans were civilized, everyone else was primitive/savage, and they had to be taught. What a legacy, huh? I don't really know if there's a need to point out how wrong that is. Essentially, "tribe" referred to any identifiable grouping (homogenous in some way, be it language, ceremony, dress etc.) that wasn't part of a state. I did know that before. But I also know, perhaps from my English Language A Level although I think it's common sense, that meanings change. Surely the meaning of a word comes from its common usage. And the word "tribe" is used frequently, comfortably, especially when referring to North American Indians - even by such people themselves. I don't think anyone these days means anything derogatory by it. It's just an identity marker. And you know what? It is used in my readings. I doubted myself, but it is. Today I've been using Daniel Gelo's "Indians of the Great Plains" to work on my 'Orientation & Background' section, and in there is a less-than-2-page section entitled "The Notion of Tribe" summing up the problem of the term, but simultaneously shrugging it off. Typical. Why do I worry myself so much sometimes?

And why, generally speaking, is academic reading so unnecessarily difficult?! It ought to be the ideas in the text that challenge and impress, not the text itself. Like Marx - I have to read a chapter of his work for one of my seminars this week. I've been introduced to his ideas before, and I kind of really liked them. But I've never got round to fully reading some of his work. I have tried, but it's imperceptible! It makes so much more sense when someone just sums it up for you. I've actually gotten half way with this assigned piece so far, but that took a good couple of hours. Another reading that I've had to do recently, well, I can't even quite remember what it was about - something to do with creation myths and naturalised power (addressed by feminists). Again, it took me a long while to get anywhere with it, and then I thought back about it,and just felt that the whole argument was kind of obvious! Perhaps not obvious, but like it could have been written with 25% the length and made the same point, but in a more sensible way. I'm an incredibly slow reader anyway, so for texts like these I'm prone just to give up. It will be a miracle if I can get my project completed 'properly' (whatever that's supposed to mean).

The thing is with this field, with the direction that it's supposedly gone in now, it is supposed to be more beneficial. Our cross-cultural methods are meant to be used to raise awareness and understanding. But it's like another one of these secret circles [like politicians] in which the members just want to out do each other, and everyone on the outside is oblivious to the point of just not caring. Who does that help?

I think this is what Melissa was getting at in our lecture yesterday when she said she thought the discipline had passed it's post-modern stage now. She couldn't say what that meant exactly, and probably we won't see it too clearly until we're 20 years down the line, but it has to change.