How is theory like spaghetti?

I am not a good cook, so I frequently ask silly questions like, “how long should I boil this?” My family members are not bad cooks, so they have no idea what the box says, and instead give me answers like, “until it’s brown and has the right texture.” But we have found synchrony in the cooking of spaghetti. How do you know when spaghetti is ready to eat? It’s ready when you throw a piece of it against the wall and it sticks.

I am a pretty good anthropologist, so I no longer have questions like, “what counts as theory in my paper?” But my students are still learning, and my thoughts on which models of power are most relevant to their data are about as helpful as the color brown. Luckily, cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides this piece of guidance:

“Theoretical ideas are not created wholly anew in each study; as I have said, they are adopted from other, related studies, and, refined in the process, applied to new interpretive problems. If they cease being useful with respect to such problems, they tend to stop being used and are more or less abandoned. If they continue being useful, throwing up new understandings, they are further elaborated and go on being used.”

I have fixated on the words, “throwing up new understandings.” Tempting though it is to think of theory like vomit, the spaghetti metaphor probably works better. Take that “related study” and “throw it up” against the wall; if it sticks, if it gives you a “new understanding” – or better yet, a new question – you have found theory.

Foucault, I tell my students, throws up lots of new ways of thinking about the world for me. I introduce my students to Foucault, but I know that they’re still struggling to understand what is meant by a “technology of the self” in relation to a contested chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis. If they throw that idea against the wall, it’s still going to be a slimy noodle. If they need to keep cooking their Foucault, it’s probably not good theory for them yet. But the idea that a diagnosis isn’t a neutral experience for a person with chronic fatigue syndrome might be just right.

What I love best about this definition of theory is that it honors students as real researchers. Of all the things I’ve given them to read, good theory is what stuck.

On Civilization (V) and the Academic Job Search

I have a confession: I love the academic job search. I love it for the same reason I love playing Civilization. I like to play on a higher setting than I can usually win on, and whenever I start a new game I like to spend a few hours researching strategy guides for new techniques. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to prioritize using my limited production to the best long term effect. When I finally start the game I look for the land tiles with the resources my civilization needs most and then adjust my strategies as I get to know the competitive field. Looking for a tenure track job as a sociocultural anthropologist focusing on the life course seems to have a lot of overlap.

Although I took anthropology classes as an undergrad, I first really connected to the discipline when I came across the Washington Post’s obituary for Clifford Geertz on November 2, 2006. I was still working as a direct service provider at Identity, Inc, but I was already itching to engage the kinds of big questions that intellectually curious people ask when they regularly encounter systemic social problems. Although I am not the kind of person who clips things out of newspapers, I clipped out Geertz’s obituary and bought the book it mentioned: The Interpretation of Cultures. The second or third time I read it, the margins had started filling with questions, arguments, and emojis. I was already hooked by the time I started reading Abu-Lughod, Capps and Ochs, and Mendoza-Denton.

By the time I finally started graduate school, I knew that the job market was inhospitable but my whole-hearted conversion to anthropology demanded action. I believed in the truth-value of particularity and in the methods for paying attention when a culture “bodies forth and enmeshes you” (Geertz After the Fact 44). I wanted to learn it, but I also knew I wanted to teach it. So, from the beginning, I attended every professionalization workshop and anthropological pedagogy talk I could. I started reading teaching blogs, and following anthropologists on Twitter. For seven years I made preparing for the job search my break-time treat. So now? I am pretty excited.

I am still playing on a higher setting than I can reliably win on; in the current job market, I am a PhD candidate competing against people who have had two or three years to prioritize building their publication records over things like researching and writing a dissertation. But the game has now started, and I am enjoying searching out the few positions best suited for the kind of anthropologist I want to be. I hope, of course, that I will win the game – find the place where I can do the kinds of teaching and research that have motivated my adult life – but in the meantime, I am having a lot of fun just playing.