If you’re curious about other cultures, love to meet new people, want to travel to Vanuatu and Tibet, and the occasional bout of malaria doesn’t daunt you, then you’ll definitely agree that Carlos Mondragón has a very cool job. I found his blog not too long ago, and I’ve been an “armchair traveler” following his current field work in the Torres Islands of Melanesia ever since. This is a long post, but it’s a great read and I guarantee by the end of it you’ll find yourself saying, “I never thought about it like that before, but being an anthropologist is a cool job!”
Carlos writes:
I am a social anthropologist and I specialise in the study of small-scale societies in Island Melanesia and the central Tibetan plateau.
Throughout the past ten years I have chosen to focus my research on
the environmental concepts and relations of Melanesian and Tibetan
peoples, which is to say on human-environmental relations in those two regions of the world. On the whole, I have tended to concentrate on
Melanesia more than Tibet, because it is the first place where I
began to carry out ethnographic field work and is therefore the
region in which I have developed my greatest skills as a social researcher.
My forays into Tibet only began in 2002 and have been on-and-off, partly because
it takes time, money and concentration to do in-depth fieldwork, and
up until now I have privileged my Melanesian research over other
endeavours.
The upsides of my work are many, but by far the most important one
is the human relations that I have established with my Melanesian
and Tibetan friends through the years (I cannot bring myself to call
them “informants”, in the usual anthropological way, because that
just sounds wrong: they do not “inform” for me…they talk to me and
I talk to them, we try to establish a conversation – whether or not
it is successful depends on many factors, and success is never
guaranteed). Paradoxically, one of the greatest advantages to
establishing relations (good and bad alike) with people from
societies which can sometimes be far removed from our everyday worlds
is precisely that they have the potential to challenge many of our
core notions and prejudices about basic social values. I want to
stress that this is not simply a concession to exoticism and
modernist nostalgia for a simpler way of life (in any event, the
lives of Melanesian villagers and Tibetan nomads are far from
simple); rather, it is a way of recognising that, at a very personal
level, anthropological fieldwork can force us to rethink even the
most apparently commonsensical terms and ideas regarding life,
cultural production and broader social forms and norms.
The downside: as with many other Humanities-related careers,
anthropology can prove to be very difficult in terms of job
opportunities. On the whole, one has to very quickly catch up and
enter the peer-reviewed publications’ rat race in order to build up
an attractive CV. Nevertheless, it is also true that there are many
ways of working laterally in order to get the best of anthropological
work and in addition enjoy its benefits without becoming and
obsessive, office-bound academic. For instance, there are a whole
raft of possibilities in the international development and
humanitarian world (which is also competitive and difficult to break
into, but very rewarding once you do). On the whole, it takes
determination, hard work and a passion for what you want to achieve –
in other words, the same qualities that it takes to be successful in
other academic career choices.
Luckily, I am very happy to be doing what I am doing, and cannot
complain. I originally landed in Melanesia as a result of a nerdish
curiousity regarding a certain archipelago (Vanuatu) that seemed to
be relatively absent from the scholarly literature. After arriving, I
quickly had to adapt to a very strange and different reality, which
no book or imagining could have prepared me for, and which is at the
same time familiar but distant to my own. At this time my main aim is
to do produce a book out of my original PhD research, and to make it
so that it really does justice to the depth and richness of a very
small scale society on the margins of Vanuatu itself.
I think the most surprising experience that I have had as a result of my work in Melanesia has been to discover the depth of richness and complexity that are present in the life worlds of the people of the Torres Islands, and, by extension, of all ni-Vanuatu from across the archipelago. This depth of cultural richness is all the more important to stress given the ease with which most foreign visitors to these islands tend to view local people as simple, unsophisticated island “peasants” with nothing more interesting to show for their cultural heritage than flashy costumes and funky “ethnic” dances. As a matter of fact, the ritual dancing and singing are only the most obvious, often tourist-orientated, aspect of these societies, but by no means do they represent or encapsulate the conceptual and experiential worlds of local people. In the Torres Islands, these worlds are informed by a notion of co-habitation with spirits, ancestral and primordial, as well as by ideas about socially inscribed landscapes, extended kinship networks and magico-religious power (both Christian and pre-Christian all at once) that all come together to present a fascinating cosmology and sense of being and belonging. It all goes to show that what you see is never what you get, and that one has to be patient, and often quiet, in order to gain insights that might otherwise escape our first impression of a place.
Wow!
I’ve been fascinated with Tibet and the Tibetan Culture ever since 1989, when I became “mom” to my first Tibetan Mastiff. Although I no longer own any dogs of that breed, I still have an interest in the subject.
I must say, though, that a ‘peer-reviewed publications’ rat race’ sounds incredibly stressful!
Thank you, Carlos.
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I am a freshmen at Ohio State University and I want to be a social anthropologist, but I’m not very sure what they do on a day to day bases. I have to study and answer all these questions about my career choice and I was hoping you could just give me som insight on what you do and how you do it. Thank you.
interesting!
cornelia
And you so much look the part! Just like Clause Levi Strauss!! Coooool!