Doing What You Like

During out Methods class back in Fall Term, my advisor mentioned that certain groups of historians tend to stick together while others have nothing to do with each other. Historians of Russia, for instance, have a strange legacy left over from the Soviet days in which many of them don't (or at least didn't) actually like Russia; many were funded by the US government and regarded Russia as a complex, fascinating, but basically distasteful object of study. He then told us that, in his experience, gender historians tend to have a lot of solidarity, since many of them are connected to women's rights movements and are used to fighting the good fight together. The other group with a lot of teamsmanship is French historians. "Why is that, Jon?" I asked. "Because we all love France! We love to go there, we love to eat there!" he replied.

I bring this up because of a conversation I had with L and C while we were on our epic hike on Saturday. L is getting paid to research all summer. C is going home to Japan and may or may not do some research while he's there. When I run down the list of people, the connections are usually obvious between their lives and their research: so-and-so lived somewhere for years, so-and-so was in such-and-such movement for years, so-and-so has always been fascinated by such-and-such. It's the whole "History of Punk Rock" phenomenon writ large: you study what you're already into (I gather that anthropologists are notorious for this.)

After giving it three seconds thought, I've concluded that I am an academic mutant. My actual interest, intellectual history, is too broad and too old-fashioned to count for much in the discipline of history itself. In the end I'm going to emerge from the long dark tunnel a specialist in France, of all things, something I have no personal connection to. Academia is kind of predicated on obsession; the only reward for digging through the dusty bins is finding interesting scraps and showing your equally obsessive and dorky compatriots. It takes a lot of focus and energy to keep going.

So, as usual, I conclude a blog post by reflecting on how much I love coffee. Today's job is drinking a lot of it and combing through notes and articles trying to come up with a(nother) MA thesis topic.