6/6/02 - 9:50 p.m.
In some backyard in Eastport, Annapolis, one of the field school teaching assistants (there are two) was talking about where she wanted to get her doctorate, as the Univeristy of Maryland program ends in a master's, and mentioned she got her undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherest in 1998. I subtracted some years in my head, and then asked, "Did you know Uzi Baram, a graduate student there." She did--she took his "culture though film" class. I want to take that class.
So now I'm in a field school directed by a former professor of Maria at Princeton, Mark Leone, and taught by a former of student of Uzi's. Maria also went to Amherest for undergrad. It's a small world of Marxist Historical Archaeologists.
Actually, it is. The context came up because the TA said she wanted to go back to Amherst or to Columbia University to get her Ph.D., as those are the two major programs with a Marxist focus. The associate director of the field school is a Ph.D. student at Columbia, and while he's an inept teacher, he got the position by absorbing everything from Leone and writing his dissertation on Annapolis in Leone's area. The TA is very much into continuing that track.
Today we dug for the first time, and the group of us who have become friends have managed to get ourselves together as a "site group," under the direction of the second TA. Of the twelve total in the field school, this consists largely of the group that goes out for happy hour, and we are at a physically different location from the other group, some of who we like. I feel weird that the field school has already broken up on a social hierarchy like this--although we're a big group of anthropologists, there's really no one else ethnographically-trained who would pick up on it--but I'm glad I'm in the happy-hour side of it.
It's not snobbishness, but there are several members of the group who are rude. Also, there are several members of the group who live far from College Park, where the rest of us are staying, and so can't come to "The Cornerstone Grill and Loft," where Sam Adams on tap is $2.50 until 7 p.m. Partially at my request, we're all going to experence Baltimore Saturday night, as it's a fun place to go, I've heard and others have experenced, and we'll go with another member of our site group who lives there.
Furthermore, we managed to break our group off to a distant site under the direction of the second TA, Khristofer (not the one who worked with Uzi). The dynamic that's emerging is that the Associate Director and the Amherst-originating TA are Leone's disciples, but Khristopher has said he's breaking away from the Maryland-Columbia-Amherst Marxist-dominated historical archaeology world, and headed out to somewhere he can dig without being asked to think about naturalizing ideology. The group I associate with had already distinguished itself by openly questioning Leone's far-out theories about naturalizing ideology and panopticism, and the associate director was probably glad to have us out of sight. When we got out alone at our site, the questioning of Leone got intense. Khris said, "I heard he was a big hippy."
We all remember his particular phrasing at the top of the garden on Wednesday. Describing how the optical illusion of the falling terraces left him totally confused in the early eighties, Leone recalled, "I'm not high right now..."
I too have aligned myself with the rebellious group, though my open questioning of the teaching of the Leone-lacky associate director. Yet, as have said many times, here because I think that the theoretical perspectives of Leone have tremendous importance for my own thesis, and I will not get sucked into the exclusion.
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Tomorrow, day: Dig holes, complete elaborate forms on geopositioning and color of soil.
Tomorrow, night: Dupont Circle.
And if you think my summer is exciting, you're right, but I invite you to browse the "back issues" of my journal.
