Disciplinary Friction

While hanging out with Lolly, Tom and Sarah, the topic of graduate school arose.  The three are fresh out of college, and they seem idealistic and motivated to go straight into school following the termination of their fulbright programs. The topic gets my pulse racing.

I've just moved into my boarding house. My bags lay open, with clothes arrayed around the periphery. My language classes are improving, and I'm delving into some actual grammatical structures. And I am ready to start looking for a motorbike so I can develop further independence and start heading out through the streets of the city in search of paintings and discussions. An intense discussion with Romo (Father, as in Priest) Baskara about the development and downfall of LEKRA (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, or the People's Cultural Organization), a group from the Communist party concerned with the arts, has given me many contacts and ideas for my research. Yet, here I sit in the office at my laptop, congested with a cold and staring at the traces of a future personal statement.

With a little more than a month before the first set of applications are due, I've decided to launch in. The GREs are out of the way, and now I just have to coordinate the creation and convergence of the appropriate documents from the assorted wifi hotspots around this campus. I'm concerned about the investment of time and money that is required for this process, and I don't want it to interrupt my research.  But it is also an important step in planning some kind of extended project leading out of this year of research.

I have been looking at various programs around the US for a long time, and I have created many opportunities to discuss graduate studies with various professors of anthropology. This has yielded some strange conceptions of the application process and the quality of various departments. One department to which I will apply has a few professors with relevant experience in contemporary Indonesian studies, although two of these professors have strange reputations. In particular, one received a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and I've been told there was an interesting story behind the reception of the grant. When the committee was forming to select the fellows, a prestigious anthropologist turned down the opportunity to be on the committee because he said that he would be tempted to select one of his students for the fellowship. In his place, another anthropologist joined the committee, and as suggested, a recipient of the fellowship was a student of the anthropologist on the committee. So there is the suggestion that the grant is influenced by relationships, perhaps beyond the perceived value of the recipients' research. Additionally, it is rumored that the recipient spent the grant drawing comics, which is an, well, interesting departure (or, being generous, offshoot) from anthropology. Hearing these stories will not affect whether I apply to graduate school, but ignite feelings of concern within me about the characters with whom I could be working. It is an emotional investment simply to apply to graduate school, but what happens upon arrival when the professors turn out to be crazy, emotionally-unstable, immature, or downright bitter and angry. I know that I am applying for the right reasons when I am already aware of disciplinary and departmental frictions, and I still want to try.