Xenophilia

26 July 2010 – Who am I? An anthropologist. A husband. A writer. An activist. A lover of ideas, of theory, of reflection. A reader. An art lover. An American expat, at least for the moment. who grew up in Boring, Oregon, a lumber mill town just East of Portland, Oregon, in a working class family. I am the first in my family to complete a college degree or earn a graduate degree, the first to live a “global” life, characterized by many moves to different cities on different continents. I often miss the mountains and the ocean.

As I write this I am an assistant professor at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. I teach a wide range of courses in the social sciences and humanities including an introduction to culture and society, research methods, twentieth century history, and the history of empires. I also periodically teach in ZU’s diplomatic program, in which I have the privilege of instructing future UAE ambassadors on topics such as nuclear proliferation and factors that lead to failing states.

My wife, the painter Angie Reed Garner, and I have lived here with our German shepherd, Heathcliff, since August 2008–thus we are just starting our third year in the Gulf. In the last 14 years, since Angie Reed and I got together, we have lived in 9 cities in four countries–most recently in Lahore, Pakistan where I spent a year doing fieldwork and teaching at the Lahore University of Management Science (2007-2008).

I am a veteran of the United States Army (1982 – 1986), where my military occupational specialty (MOS) was 15E (Pershing Missile Specialist), stationed in Schwaebisch Gmund, Alpha Battery, First of the Forty-First Field Artillery, from where I witnessed the closing years of the Cold War at close quarters. My time in the military shaped me in ways I am still discovering and it is not coincidence that much of my scholarly work has focused on issues of military service, masculinity and civil military relations, including work with the German military, American veterans, the Pakistani military and now the military of the United Arab Emirates.

On my discharge from the military I started college, doing most of the first two years in a year and two summers at Mt. Hood Community College in Troutdale, Oregon before transferring to Lewis & Clark College where I majored in Sociology & Anthropology and spent my time organizing for peace and sustainability, against South African apartheid and consumerism, and in solidarity with the peoples of Central America. It took me one summer to go from nuclear warrior to peace activist. After finishing my bachelor’s degree I spent a year at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan (1990-1991), where I had hoped to work with Talal Asad and Rayna Rapp. I also began volunteering for a small, start-up NGO called the Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) which some college friends of mine had founded back in Portland.

At the end of the 1991 academic year my veteran’s benefits ran out and my fellowship–considered generous at the New School–only covered tuition, not housing and other needful things. So in spite of my infatuation with the city, I took what I thought would be a year-long leave of absence to make and hopefully save some money. Things turned out differently. The early 1990s were a contentious time in Portland and the wider Pacific Northwest. Skinheads, racist and anti-racist, battled on the streets for control of access to the city’s thriving music venues. The Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) emerged as a major player in state politics, pushing a misogynist, homophobic agenda that polarized the state, exacerbating the rural/urban divide and playing to people’s fears and bigotry. I was recruited by my friends at CHD to write, produce and promote a backgrounder on the OCA and its efforts to use the ballot measure process to institutionalize discrimination against LGBT people.

The report I wrote, Rolling Back Civil Rights: The Oregon Citizens Alliance at Religious War (Coalition for Human Dignity, 1992), became a regional NGO bestseller, selling several thousand copies and widely quoted in books and articles on the religious right, marked the beginning of my full-time association with CHD. Working closely with a small staff and group of volunteers CHD researched and published a variety of ground-breaking reports as well as a journal, The Dignity Report, which I edited. Between 1992 and 1997 when I went back to graduate school I wrote grants and grant reports, did field research, organized archives and data bases, wrote and edited articles, designed publications, handled payroll, trained volunteers, briefed the media, dealt with death threats, and eventually helped to raise enough money to afford health insurance.

It was demanding work, often calling for absurdly long hours and deferred paychecks, but I remain proud of what we did at the time, exposing the activities of religious right, the Christian patriot movement, militias and neo-nazis of various stripes. There is, however, a burn-out factor. When I started at at CHD I was 27 and single. I knew I would eventually want to finish my Ph.D., but at that age it seems like there is plenty of time. Eventually life catches up to you.

In 1996 I was 33 and I’d spent most of the years since I got out of the army without health insurance, living month-to-month, going from meeting to meeting, organizing against anti-gay legislation, neo-nazi violence, militia movement vigilantes, hate crimes, doing interviews, giving interviews, raising money, speaking at colleges and high schools, writing articles, running on caffeine and adrenaline. Then I met my future wife and she not so subtly pointed out that my work schedule, however important the work, was not conducive to a long an healthy life.

After a period of introspection, I realized it was time to move on from full-time activism, and applied to graduate school–this time looking for programs that would provide full support. With no one to advise me, I made two applications: Cornell and the University of Chicago and was admitted to both, though Chicago said there would be no funding until the second year. As an aside, I advise my undergraduate students to make at least 6 carefully targeted grad school applications, after really understanding whom in particular they might want to work with and writing to that person directly. They have been very successful, going on to London School of Economics, Oxford, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, UT Austen and Chicago.

I, of course, did none of that–but was lucky enough to find a slot at Cornell, beginning in 1997, so Angie Reed and I picked up and moved cross-country, from Portland to Ithaca in upstate New York. Ithaca is a charming community and Cornell a fantastic intellectual community, but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t spend that much time there. I’m not sure, of course, but I may well hold the record for a Cornell Ph.D. for spending the least amount of time on-campus.

I went to the field, to Berlin, a year early after only two years in Ithaca, spent two years in Germany, and then since I had funding and didn’t have to return to teach while I wrote, I completed my dissertation while living in Chicago. We spent two years living in Chicago–a great city–earning extra income by writing and editing for various NGOs in the city and doing some work with a local labor union.

This is also where Heathcliff, our German shepherd, grew up. Finally, as my grant money ran out and occasional employment dried up, we relocated to Louisville, Kentucky in late fall 2003, where we stayed with Angie Reed’s family, who kindly provided work space, crash space, warm meals and stimulating conversations. I defended in early 2004, in the dead of the Ithaca winter, and was awarded my Ph.D. in May 2004.

In the mean time I applied for dozens of jobs, landing a one-year visiting position at Beloit College in southern Wisconsin–the beginning of several years of one year positions in the Midwest. Of all these jobs–Beloit, Miami University, Monmouth College–Beloit is where I fit best: a small liberal arts school, progressive leaning, with an eclectic student body. It reminded me a lot of my own undergraduate institution, Lewis & Clark College. I was sad to leave, but the person whom I was standing in for while on sabbatical wanted to return to her position. So I moved on to one year visiting positions at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and then Monmouth College In West-Central Illinois–and learned a lot about teaching.

These years, from completing my doctorate through moving from Monmouth to moving to Pakistan in 2007 I think of as our Midwest Exile. But besides learning about teaching in a variety of environments, I also learned a good deal about a part of the country that had always felt like enemy territory: rural, central, and farm and rust belt–and heavily republican. For someone who loves the both bustling cities on the one hand and the oceans, mountains and forests of my native Pacific Northwest, it was an odd place to be.

Now, during the my three years on the visiting professor treadmill, I had a number of on campus job interviews for tenure track positions. In the first of these, I lost out because of lack of teaching experience–including a difficult interview at Centre College in Kentucky when I came down with the flu and gave my demonstration class with strep throat and a high fever, but later on I was told three times–including when I interviewed for a “dream job” at a progressive liberal arts college on the East coast for a joint appointment in Anthropology and Gender Studies–that I was by far the number one overall candidate, but had been eliminated because they just couldn’t afford to hire a pure Europeanist in the Anthropology Department.

I had been warned about this by both John Borneman–my first dissertation adviser–and Davydd Greenwood, who kindly took over when John moved from Cornell to Princeton in the middle of my fieldwork. Jobs for anthropological Europeanists are generally only available at the largest institutions, or at the occasional liberal arts college where the department is less concerned about how the uniqueness of their offerings might look to administrative higher-ups (i.e., “we already have a German Department.”)

Thus my quirky, “not quite traditional anthropology” work on masculinity, the military, and far right social movements made me an attractive visiting candidate, but virtually ruled me out for a tenure track hire (even though hiring committees always seemed eager to interview me and my interviews and demonstrations always seemed to go extraordinarily well–something I can now say with some authority, since I’ve sat on hiring committees). It was a problem I needed to address, I decided, and started looking for jobs overseas where I could combine some new fieldwork with teaching, and was considering applying for a Fullbright, when I noticed a job opening in Pakistan, at the Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS).

As luck would have it, I had become friends with a Pakistani political scientist while at Monmouth College and remembered that she had some connection to LUMS. It turned out, in fact, that she taught there during the summers when she went to visit her extended family in Lahore. She was able to answer many questions about Lahore, about Pakistan, and about LUMS in particular, explaining that it was the premier liberal arts college in the country, in spite of the name that made it sound like a professional school. She made helpful inquiries for me, contacting the chair of social sciences to find out where the application should be sent–since the advertisement, posted by the human resources department, hadn’t mentioned that piece of information. She also passed along the information that I needed to hurry, since they already had several “very strong” applications and were ready to make a decision.

After a long discussion with Angie Reed, who had been encouraging me to apply for work overseas not just to get out of the Midwest, but also to escape George Bush’s America and for the pure adventure of it, we decided that media portrayals of the dangers of Pakistan were overblown–or at any rate, that Pakistan was a large country and that Lahore was pretty removed from either the blowback from the Afghanistan war in the Northwest or the political violence in Karachi. I sent in my application and had a phone interview a few days later.

The job offer came not long after and then all we had to do was renew our passports, secure a visa, find dog-friendly housing in Lahore–since faculty housing did not allow dogs. Oh, then there was the little matter of figuring out exactly how to ship a dog to Pakistan. (A lot of paperwork, pay some money, and cross your fingers–when Heathcliff was unloaded in Lahore, the baggage handlers put his crate on the conveyor belt with the luggage. He rode it down like a surfboard.) Pakistan was an amazing experience, but in terms of teaching some of the most gifted students I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with–several have gone on to do graduate work at Oxford, UT Texas, Chicago, Johns Hopkins and the London School of Economics–but also just in terms of the daily experience. We ended up renting the upper portion of a villa in the Defense sector of Lahore, where we were immersed in the city and the country. (Okay, real Lahoris might say that Defense is not “real” Lahore, but from our base in Defense we made trips all over the city.)

Living in the city, instead of the isolation of faculty housing, we were highly motivated to learn Urdu–and made a lot of progress, with a private tutor coming to our house twice a week. A year isn’t enough to really learn a language, of course, but I got the rudiments and have continued to put them to good use in Abu Dhabi, where Urdu/Hindi is the most commonly spoken language besides English. (Arabic is actually spoken by only about 30 percent of the population.)

Life in Lahore is intense. Temperature sore to 120-degrees in the summer and the air is intensely polluted from private diesel generators that wealthy residents use to compensate for the many hours a day without electricity. Beggars, often missing arms or legs, surround your car at stop lights or mob anyone who looks like an easy mark in the crowded markets. But people are also quick to invite you for tea, or to their daughter’s wedding. It is a bustling city, but virtually devoid of tourists from North America or Europe–thus as Americans we were highly desired guests, people whom people wanted to know, to talk to.

It could be overwhelming. We did not own a car–though often borrowed one–while living in Lahore. I learn to move about the city, or at least our end of it, on a locally manufactured one-speed bicycle, the Humber–a solid steel contraption that weighed more than 50 pounds. I dearly loved it. I rode around the city in native dress-Shalwar Kameez–purchased from the local department story, the same kind the worker people wore. It was effective camouflage, especially with a few days growth of beard. With my rudimentary Urdu and my idiot-savant ability to sound as if I actually speak a language in spite of limited vocabulary and grammar I was often taken for someone from the North of the country–and the treatment I was accorded was dramatically different. In this Desi drag, riding my bike through the city, no one cast me a second glance–but going into a bank, the shotgun armed guard would challenge me aggressively and demand to search my backpack. In Gora (European) drag it was the opposite, people stared on the street and the guards jumped to open the door for me. Neo-imperial realities at their finest.

Shortly after arriving in Lahore, however, the troubles that had long afflicted the rest of the country–chronic rolling power outages, bombings, and water shortages. Also, certain realities affect a country as a whole, the currency exchange rate for example. When we moved to Pakistan one dollar was worth about 60 PK Rupees; by a year later it took 75 or more PK Rupees to buy one dollar. Since I was paid in the local currency and had financial obligations back in the States, my actual earnings were deteriorating week-by-week. This combined with the explosion of a bomb close enough to rattle the window of our villa (it wasn’t that close, it was just a big bomb!) convinced us it was time, however reluctantly, to move on.

We knew, however, that we were not ready to return to the United States. For one thing, the Bush Administration was still stuck in the White House and it was by no means certain that his successor wouldn’t be a Bush clone. So I cast around, looking for something to apply for, heartsick at the prospect of leaving Lahore after only a year. (to be continued)