welcome to my thesis, part four

this is the fourth post in a series of discussions examining the research i conducted and the choices i made while working on my master's thesis, "shamrocks, sombreros, and the stars and stripes: ritual drinking on nationalistic holidays and the creation of cultural identity," last year.

you can read the first part of this series and my paper's abstract here.

after that, the second part can be found here and the third part here.

i'll be continuing this series next monday, and hopefully it'll only take me one or two more posts to finish everything up.

discussing ritual, letting go of social deviance 

it’s been a bit since i’ve had the time and been in the correct frame of mind to discuss my thesis, so before we move on, i’d like to review two of the paragraphs from the first “welcome to my thesis” post:

when i first approached rb [my thesis adviser] with my general proposal, my idea was to write about drinking holidays, taboos, and social deviance. and while the drinking holidays certainly remained the central focus of my work, you can see simply from my title that social deviance and taboos did not. i still discussed elements of social deviance and taboo, but they certainly were not my linchpin.

i struggled for a good bit this past summer to be okay with that, and i don’t know if i can fully explain why. i got trapped by a working title, an idea that my paper was a square peg when it was really circular. and [most importantly] i got caught in the trap that, because i had written about ritual in anthropology before (in fact, i’d taken whole classes on it), i had to avoid it and write something entirely different. 

these paragraphs bring us to the heart of this installment: the problems i faced realizing the true direction of my work and how difficult it was for me to let go of my original ideas for this paper.

when i began work on my thesis – compiling initial sources, writing my annotated bibliography, even taking notes during fieldwork – i focused my work within a very rigid idea of what i was looking at... and for: namely, i was going into my research with the intent to observe, discuss, and better understand social deviance and taboo behaviors within the celebration of these holidays. and while yes, social deviance and taboo behaviors are certainly a part of present-day drinking holiday celebrations, my focus on these aspects quickly became limiting and confining. my research materials, my notes, even my source materials were all skewed in a direction that was very different from where my paper actually wanted to go. struggling between these two polarities was paralyzing. what i was thinking and seeing didn’t match with what i was saying, and that very disparate nature was evident in every bad draft i wrote.

the truth is, i thought my paper was about the role of social deviant and taboo actions and behaviors in relation to drinking holidays, but what i was actually dealing with was the greater aspects of ritual within these secular holidays and, given the nationalistic nature of these celebrations, the resulting processes of assimilation and acculturation. 

in retrospect, i had actually seen this research/writing conflict before. in one of my undergrad anthropology classes we read steven caton’s yeman chronicles, which recounts caton’s experiences as an ethnographer in the middle east in the late 1970s. while caton began his research focusing on the oral poetry of the yemani tribes, his work grew out and away from his initial expectations and academic intents. the conflicting notion of what caton thought he was researching and what he was actually researching was difficult for him to reconcile, as well. 

so, even though i had read about this sort of trapped thinking, i was not in any way prepared to deal with it in my own work. a big part of that difficultly certainly came from a skewed trees-before-forest perspective: i was living my thesis every day. it was my primary concern and i spent most of my time thinking about it, forming outlines, searching for sources, and desperately, desperately trying to get the words on the page to work. because i was so intimately involved with it all, i was overwhelmed. i couldn’t see where or what the problems actually were. i had no big picture perspective. 

my second problem with shifting my thinking and my paper’s focus had more to do with where my paper was actually going than how i needed to get there. i had done a lot of work in the past focusing on ritual. as i mentioned ealier, i had done a lot of research and taken focused classes on it. going back to that theme felt like i was taking a step backwards, relying on past work rather than trying something new. 

that was a really, really naïve way to think about it all, and it took me a long time to break free from those negative limiting thoughts. what saved me, and my paper, actually also came from my undergraduate studies: a philosophy of learning i had forgotten.

in the the beginning of the collection of teachings choiceless awareness, jiddu krishnamurti states two ideas that relate directly with the dilemma i was struggling with:

“knowledge implies a sense of accumulation, does it not? knowledge can be acquired and, because of its nature, knowledge is always partial, it is never complete; therefore, all action springing from knowledge is also partial, incomplete” (1992:7).

and then:

“a mind that is learning never says ‘i know,’ because knowledge is always partial, whereas learning is complete all the time. learning does not mean starting with a certain amount of knowledge and adding to it further knowledge...learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end” (ibid 1992:10-11).

remembering krishnamurti's words gave me a chance to regain my perspective, to allow myself to rethink my work and not view my change in subject matter as a personal failure. 

i balked when it came to writing about ritual because i felt i already knew, and because of that, i couldn’t write and my paper didn’t work. when i let that sense go and admitted to myself there was so much more out there, that it was okay to continue the process of learning i had begun so long ago, that’s when i was able to see what i was actually doing.

caton, steven (2005). yeman chronicles. new york: hill and wang (a division of farrar, straus, and giroux).

krishnamurti, jiddu (1992). choiceless awareness. ojai: the krishnamurti foundation of america.

on accepting writer’s block

i haven’t been in the right frame-of-mind to write for a while now.

both my grandmother and my mother recently tore their rotator cuffs, and for the past few months (well, since mid-january, really), i’ve been acting as a sort of family caregiver. this has involved a lot of schedule-juggling and a fair bit of commuting, since my mother lives in baltimore and my grandmother in annapolis. being a caregiver is scary, and even now, after all these months and despite my family’s reassurances, i have little confidence in my own caregiving abilities. i also have the utmost respect for those individuals who choose caregiving as a career. 

my mother finally had her surgery yesterday, and my grandmother’s surgery is on friday. with this sort of repair, however, surgery is not a magical fix. they’ll both have to dedicate themselves to some major down time, followed by months of physical therapy. full recovery isn’t expected until six months to a year after the surgery. as stressed or overwhelmed as i might be by any or all of this, i know it’s a much more difficult reality for my mother and my grandmother. but i also know something else, something that they don’t always remember, so i’m doing my best to remind them both as often as possible: my grandmother and my mother are both tough cookies. this sucks, but it’s not forever. and life is going to get better from here.

so, with all of this in mind, i’ve decided to forgive myself for this bout of writer’s block. forgiving has always been the hardest part for me. i’m a planner when it comes to posts: i create long lists of ideas, i save links. i write in large batches, keep a calendar, and schedule things ahead of time. and that’s just for the cactus garden. my independent projects are sculpted by to-do lists, mind-maps, and excel spreadsheets charting novel plot lines. writing isn’t just a process for me; it’s a way of thinking, a style of seeing the world.

the problem with this sort of mentality is that when i can’t do the work i want to do, i guilt myself. over time that guilt builds into a seemingly unsurmountable wall between me and creativity. and that’s where the writing halts - not with a screech, but with a painful, empty silence. and, in that silence, everything becomes procrastination: chronically not charging the laptop’s battery, grey skies, not enough coffee in the pot, a cat sleeping on my feet in bed. even extensive research on a subject i want to explore is really just a guise for not formulating a semi-coherent sentence of my own. and now, sadly, over these past few months, i’ve added caregiving to that list, which just isn’t fair to anyone. 

that’s why i’ve decided to accept my writer’s block, because i’ve realized my writer’s block isn’t a block at all. it’s the culmination of a series of unrealistic expectations of myself. caregiving, as i said earlier, is hard. it’s mentally and emotionally difficult, even when it’s not physically difficult. it’s not anyone’s fault; i don’t begrudge my mother or my grandmother for needing me — in fact, i’m happy i can help. i’m glad i’m here. i want them to depend upon me, because i love them and i know that, were the situations reversed, they would care for me. and they wouldn’t just do that because we’re family; they would do it because they are genuinely wonderful people. and if i can grow up to be like anybody in the world, i want to grow up to be like them. 

so, am i sad that i’ve had to take such a long break from my work? yes.

do i wish i hadn’t stopped so suddenly in the middle of my “welcome to my thesis” series? also, yes.

do i have an incredibly long list of things i want to write for you all and then discuss in detail? of course i do.

but you know what? whatever.

life happens. we take breaks from our work, and then we come back.

if we can do something meaningful in the interim and spend time with the people we love, so much the better.

because that just means that it’s not writer’s block at all; it’s just a writer’s vacation.

welcome to my thesis, part three

this is the third post in a series of discussions examining the research i conducted and the choices i made while working on my master's thesis, "shamrocks, sombreros, and the stars and stripes: ritual drinking on nationalistic holidays and the creation of cultural identity," last year.

you can read the first part of this series and my paper's abstract here.

and the second part can be found here.

alcohol and participating in the observations

i learned early on that there are two sorts of reactions you get when you tell people you’re writing your master's thesis about drinking holidays. 

people who celebrate, who like drinking holidays, or are just generally receptive respond with a fascination and a glee — an almost infectious exuberance. i get excited about my work all over again just explaining it to these people.

and then there are the people who don’t get it. they look at me like i’m crazed, and no amount of explaining will change their minds. perhaps the best word to describe their reactions is incredulous? at the best, i get a wary “sounds… interesting.” at the worst, i’ve gotten accusations of being an alcoholic looking for an excuse to drink. i find these people… interesting. luckily, for my self-esteem and stamina, the people in this second category are fewer and further between.

writing about alcohol is difficult, within academia and without, and there are inherent problems in conducting ethnographic fieldwork focusing on alcoholic consumption. in my paper, i write:

keeping in mind possible dangers i might encounter, i made a definite decision before all three holidays to avoid taking any shots of alcohol. i also made a concerted effort to try to stick to one drink an hour to avoid impairing my observations. despite those efforts, however, i understood that alcohol would affect my perceptions and ultimate analysis. when possible, i took notes en route between destinations, as well as at the bars. i also took photos to attempt to provide some balance between experience and memory. recognizing that my alcohol intake, although controlled, may have affected my cognizance, i approached my notes with heightened reflexivity. this meant being aware of how my comprehensions of events may have been altered and how those understandings might influence my conclusions, while still understanding that consuming alcohol was a key component of the celebration and the participant observation. the altered state of consciousness from alcohol consumption was therefore a necessary part of the research, one that allowed a lived understanding of the ritual.

the truth is, when you drink alcohol, it affects your perception of events and happenings. and the more you drink, the more effect it has. there’s no way to get around this. 

conversely, to conduct an ethnographic study of a drinking holiday and to not drink would also be problematic. the resulting work would be “observation,” not “participant observation.” 

complicating this is that fact that celebrations are communal events. to not drink on a drinking holiday is to not participate, to be atypical, to stand apart. 

playing a primary role was the importance of group dynamics and groupthink on individual behaviors. celebrations are inherently communal activities and, whether celebrated with friends or families or strangers just met at a bar, they provide opportunities to interact with others and encourage a sense of conviviality and connection. while sharing a pitcher of harpoon ale with my companions at the stadium bar & grill, our second stop in the early afternoon, one of my friends turned and pointed out a girl sitting alone in a booth, keeping her head down and doing her best to avoid interacting with anyone else.

"what do you think is wrong with her?" timothy* asked. 

this question highlighted the importance of the group and emphasized social interactions: participation requires companionship. not having companions on a holiday is in itself atypical, however, this sort of deviance, exemplified by this girl, implied to my friends a rejection of celebration and participation. susanna barrows and robin room iterate this notion, stating: “the essentially social nature of drinking is indicated by the fact that solitary drinking is commonly considered to be a problematic symptom” (1991). isabel gonzález turmo considers the question of whether or not drinking alcohol is a social or individual act, suggesting instead that drinking is simultaneously both a social act and a solitary act (in de garine and de garine, eds. 2001:131). the meanings and intents embedded and imbued within the prescribed actions and performances create social connections that can cross cultures and language boundaries. in this way "[d]rinking is always an individual act, since each drinker necessarily has to situate himself, more or less consciously, according to the change of emotions produced by the ingestion of alcohol;" and yet, "[i]t is also a social fact, even when drinking alone, since it is loaded with socially assumed meanings. it is a language that, on many occasions, needs neither words nor expressions" (gonzález turmo in de garine and de garine, eds. 2001:131). my companion’s observation of the lone drinker emphasized the silent language of ritual behavior and the ways those messages could be perceived.

* all names have been changed

welcome to my thesis, part two

this is the second post in a series of discussions examining the research i conducted and the choices i made while working on my master's thesis, "shamrocks, sombreros, and the stars and stripes: ritual drinking on nationalistic holidays and the creation of cultural identity," last year.

you can read the first part of this series and my paper's abstract here.

choosing the holidays

in our origin story, i mentioned how i missed out on using halloween as part of my study. no lie, that was a bit of a bummer.

in many ways, though, i’m grateful i didn’t end up using halloween; partly because the holidays i ended up studying ended up having some fascinating connections of their own, but also because halloween in boston in 2011 was cold and wet and gross. i’m incredibly grateful that my graduate career is not commemorated in an ode to how i froze my feet off as i waited in line for hours trying to get into the cambridge brewing company, as the freezing rain turned to snow. just saying.

when i sat down to look at my proposed timeline, three holidays made sense to me: st. patrick’s day, cinco de mayo, and the fourth of july. 

a lot of people have asked me why i didn’t include new year's eve in my study. to be frank, the original reason was timing. having only just started my graduate degree in september and given the proximity of the holiday to the end of semester deadlines, along with the fact that i had only just turned in my thesis proposal in the beginning of december, there was no sane or sensible way to include new year's eve in my research.

instead, i lied and told my parents i couldn’t come home to baltimore for the holiday because i was going to use new year's eve as one of my participant observations, then snuck home to baltimore and hid in am the elder’s apartment, and surprised our parents at our normal friends and family party. that wasn’t a convoluted sentence at all. 

in picking st. patrick’s day, cinco de mayo, and fourth of july as my holidays, i ended up providing a framework myself that was incredibly useful later. here’s how i describe how and why i chose these holidays in my paper, and how i proposed to go about studying them:

my plan was to conduct participant observations of three holidays — st. patrick’s day (march 17), cinco de mayo (may 5), and american independence day (july 4) — in boston, massachusetts. i hoped to observe how these ethnic and nationalistic holidays were interpreted through celebratory drinking in order to better understand how holiday drinking practices engender and reinforce concepts of community. i chose these holidays for their perceived ethnic and patriotic associations that have been appropriated and subsequently reinterpreted by the american public. the participant observations would all start in the morning and range into the early hours of the following day. i intended to observe the relationship between ritual drinking and the celebration of the holidays: who was celebrating, by gender, ethnicity, and age; how celebrants were dressed to represent the holiday; what they drank and how much they drank; what their celebratory behaviors were, both sober and intoxicated; and how drinking served as an embodiment of the holiday for the celebrants. being relatively unfamiliar with boston, i primarily chose field sites based on perceived popularity among drinkers in their 20s and 30s, as opposed to specifically ethnically self-identified bars. i would spend st. patrick’s day in south boston with a group of friends, cinco de mayo in faneuil hall and allston, and independence day in somerville. south boston was chosen for its strong irish american neighborhood identity. faneuil hall and allston were chosen for their perceived popularity among young celebrants. somerville served as a contrasting residential neighborhood. i planned to conduct informal interviews with participants i would meet throughout the holidays about why and how they were celebrating.

i will admit, choosing secular holidays rather than religious holidays was a conscious choice. there is a lot that has been written about religious ritual in relation to alcohol consumption. there is a lot more that can be written about religious drinking holidays. my choice of secular holidays primarily came from a spatial factor: i was looking at public spaces, bars, etc. i don’t know if i’ve ever seen anyone out having their customary four glasses of wine for passover in their local pub. (that would be mad impressive, though. now that i think about it, i might need to be the first. or not.)

i also shied away from the religious holidays from a practical feasibility point. there is a lot of work that has been within alcohol studies focusing on the religious; it’s a bit overwhelming and it’s difficult to know where to start and where to end. certainly the amount of material there is book-length, not master's thesis length. (though, i will admit, given more time and more research, i could see book-length material developing from my finished thesis.)

alternatively, secular holidays also held a certain attraction to me simply because there was less work already written about them. the secular drinking holiday is a phenomenon that i feel has flown largely under the radar. it’s there, academics know it’s there, but for whatever reason, there’s less of a draw to write about them.

i’d like to address a few points specifically about each of these holidays, because i’m sure some of you out there have concerns with my defining each of these three holidays as a secular drinking holiday. and for those of you who don’t — maybe they didn’t occur to you, maybe you’re not accustomed to this sort of academic discussion, whatever (it’s okay, i know we have all sorts of readers here in the garden. nobody’s judging anybody) — there are reasons why you should want me to fully explain my definitions. primarily, i, like all researchers, should be held accountable for my work. and if i can’t explain what i did or why, i’m not doing my job.

firstly, this was an ethnographic inquiry. the research i completed was all here-and-now. yes, my literature review included the historical perspectives of these holidays. however, the primary focus was to gain a better understanding of current practices.

and so of course it’s important to acknowledge the fact that st. patrick’s day began as a religious holiday. however, in the here-and-now, the celebrations i observed were of a secular nature. 

this here-and-now perspective also applies to the whole “drinking holiday” aspect of my observations. none of these holidays were founded with the intention of selling more guiness or providing a venue for sombreros on college campuses. (at least, i’m pretty sure they weren’t.) however, it is the intent of the participants to drink on these days that transforms these holidays into drinking holidays. 

thus, by this reasoning, i consider st. patrick's day, cinco de mayo, and the fourth of july all to be secular drinking holidays.

my next post in this series will discuss questions and concerns dealing with actual alcohol consumption and participant observations.

welcome to my thesis, part one

Shamrocks, Sombreros, and the Stars and Stripes: 

Ritual Drinking on Nationalistic Holidays and the Creation of Cultural Identity

This paper examines ritual drinking practices on the nationalistic holidays St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, and American Independence Day. The objective of this study was to understand how alcohol is used as a ritualistic tool during these holidays, and how extreme drinking is encouraged by participants as a mode of community formation. Employing anthropological methods, I conducted participant observations in Boston, Massachusetts at neighborhood bars on all three holidays and at a house party on independence day. Through these observations, it became clear that young adults celebrated these nationalistic holidays through ritualistic practices that included stylized modes of dress, the collection and use of material artifacts, the liminal experience of secular pilgrimage, and ritualized actions that facilitated processes of assimilation and acculturation. 

goodness. 

there is so much here i want to discuss that i think we’re going to have to break the conversation up into segments so i don’t get lost.

this is the first part of an extensive series of posts, so please bear with me.

the origin story

i first had the idea to write an academic paper about drinking holidays while i was still working on my undergrad degree. 

aptly, the idea came to me while i was at a bar, having a ridiculous brainstorm session with one of my best friends, ap. (one day, ap, i promise we’ll make our short film, “add and ocd go to a bar.” it’ll be epic.)

the first idea was broad, with no limit to holiday, no spatial or locational structure (though there was the passing mention of spending each holiday in its place of origin — carnivale in brazil, oktoberfest in germany, and so on). there was no theoretical framework, no discerning focus to direct the study.

and, like so many ideas, it remained an idea. 

an amusing idea, an idea i hoped to pursue, but just an idea all the same. 

and after a while, as my undergrad career ended and as life went on, i forgot all about it.

it wasn’t until three years or so later that i came back to the concept of completing an anthropological study of drinking holidays.

midway through my first semester as a graduate student at boston university i was faced with a quandary. because i was a full-time student and intended to remain so for my entire graduate career, i had to decide my class schedule and final track route almost as soon as i began the program. this may sound a little confusing, so let me break this down a little bit to be clear. 

essentially, with the way boston university’s gastronomy program breaks down class credits, graduate students take ten classes. there are four required courses (anthropology of food, experiencing food through the senses, theory and methodology, and history of food). the rest of the classes are electives. along with the classes offered, students can also elect to do a four-credit thesis/project or an eight-credit thesis in lieu of one or two elective classes, respectively. 

i knew early on that because i eventually plan to continue on into a phd program, i wanted to write a thesis. and so, when it came time for me to start thinking about planning my spring semester schedule, it was also necessary to  consider how to handle my summer class registration. 

i’m not sure when exactly i remembered the original drinking holiday study idea, but i believe it was either on or directly after halloween. 

in fact, i’m pretty sure of this timing because i seem to remember thinking “expletive!! well, there’s no way i can do a participant-observation study for that holiday now!”

and while halloween was a wash, i was lucky to have remembered the idea when i did; it gave me enough time to discuss my idea over with the gastronomy program coordinator, rb. besides being wonderfully supportive, rb also agreed to be my thesis advisor. 

it also gave me enough time to submit my proposal before the spring semester began. despite the fact that i wouldn’t register for the eight-credit thesis until the summer, because of the temporal nature of my study, i actually began work on my thesis in january. 

we’re almost done with our origin story, but before we finish this up, i’d like to discuss the fluctuating nature of this paper, because it’s certainly been a theme throughout my experience writing it. 

when i first approached rb with my general proposal, my idea was to write about drinking holidays, taboos, and social deviance. and while the drinking holidays certainly remained the central focus of my work, you can see simply from my title that social deviance and taboos did not. i still discussed elements of social deviance and taboo, but they certainly were not my linchpin.

i struggled for a good bit this past summer to be okay with that, and i don’t know if i can fully explain why. i got trapped by a working title, an idea that my paper was a square peg when it was really circular. and i also got caught in the trap that because i had written about ritual in anthropology before (in fact, i’d taken whole classes on it), i had to avoid it and write something entirely different. 

in other words, i was an idiot. 

but we can get to those troubles, and how i got over them, later.