Introduction
We aim to explore the social conditions and processes of graduate education in anthropology. Our hope is to promote greater reflexive attention to our own social world; to explore the contradictions between our ethics and our practices; and to look into how graduate education could be improved. We began in Spring 2006, and are preparing a number of publications and public presentations.
We currently have 30 contributors from universities all around the U.S., Canada and Britain. Our work takes up everything from status and stratification to emotional crisis to metaphor and meditation; it ranges everywhere from personal essays to global critiques. Anthropology emerges from these texts in a hundred different guises: it becomes the blind leading the blind, an obstacle course, a masked ball of ideas, a creature with sharp teeth. It is a shift from "unbearable confusion to just about bearable confusion," a place to feel lost or to be found, a place where we have no identity, or too much identity. Sossi Essajanian likens it to "a raw egg cracked into a bowl," apparently solid but in fact malleable at the slightest touch. Sometimes there are deep crevices between the essays: when one sees a place of grooming and friendliness and good fortune, another sees a prison; for one it is a struggle for equality, for the next a retreat into a game of elitism. But anthropology also comes through more pragmatically, as a place where we raise families, suffer financial hardship, and just try to get by.