Liminality

Victor Turner wrote a lot about ritual, and one of the concepts he expanded upon was that of the liminal state, the transition between one phase and another, a state rife with ambiguity, uncertainty, and often characterized by relative lack of structure. Some scholars have argued that an engagement period represents a form of liminality insofar as you are no longer truly single, but neither are you married. But I'm also currently in a liminal state for other reasons.


I currently live in the suburbs of Chicago and met my fiancé while he, too, was in school up here. When he finished his own schooling, he moved back to his home state of Tennessee, which is where we had agreed we wanted to live when we get married. The original plan was that I would move down there when I, too, finished school. But over a month after graduation, I'm still up here. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, humans are social beings and my grandmother has antediluvian morals. My very traditional grandmother has proclaimed that she would have a heart attack if we lived together before marriage (not an idle threat, because she does have cardiovascular problems... still, emotional blackmail much?) and on top of that has threatened to disown me. As infuriating as the situation is, it's not as though I can simply disregard her. She's batty and old-fashioned, but I still love her, and can't imagine her not being part of my life while she is still alive. 


Anyway, because of that whole situation, there are only two "legitimate" reasons for me to move down to Tennessee before the wedding: either be in school or have a job down there. Assuming everything even goes to plan (which is a whole other ball of wax), I would not be starting graduate school before fall semester of 2011. We want to get married before I start classes. So the key is to find a job down there, right? Unfortunately, it's hard to get employers to take you seriously when you're applying for positions from over five hundred miles away. (Since I plan to attend grad school, I'm not looking for anything serious or long-term, i.e. the kind of jobs where they might actually consider someone who plans to relocate.) And of course I can't get an apartment down there because no one will rent to me without having proof of some sort of income. Lovely little catch-22, isn't it?


The other thing currently nagging us is that we don't know where I'll be in graduate school. My top choice for both geographic and academic reasons is the University of Tennessee's Knoxville campus, but since this is graduate school, admissions is by no means guaranteed, and I have to have several contingency plans; hence the applications for Emory, University of Georgia, University of Kentucky, Appalachian State University, and my undergraduate alma mater the University of Illinois at Chicago (with the caveat that doing my MA and PhD at the same school as undergrad is not the most desirable option). Yes, my undergrad GPA was 3.76 with an in-major GPA of 3.88, but that doesn't guarantee anything. I still need to take the bloody GRE, and if I'm honest I'm terrified of not doing well on the mathematics section. It's not even just getting in with the programs; I also have to hope that schools will offer decent financial aid packages, assistantships, et cetera.


And to further complicate matters, UT has one of the most outstanding anthropology departments in the United States. I'm not sure if the fact that they're particularly geared toward biological anthropology helps or hurts me as a cultural anthropologist. There's one particular professor with whom I would love to work because his area of research dovetails beautifully with my preferred potential project; since UT attracts more biological anthropologists, there could conceivably be less "competition" to work with that particular professor. But if he isn't taking on new students for the semester I'm trying to get in, or if there are a bazillion more qualified candidates who want to work with the forensic anthropologists at UT and they take all the spots in that particular cohort, well, I'm SOL.


We have to proceed with the understanding that there is a not-insignificant possibility that I will be in Georgia, or Kentucky, or North Carolina, or even Illinois for graduate school instead of Tennessee. (My fiancé has stated that if necessary, he would move wherever I wound up in school, but I'd hate to do that to him.) Or worse, that I won't even get into grad school at all. But that's something I'd really prefer not to think about, because the prospects of that are simply devastating.


I miss being in school. Of course I am continuing to pursue independent research, but I miss the structure of having classes, of meeting with professors. I miss writing twenty-page papers and having someone who wants to read and grade them. It's bad enough that I'm seriously considering making the whole wedding planning process into a self-ethnography. (Kamy Wicoff sort of already did that in I Do But I Don't: Why the Way We Marry Matters, but this would be even more anthropological.)


Above all else.... I just wish there were a modicum of certainty about the relatively near future.


All of this is a long-winded way of saying, liminality can suck huge donkey balls.

"Deportee" and dehumanization

When Woodie Guthrie wrote the poem that eventually became the song "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"), he was referring to a tragic plane crash where, in addition to the pilot and three crew members whose names were listed in the papers, twenty-eight Mexican nationals (27 men and one woman) who were being flown back to Mexico also died. This was during the time of the Bracero Program, a sort of guest worker program which let Mexican agricultural workers (braceros) come to work in the United States during a labor shortage in the U.S. Then as now, there were many workers who came outside the confines of the Bracero Program, usually at the behest of those who were hiring them who would rather have an undocumented workforce than one they had to pay under contractual terms. The song mentions that, "They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border / To pay all their money to wade back again," in reference to the practice of "drying out the wetbacks" (seriously, that's what they called it), where immigration authorities would take undocumented workers to the border, have them place a foot back in Mexican soil, and point them to the Border Patrol to pay to sign back up under the Bracero Program and get them back to work. The plane was taking them to a border town so that they could do just that when it crashed, killing everyone on board.


Woodie Guthrie expressed outrage at the fact that newspapers did not report the names of the undocumented Mexican nationals (he gives them symbolic names in the song). Whether this was due to mere callousness or if the papers really and truly could not obtain information about their identities is not a question for which I can find a straight answer. It is clear, however, that many of the attitudes taken toward the Mexican workers in 1948 carry through today in the debate over Mexico-U.S. migration.


"They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves." The vast majority of undocumented individuals are not criminals, although they sure as heck are treated like it. It's all too easy to think of "illegal aliens" as amorphous, faceless beings, and that's exactly why the terminology is problematic. I'm going to copy and paste from an earlier entry because I can't be arsed to re-word this argument:


The question of calling people who enter the United States without authorization or overstay their visas "illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants" or simply "illegals" versus "undocumented immigrants" is not just an issue of semantics or trying to be PC. Undocumented and unauthorized are not perfect terms, but they at least acknowledge that the nature of the imposed status is whether or not they have papers or formal authorization to be in a particular place. The word alien simply means non-citizen, but the connotation of the word is dehumanizing because it conjures up images of something downright otherworldly. Illegal alien is a term used by the INS to describe immigrants who have been convicted of felonies; it is not a blanket term for anyone residing in the country without authorization. Illegal immigrant is a relatively mainstream term, unfortunately, but it still conjures up images of criminality when immigration is a civil, not criminal, issue (although the Arizona law has changed that, which is a problem in and of itself). Of course, when "illegal" modifies the word "immigrant," at least then the main descriptor is immigrant, maintaining some semblance of the personhood of the individual(s) being described. "Illegal" as a noun, by contrast, completely dehumanizes them and implies that the very nature of the person is their "illegality." 


What would happen if we stopped seeing undocumented immigrants – or economic refugees, or unauthorized residents, or whatever you wish to call them – as collectivities and started seeing them first and foremost as human beings? To recognize that their nature is not that of a worker, or an immigrant, or a deportee, but as aperson? To remember that every single one of these people, whether they come from Mexico or Guatemala or Laos or China or Haiti or Ghana or Senegal, is a unique person, with their own story, their own set of loved ones, their own individuality?


Maybe it would be easier to give a damn and to treat them with a little bit more respect.


And maybe once we recognize their humanity, and listen to their stories, putting them in global context, we could begin to recognize that the people who are disparagingly called "illegals" aren't the bad guys in the immigration debate.

Engaged

My boyfriend and I have known that we were going to get married for well over a year now, and we've been calling each other "husband" and "wife" for long enough that I can't even remember when that started. (Not in public, of course, because we are not legally married and don't want to confuse others, but we'll say things like, "My darling husband" or "my beautiful wife" to each other in private.) Our society's standards dictate that we can't technically refer to each other as "fiancé(e)" without a formal display and a gift of jewelry, but for all intents and purposes, we considered ourselves affianced.


So when he took me up to Foothills Parkway (this is in Blount County, Tennessee) and asked, "Would you marry me?" as we were gazing at an absolutely gorgeous mountain view, I just smiled and said, "Of course!" without even thinking about it. (When he asked a second time, I realized this was a formal proposal, and gave an unequivocal "yes." At least it gave us a funny story to tell.)


Picking out a ring was almost anticlimactic. We wound up with a silver ring with a Celtic design and a synthetic emerald stone. My grandmother, of course, thought it was incredibly insulting that the ring was silver instead of gold or white gold, insisting that she had never heard of a silver engagement ring. (At least she understands my feelings about diamonds.) Grandma also was shocked that it is likely going to be well over a year before we have an actual wedding, and could scarcely believe it when I told her that the average engagement period for U.S. couples today is something like seventeen months. Of course, one has to remember that (a) she grew up in rural Lithuania and what little she knows of wedding customs in the United States comes from who-knows-where, and (b) she got married at the ripe old age of sixteen to my grandfather when she'd known him all of three weeks. This same grandmother, incidentally, has had a wedding fund set up for me since way before I even met my fiancé, let alone had anyone on the horizon with whom marriage was a remote possibility... but never set up an education fund. You can see where her priorities lie!


What's interesting is how people treat us differently now that we are formally engaged. Empirically, nothing has changed except I have a ring on a certain finger. But friends and family alike are "squee"-ing and applauding and squealing excitedly, and asking us if we've set a date, where we want to have it, et cetera, et cetera, and prevailing norms dictate that we now call each other "fiancé(e)" instead of "boyfriend" or "girlfriend." Funny the difference a social construct can make. I guess we're officially in a sort of liminal state.


Now, the question becomes: How can an anthropologist get married without analyzing the whole process?