The American Anthropological Association’s annual conference was this past weekend in Montreal and I was there. A group of us from the Anthro Club drove up on Friday, went to the less-expensive Student Saturday, and came back Sunday. A whirlwind of a weekend and quite fun.
Friday’s seven-hour car ride was rather boring, but I got some school reading done (Dante’s Inferno!) and then we went out and I finally ordered a beer with my food. I’d make a comment about my issues with the drinking age here in the US, but I’m too excited to get to the nerdy part. So.
Saturday came early, as I wanted to get to an 8:00 panel—and I ended up convincing most of our party to come, too. They didn’t get moving quick enough, so we ended up walking twenty minutes late into our panel…entitled, Top Ten Tips for Getting a Job in Anthropology. Luckily enough, it was basically a Top Ten Tips for Getting Any Job Ever, which was not informative on the anthro side but good, as I’m not particularly experienced in the world of jobs.
The next panel we went to (my friend M., a freshman in the Intro to Cultural Anthro class I TA for, was my con buddy for the day) was linguistics, my favorite! It was about Language and Space and featured four very interesting presentations. The first was given by a grad student who looked liked a cuter version of Jason Schwartzman. He was nervous and we made eye contact and, oh right, his paper was particularly interesting—hard to explain, but the gist was the language used when referring to specific places that have a magical context in a South American town. The other one I really liked was about using language in tours at the Independence National Historical Park.
Our next stop was the exhibition room. The sheer amount of books in that room had me drooling as soon as we stepped in. Goodness gracious, I cannot accurately describe just how happy that room made me. Booth after booth of university presses, hawking books with slick covers and amazing titles, that smelled of a combination of that new book smell and knowledge. It was beautiful. Sadly, I did not buy anything (they were all so expensive and I knew I wouldn't actually read any of them; I tend to collect academic books, for some strange reason, but not read them often), but it was an amazing room.
Would you believe a panel entitled The Cradle of Voodoo: Religion and the Occult in Benin would be boring as all hell and worth walking out in the middle of? If you said no, you’d be wrong. This was a long panel, one that had four presentations in the first half, then a break, then another four presentations and I was incredibly excited. Religion is one of my biggest interests and especially religions that have been taken and used for other purposes by people who don’t understand the origins. So it should've been right up my alley. And yet. We only stayed for the first half because I was quite literally falling asleep during the last one. Bits and pieces of the information held my attention, but I suppose I was rather hoping for an in-depth analysis of the Vodun religion from Benin and the path from there to our current interpretation of ~voodoo~, but instead we got a monotone medical anthropology paper on the connection between smallpox and a specific deity. (This is the one I nearly fell asleep during; the others were more interesting.)
And so, we left, and after some deliberation, managed to find another long panel that we could slip into during the break. This one was Sight Unseen: Connecting with the Invisible in Secularized Societies. The vibe from the audience felt a lot better than the last and we spotted Mr. Jason Schwartman again as we sat down (though he left before I got a chance to say I enjoyed his presentation and introduce myself). There were a couple interesting panels; one talked about how there are websites where bereaved parents can write to and light candles for their deceased children and bond with others who’ve been through the same thing—this led to some very interesting discussion on how the internet is a disembodied realm and these kids become “digital ghosts.” The other interesting one was on the Spiritualist community in Montreal; my favorite comment was how this one priest Michel performed “house cleanings” on “home invasions.” I just really liked her wording in that section.
However, the discussion part of that panel went wonky and boring and we left just as it was about to get controversial. Someone commented how “normal people” have all sorts of supernatural experiences, but educated people often don’t, and therefore educated people are the abnormal ones. I was confused at this comment, but as soon as someone from the back squawked a loud “what?”, I knew it was time to go. I turned to Melissa and we peaced out of there as fast as we could. And there ended our conference experience.
Other exciting, nonacademic things that happened:
+ Wandering around Montreal with four other people, talking and laughing and learning our way through a very pretty city after dark.
+ Finding a delicious Italian place during that trek.
+ Using my French to buy metro tickets and order breakfast at a beautiful, very French café before we left on Sunday morning.
All in all, it was a very fun and very informative weekend. And while I’m still not keen on going into the anthropology field, I quite enjoyed seeing all the big names in anthropology and learning what it is they actually do. If you ever get the chance to go to a conference, do it. The AAA is a really, really big one, but D. just mentioned the Northeast AA conference will be in March, if you want to start with a small one.
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