ABSTRACT
I came to poetry as a refugee. After years of forcing myself to perfect rigid academic writing while getting my graduate degrees in anthropology and religion at Harvard, I came to a point where I was miserable enough to consider dropping out. Although I did end up finishing my Ph.D. and now teach cultural anthropology to undergraduates, I did end up actually writing my dissertation away from Harvard (in Northampton, Massachusetts), and it was at that time that I really embraced poetry and admitted that, if I were to stay engaged and committed to anthropology, I had to practice, read and write a kind of poetic anthropology, an anthropology that moves beyond a mere intellectual exercise and becomes an anthropology of the hips and soul. After Divinity School, I was two years into my Ph.D. in social anthropology when I started having trouble with my eyes. Whether this blurred vision was psychosomatic or not I’ll never know. I’d been reading so much for my general exams, every time I tried to sit down and read, words became blurry. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to see well enough to work on the computer during my general exam dates. After I confessed this to one of my senior anthropology professors, she looked at me with indifference and said, “Well, maybe you’re just not fit for this profession. It does require a lot of reading.” I left her office feeling ashamed, but also slightly liberated. In trying to impersonate a stiff, male, British scientific approach to the field, I knew more than ever that I had to leave. After years of milking dry academic readings for the soul and poetry of anthropology, I’d had enough. I had to get out. I was tired of feeling imprisoned, stifled,
sick, scientific, stale. Tired of presenting and reading the juiciest parts of anthropology in cachectic, formal, half-dead language.
