Mid-Degree Crisis

It has become apparent to me during the course of my study of anthropology that I'm meant to be a theorist rather than a technician. Not for me the digging up and sexing of bones, the detailed nuance of pottery patterns, the observation of primate behavior. In fact, the watching of contemporary people is almost too concrete for me, though I know it's going to have to make up part of the foundation for my theorizing. The point is, the information I seek out and immerse myself in is essentially philosophical.

In the aftermath of post-modernism there seems to be a structural void. This may be my inexperience and incomplete education talking, but the upshot of post-modernism on anthropology has been the nearly discipline-wide conviction that everyone's story is just as valid as the next person's. The Big Bang theory is just as true to physicists as the theory that humankind was made from mud and the breath of the gods is to many cultures around the globe. Anthropologists work hard to make ourselves believe that it is supremely culturally insensitive to privilege any system above another, especially our own. I completely support this stance, while subjectively believing in the system that works for me. I think that I can only ever speak definitively for my own experience and understanding and that it would be both naive and arrogant to assume that I speak for anyone else.

Add into this mix an in-depth study of epistemology--that is, the nature of knowing. How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we know is valid? What makes what we know better than what they know? My most trusted mentors encourage me to read as much as possible and to spend time searching myself to find out where I stand theoretically. Yet there's no mistaking their parallel goal of passing on their position to you as a protege. The position that I've been synthesizing from my studies and my professors is simply this: everything that ever is or was or will be is subjective and arbitrary. More simply: nothing has any value except that which we give it.

This is a revelation to me which has far-reaching repurcussions not just for my academic and professional development, but for my personal life as well. What this means to me is that reality is entirely malleable. I can make decisions that are outside social norms, but if they make me happy and fulfilled, I'm not an outlier, I am simply myself, fulfilled. The not-quite-as-constructive upshot is that I am now almost completely adrift academically. If nothing means anything, then what is the point of studying anything?

Any work I publish will only be my own observations, opinions, and thoughts, filtered through the theories and historical background already laid by others, true, but essentially it all seems very self-serving at this point. Anything is a valid field for study, anything I want. But what will the results mean? Can I really ever say anything meaningful about anything if it's all relative and particular to the moment in time and space where my observations were made? Can any of that particular information be extrapolated out to apply to humanity at large? Should that even be a goal?

So now I find myself at a crossroads. My faith in the value of my studies is shaken, and now it's hard to find motivation to take any classes or work hard in them. This is not just anthropology, but life I'm talking about here--do I pick a system to buy into or do I now spend the rest of my life developing and living by my own system? Can my life mean anything if I do that? I do want to make a lasting contribution to humanity, to leave the world a little better than I found it, but I'm not so sure anymore that that's possible. Again, terrifying...and liberating.