Observations

Elena’s on the verge, about to step into the field, the real deal. She laughs quietly to herself. Who cares besides herself that she’s crossing the threshold from life to fieldwork. Well, maybe her professors, the judges. Still, this time, it will different, she hopes. Not what she had done before when she tried doing research on her own, making it up as she went along, fumbling with questions probably too personal to ask people she had only just met. Curiosity was her guide, not method or technique. That was the mid-1970s — so long ago it seems to her now. Since then, it’s been ten years. She’s five years into her graduate program, the only one among her cohort who didn’t study anthropology as an undergrad. They all seem to know so much; she seems to know so little. She does know to follow her gut, and it told her to go back to school, to pursue this thing she only vaguely grasped. She surrendered her profession and her marriage to it, this nebulous quest to make sense of life, of humans, of this crazy, unfair world.