Becoming an anthropologist

In my last post, The Question That Stayed With Me, I wrote about Professor Zofia Staszczak and her fascination with warsztat—not simply the tools of scholarship, but the habits and practices through which we learn to think as scholars. Another of my professors at Adam Mickiewicz University, Professor Józef Burszta, left me with a different lesson, encapsulated in a phrase I have carried with me for almost half a century:

„Antropologiem się nie bywa, antropologiem się jest.”

Being an anthropologist isn't something one does occasionally; it's something one is.

As a student, I probably understood this as one of those pronouncements professors make and students dutifully remember. Only much later did I begin to understand what he meant.

When does one become an anthropologist?

Learning Anthropology

My formal education in anthropology was highly structured. The fifteen students in my cohort took essentially the same courses, together, for five years. We studied ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology, although we did not spend much time worrying about where one ended and another began. Ironically, the institutional home for this rather broad education was called the Chair of Ethnography (Katedra Etnografii).

We certainly did not describe our education in terms of the American four-field model, but looking back, there were striking similarities. We studied human evolution and archaeology alongside ethnography, material culture, language and communication, social organization, and the theoretical traditions of anthropology. The labels and intellectual genealogies were different, but the breadth was there.

What seems most important to me now, however, is not the particular list of courses we took. We all started from the same foundation. Eventually our interests diverged considerably. Those of us who went on to doctoral work pursued very different questions. I became interested in nonverbal communication; others studied subjects as distant from mine as Australian Aboriginal societies. Yet underneath those very different interests was a common way of approaching human experience. We had learned to ask anthropological questions.

Only much later did I come to appreciate how important that common foundation had been. Working with younger scholars who arrive at anthropology through psychology, public health, sociology, education, or other disciplines has made me see both the richness they bring from those fields and the challenge of acquiring an anthropological way of seeing while simultaneously learning how to conduct ethnographic research. We had the luxury of acquiring that foundation slowly, collectively, and before we were expected to specialize.

Learning to See

Photo Irena Kabat

Another important site for learning the anthropological warsztat was the field camp in Ciechanowiec, where students from five Polish universities, accompanied by many of their professors, came together to practice the craft of ethnography. We returned year after year to the same village. In retrospect, there was something almost comical about this arrangement. The villagers became thoroughly familiar with generations of anthropology students and with the kinds of questions we were likely to ask. At times, they would remind us that we had forgotten something: “But you didn’t ask about X.” They knew the ethnographic repertoire almost as well as we did—or perhaps better, since they had encountered successive cohorts of students asking variations of the same questions.

Yet the field camp was much more than an exercise in applying interviewing techniques learned in the classroom. It was where anthropology began to become a way of looking and listening. We learned to pay attention to what people did as well as what they told us, to follow activities as they unfolded, and to understand practices within the social worlds that gave them meaning. The task was not simply to look at the village through an anthropological lens, but gradually to learn to see it, however imperfectly, through the eyes of the people who lived there. The distinction between learning methods and learning ethnography mattered. Interviewing, observing, taking fieldnotes, and asking questions were techniques; the warsztat lay in learning how to bring them together, how to notice what we had not thought to ask, and how to allow the field itself—and the people in it—to redirect our attention.

The field camp was also part of a particular organization of anthropological education that has since largely disappeared. In my cohort, approximately fifteen students moved through the five-year program together, taking the same courses and eventually going into the field together. We therefore learned anthropology not only from our professors but also from one another. We listened to each other’s questions, compared fieldnotes and interpretations, noticed what someone else had seen and we had missed, and argued about what our observations meant. The cohort itself became part of the warsztat: learning ethnography was a collective process in which ways of seeing, asking, listening, and interpreting developed through sustained engagement with the same group of fellow students. Contemporary students, who have considerably more freedom to construct individual programs of study, gain other possibilities from that flexibility, but they do not necessarily experience this same form of prolonged collective apprenticeship. The point is not to romanticize an earlier model of anthropological training, but to recognize that the institutional organization of learning shaped how the craft itself was acquired.

Beyond Fieldwork

My anthropological curiosity does not disappear when I am not conducting fieldwork. Anthropological attention travels with me, whether I am on vacation or relaxing at home. During the pandemic, for example, I became fascinated with South Korea through watching K-dramas. I watched them for pleasure, certainly, but I also found myself paying attention to the details of everyday life: food, family relationships, forms of address, workplaces, housing, education, and social hierarchies. I watched K-dramas the way an anthropologist studying culture at a distance might. I figured if this approach worked for the grand dames of anthropology, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, it ought to work for me.

I did not merely follow the narrative arcs of melodramas and police procedurals. I became curious about the political and social worlds against which these stories unfolded. Soon I was reading Korean literature, learning more about Korean history and society, and even experimenting with Korean cooking. Long before I ever set foot in Seoul, I had developed a kind of mediated familiarity with Korea.

None of this was ethnographic fieldwork. But I am not sure I knew how to stop being an anthropologist simply because I was sitting on my sofa in Washington, DC.

Becoming Slowly

I don't know when I became an anthropologist. Certainly not when I got my MA in anthropology. Perhaps not even when I got my doctorate. The exact moment is hard to pinpoint. Even today, I sometimes ask myself whether I am an anthropologist—and whether I am a good one.

I suspect that is precisely the point. Becoming happens gradually, through books and teachers, but also through encounters that unsettle what we think we know.

I learned one such lesson early in my career. In one of my first research projects, I traveled to New York City to interview Polish immigrants. I was about thirty years old and had assumed, perhaps rather naively, that speaking the same language and sharing a cultural background would help me establish rapport with the Polish women I hoped to interview.

It did not.

Many of the women were my age and, like me, highly educated. But while I was staying in a Manhattan hotel and occasionally taking taxis to interviews, they were working as cleaners and kitchen helpers. The differences in our circumstances were impossible to ignore. They were uncomfortable talking to me, and their discomfort made me uncomfortable in turn. Sharing a language did not erase the social distance between us.

I don't remember experiencing this as a methodological revelation at the time. But I came to understand that rapport cannot be assumed on the basis of shared nationality, language, gender, or age. Sometimes the differences within a seemingly shared identity matter more than the things we have in common.

That experience stayed with me. Perhaps becoming an anthropologist happens partly through such moments: when the field refuses to behave as we expected and forces us to reconsider not only the people we are studying, but our own position in relation to them.

Still Becoming

I am an anthropologist, at least I think I am. But I also believe one never completely finishes becoming one. I continue to discover new places, both as sites for research and as vacation destinations, meet new people, use new technologies to conduct research and communicate with study participants, and collaborate with new research teams. All of these experiences keep changing how I see the world I study and inhabit. Always through an anthropological lens.

Photo by Chase Clark

I continue to learn from colleagues, but also from students and younger scholars I mentor. They ask questions I might not have asked, introduce me to different ways of working, and sometimes challenge assumptions I did not realize I was making. Teaching anthropology, I have discovered, is also another way of continuing to learn it.

And anthropology follows me well beyond research and teaching. I find myself observing and asking questions when I travel, read a novel, watch a film, wander through a market, or encounter some ordinary practice that suddenly seems not so ordinary. I don't consciously decide to "do anthropology" in these moments. The curiosity is simply there.

Perhaps this is what Professor Burszta meant all those years ago when he said, „Antropologiem się nie bywa, antropologiem się jest.” Being an anthropologist isn't something one does occasionally; it's something one is.

But I would add something now that I could not have added as his student: one is also always becoming one.