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Published June 7th, 2025 from Vancouver, Canada
For me, anthropology and love are one and the same.
After much deliberation, I recently decided to press on with siting my MA project in South India. This isn't a practical decision. I live in Western Canada, where I have existing research interests. My father owns a house in Northwestern India, and already introduced me to local experts on that area's history. I intend to learn Tamil, but the Tamil population in Canada is centred on the other side of the country in Toronto, and the language services here are mostly for Punjabi or Nepali.
So, why am I making it so hard for myself? The answer is that I love South India.
Historically, anthropology was the study of the other. In our jargon, this 'otherness' is called alterity, and it was one of the great fixations of the classical anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Early anthropologists wondered: what is the other? How can we understand it? What does understanding it do to us?
As you may have noticed, we do not live in the 19th century any more.
In the 1850s, Englishman Francis Burton circumcised himself and spent a year pretending to be a Persian doctor so that he could sneak into Mecca¹. Today, he could have heard the call to prayer without leaving London. One of Germany's most prominent social conservatives grew up speaking Farsi. A girl I met trying to start a fire in the woods outside Tiruvannamali knew just enough English to ask for my Instagram handle.
The world is still a weird and wonderful place, but for good reason, 'alterity' doesn't really hold up like it used to. Edward Said exposed just how much of this otherness was only ever a projection of European's adventurist and erotic fantasies. After all, the world has always been a polyglot, creole, mixed-race mashup. Well before Malinowski arrived in the Trobriand Islands, Québécois voyageurs didn't seem to find alterity much of an impediment to marrying into Cree families, nor did crews of Taino, Chinese, Yoruba, and Irish men in the Golden Age of Piracy struggle to work together because of some abstract 'otherness'.
Today, fewer Euro-Canadian graduate students are trucking off to Melanesia than they are looking to their own suburban subcultures. Work at Euro-American universities on Asia or Africa is now often lead by students from those countries' own diasporas. This has generally produced work which is far more in tune with the real concerns of anthropological subjects, and with less cadaverous vibes than the old tomes on 'Taboo among the Nuer'.
But personally, I have very little interest in studying 'at home'. For me, that would presumably mean either going back to the rain-slaked Welsh Marches of my childhood or studying the messy, make-do care networks of Trans women that have nurtured me since my teens. I'm just not that kind of person, nor that kind of anthropologist. I left England for good reasons, and I spend enough of my personal life with weird Transsexuals without making that my academic life as well.
But neither am I interested in faraway places in the way that Francis Burton was. I am a child of a post-alterity world, and so for me, ethnography is shaped like immigration.
Immigrating to Canada has fundamentally changed me. It changed the words I use and how I pronounce them. It changed the kind of food I eat, how I read the news, the kinds of houses I live in.
As an anthropologist, I don't want to disguise myself, trick anyone, or write a book about people without expecting them to ever read it. I want to acculturate and learn in a way that truly transforms me as a person. I want to perform ethnographic labour that leaves marks in my skin and blooms in my skull into new neural clusters of languages, faces, and routes.
If this kind of ethnography resembles immigration, it is only inasmuch as both are akin to falling in love.
This heading is a little tongue-in-cheek. Methods are, well, methodical. You plan them and implement them on a practical basis in accord with the time you have and the funding you've been provided. But who cares about schedules and money when you're in love?
I realised recently that my two significant research projects thus far—a published paper and an honours thesis—are intimately entangled with women I have dated and loved, in Midwestern America and Pacific Canada respectively.
"The Circus of Liberation", my paper on clowning as social creativity, is about the Detroit hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse (ICP). In the paper, I argue that ICP are not from Detroit by accident:
"Rising from the liminal landscape of Detroit—a city betwixt life and death, stuck between narratives of decline and the anticipation of rebirth—ICP stands at the clowned intersections of class, geography, history, and disposition" (2024, 158).
Nor was my interest in them by accident; I have visited Detroit many times, and it is my favourite place in America.
When I was twenty, I met and fell in love with an American woman six years my senior. She grew up in Detroit and moved back there shortly after we began dating. I spent a fortune on plane tickets, and most of our relationship played out in southeastern Michigan and nearby parts of the Midwest. On those visits, I became entranced with the ruination of Detroit; how vast and empty its downtown felt, littered with neoclassical facades built for a wealthier and more metropolitan city than it now was. My love for Detroit was born night-drives, hours in the DIA, and afternoons on Belle Isle with the Detroiter who I was also falling in love with.
Sharing a life in somebody's hometown opens windows into profound beauty, and also deep ugliness. Being invited into my partner's home in suburban Detroit, I witnessed first-hand the same racism which emptied Detroit in the 1960s. Even in the late 2010s, her father openly said he was worried that "schvartzes"² downtown would steal our car. She, too, had a tremendously complex relationship with Detroit; in many ways it felt like a prison to her, as it did to the Juggalos— this is part of what fuels their clown creativity, and the beautiful family they made. All these are things that I, from rural England, would never have understood—nor would I perhaps have been interested in understanding—had I not fallen in love with a Detroiter.
Just the same, my undergraduate honours thesis, "'The Alleyway Economy'", is about the down-and-out punks and underground musicians who furnish their apartments from the backstreets in Vancouver. Well, guess who I fell in love with? Guess what kind of people I live with?
If the anthropological maxim goes that you learn best about a place from getting to know the people living there, there is no better way to learn about a person than by falling in love with them. Being in love not only provides access, but becomes an ethnographic raison d'être in of itself.
So, why am I making it hard for myself? Why South India and not North India, or Vancouver again?
Because, whatever the practical challenges, I take such pleasure in the Tamil language, in tracing an arcing இ, just as I do in the heavy sweetness of a masala chai beside the East Coast Road. For the joy of clambering up a blackened concrete skeleton abandoned in the sloping forests overlooking Tiruvannamalai. For the love of a jutting peninsula of languages and dynasties aside and askance from the Vedic, Buddhist, and Turco-Persian flows of the north's plains and deltas. Out of admiration and love for the land which produced the social justice of Periyar, egalitarian Dravidian politics, the couplets of the Thirukkural—
Social scientists are often wary of being romantic, and so, ultimately, am I. Tamil Nadu is just a place on our Earth. It's a free trade zone, an ex-colony, besotten by patriarchy and casteism like anywhere else. But it has captured my imagination as nowhere else has since Canada. And what's the point of doing anything, if not love? I can't help it, anyway.
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¹ Burton probably didn't need to do all this. Islam has always been tremendously multi-ethnic, and in Burton's lifetime there would have been plenty of phenotypically European Muslims from the Caucasus or Balkans, who also would not have spoken Arabic. He could easily have passed himself off as one of them.
² A Yiddish slur for Black people.