Romance versus Reality

Falling for Anthropology It was my freshmen year of 1998, when I took anthropology 101. I took on my academic life at that point with a shrug. Clueless as to what my expectations were regarding the college experience, I did it simply because it was the thing to do. Amidst what I experienced to be a hodgepodge of unassociated classes, I was blessed with a few gems. The rest I eked through with yawns and dreams of the world outside. Anthropology was one of these gems, because anthropology, I thought, was “cool”. My professor, Alan Aycock, spoke of studying the behavior and activities of humans in so many seemingly disparate places; “rituals” in male-dressing rooms at the YMCA and tribal currency systems in Africa. It was the one lecture to which I arrived anxious and early, and the only one in which my nervousness at asking questions in front of so many students disappeared. By the end of the semester, I still didn’t understand what it was that anthropologists did for careers, or even how to define their discipline, but one word opened up doors for me: Holism. Defining culture was a slippery thing from day one, and when I tried to describe exactly what I was learning to my friends, it was the “holistic” approach to societal phenomena that I found myself referring too, not culture. It was a method of seeing the world and polyvalence rang loud (For those screaming “holism is impossible! There is no such thing!”, please hold onto your questions and comments, and if you cannot stand to do so quietly exit out the back!). Still, I was more into journaling during classes that taking notes, adopting a bit of anthropology and heading to Europe with a cheap backpack and no plans. Backpacking, and that notion they called “culture” were beckoning. As I traveled and changed university settings throughout the years, I also changed majors. I started with English, switched to anthropology after Aycock’s class, obsessed over comparative religious studies with Veena Howard at Lane Community College, almost switched to History at UW-Steven’s Point thanks to two amazing classes in Ancient History and Medieval History with ( ), and finally came home to finish my honors in anthropology at the University Of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is impossible for me to separate my personal journey from my intellectual development as I traveled between schools, countries, and states, taking experiences with me and overlapping disciplines unconsciously. Both my background in writing and my experience with a “Native” Indian teacher in classes on Hinduism and religions of the East informed my work and interests in anthropology. My travels in Europe, and even the west coast of the U.S. as opposed to the Midwest where I was raised, made me aware of intriguing differences between geographic settings. It was rarely something I could pin down and say “there” but rather what I perceived to be tendencies or vague feelings about places or people that began to accumulate into something I was tempted to call “culture”. I had yet to find what, if any, valuable import these observations had. If people “tended” to be nicer in a grocery store in Eugene, OR than they did in say, Chicago, I was not ready to make any conclusions about meaning. And if a Slovakian man in a Belgian café knew infinitely more about my country than I did about his, I felt I was somehow missing out on a bigger picture, though I hadn’t a clue as to what that big picture was. Nevertheless I donned myself “the amateur anthropologist” and saw it fitting to play the “gringo” in my own household, applying cultural relativism to a perception of my new roommates and as a result found they weren’t “so annoying” after all. This was my first “applied anthropology”, and as much as I would journal about it with humor it raised questions for me concerning the role of psychology in anthropology, a question that I came to discover was quite loaded when brought up in the university. In 2004, I was back at UW-Milwaukee. At that point I became completely captivated by both anthropology and the department itself. Alan Aycock was teaching a class on the anthropology of religion. We focused particularly on neo-paganism in relation to a feeling of “religious homelessness” by white westerners. We discussed different cases where this homelessness was assumed, denied, criticized, and so forth. We also reflected upon neo-paganism as chosen or reactionary in terms of many practitioners’ bitterness toward Christianity both because of their own past and their perception of Christianity as patriarchal and historically oppressive. These conversations introduced me to some long-standing terms of controversial definition such as “authenticity” and “cultural appropriation”. It was my first glimpse of how messy anthropology gets. There were two major seminars that expanded my research interests as well as helping me to critically evaluate and make sense of research material. These were Modernity, Development, and the Global Imagination in Critical Perspective, and Globalization, Culture, and The Environment, both taught by Dr. Heatherington. In these seminars we discussed how ‘globalization’ and ‘nature’, for example, are powerful concepts defined differently in different contexts and at different points in history. We read William Cronin’s The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (2003), assessing the history of such an idea as ‘nature’ and how this concept, to name one context, is shaped and used by powerful nation-states to hold sway over indigenous cultures and to create favorable perceptions of the state. I took a number of classes with Dr. Tracey Heatherington that challenged me to think critically and creatively in terms of both analysis and conducting ethnographies. We visited the rain forest exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum, learning to see thru the presentation to the meaning behind what objects were chosen and how they were placed. We began to read the exhibit like an out of date ethnography, picking apart the fiction before us that ironically failed to include a singular native person of the rainforest; we are tempted to say this is another intentional exclusion; there were so many symbols of colonial domination but not a single human being of color. We read Candice Slater’s Entangled Edens (2003), in which she studies how myths and legends help to shape and are simultaneously shaped by cultural and political realities in the Amazon. This focus on narrative brought a fresh perspective and insight into her ethnography. I began to see the potential of this method for my own research on freight-train culture and “hoboes”. The connection between myth and real life became for me an obvious tension between romance and realty in people’s perceptions of their world and of history. Stories about early 20th century hobos, or the beat generation, for example, greatly influence contemporary train-riders’ perceptions of their way of life. All of these generations of riders have a strong symbolic and real connection to capitalist system, but their relationships to it are drastically different, and in some cases best illuminated through narrative stories that they tell, or that are told about them. I will start by explaining where I think my self-consciously cultivated obsession with the trains began for me. When I took ‘Techniques and Problems In Ethnography’ with Ingrid Jordt my personal interest in freight trains matured greatly. . We read several classic ethnographies in counter-pose to modern ones, starting for example with Evans Pritchard and following with Sharon Hutchinson. We were challenged to see what value might be found in such colonial projects as Pritchard’s study of the Nuer, as well as to pay attention to ethnographic habits of contemporary ethnographers like Hutchinson. Often these anthropologists proposed many correctives to the colonial writers before them, but in some important ways reflected biases of those same earlier generations whose methods they sought to debunk. By far the most exciting part of this class was the freedom to choose our own ethnographic projects. I was eager to get into the field, but had yet to feel passion for any particular topic area. When we had to choose our research projects I was at a loss. I finally said to Ingrid, sheepishly, something like “I have always been into freight trains and train hopping do you think… that could be a project?” This pretty much sums up where my train-brain was at; gestation. But by the time the project was done, the freight trains had become one of my filters. How this was so is something I cannot explain but will become apparent in my writing. The thing is that from the very beginning I was uneasy about talking about trains in certain ways let alone “studying” them. For right or wrong I felt that partly because I had not done any hard time on the trains I would be a poser. I thought studying train-riders would be superficial and trendy. I doubted that I could produce anything worthwhile anthropologically, regardless of how interesting it would seem to my classmates. I tried to imagine how a few ethnographic approaches to the project would look to a hardcore anarchist train-hopper and they all made me shudder. In addition to so many of these doubts and considerations was the fact that, privately, I loved trains very much; seeing them, hearing them, and riding them. I didn’t feel like an insider or an outsider of that “subculture”, but whatever I was I was personally much more interested in what the trains had to say than other people riding them. For the mystics this will make a lot of sense. But as this was a cultural anthropology project, and I was falling deeper in love with that discipline, I knew the people did matter. The way they mattered was the elusive. Entering into it with these ambiguities and aspirations of incredible holism was fine for an undergrad paper of 20 pages because opening up a huge can of worms without being remotely ready to catch any fish was offset by demonstrating a considerably productive first time doing field-work, and talking about that information in combination with the literature. When I look back at that project I think it as quite good as I actually found intriguing things out and discovered serious problems and questions and was overwhelmed with how vast the freight-train related corpus of stuff… song, books, geography, and on and on was and from this I wrote what was basically an abbreviated response to my experience delving into the world of freight trains. After class one day I saw my friend Nathan, the “hobo” who walked into the café and later showed me that it is still possible to hop trains. He said he was “catching out” that night, and would I like to keep him company while he waited for the train. Voila! Of course I would wait with him! Thus Nathan was my first interview. “Where should we meet?” I asked. He rolled a cigarette while thinking it over, finally asking me “Did I ever show you the 2nd & Florida split?” I met Nathan that night in the Third Ward of Milwaukee, a term carried over from the industrial days when Milwaukee was mapped out in zones. Thus in 2004 this became “The Historic District”. Until recently dozens of abandoned factories stood in what seemed to be a state of arrested decay. Urban spelunking turned up entire tanneries and breweries full of machinery with thousands of scraps of leather or empty and uncapped beer bottles, offices with calendars marking the day when the 20th century could no longer sustain production in this city. It wasn’t until we walked up the embankment where Florida Street intercepted 2nd street that I began to see the organic connection of the city and the trains. The abandoned buildings were already becoming speculative real estate, but you could still see and hear the echo of the industrial era. In the following weeks I interviewed workers, supervisors, and train riders in several different yards, and in the process discovered first hand the value of fieldwork. Each interview carried with it different claims of the way things “really” were. A supervisor and a break-man had different ideas about what degree of non-worker presence in the yard was required to stop the freight trains or call the police. Another break-man made a sincere claim that he hadn’t seen anybody hop a freight train since the 70’s. People talked to me about 9/11, national security, imperialism, anarchy, hobo lore, industrialism, living off of the grid, policy, and of course, capitalism. I’ll never forget what one supervisor in the Wisconsin Central yard said to me. I asked him why it was that I often saw stationary locomotives running their diesel engines set out on some lonely tracks with no one around. His answer: “If the engine isn’t running we’re not making money”. some of the older employees felt that train riders no longer existed because they had not seen one in decades. Many employees who had first hand experience with riders were not personally biased against them in any way but were concerned about individuals getting injured while engaging with the trains. The three conductors that I interviewed had all experienced psychological trauma from having to witness people falling under trains or getting in the way of the engine. They felt certain that at some point in his or her career every conductor would have such experiences. As a result, these employees were more likely to fear for the safety of people riding the trains as opposed to having personal feelings about the illegality of the act. Other workers said they tend to “look the other way” when seeing people riding trains unless the riders appeared to be putting themselves in explicit danger. One break man said that people have been riding trains for over a century and he did not see anything inherently “wrong” with hopping trains. A more immediate reason he gave for letting riders go was that, financially, the company would lose a lot of money if they stopped the trains every time someone was in the yard. Of the riders I interviewed, some were older and had been riding trains for decades. Others were in their late teens, 20’s, or 30’s and either rode trains on a regular basis or only on occasion. Some informants had only ridden a train once. Even the subjects who had only hopped a train once in their lives were left with a deep impression from the experience as they enthusiastically spoke of trains and their experiences in riding. I think the thrill seeker category has to be separated out as one of the strand of participants. It’s almost described as a rite of passage in which danger or a norm is trespassed to gain entrance into another status of maturity or the accumulation of personal qualities such as courage or daringness. I guess I would want to know if the train hoppers are only thrill seekers and adventurers. Then the question of how the era has changed would be perhaps an insightful location for understanding other changes in our society. The riders were men and women with significantly different socio-economic backgrounds as well as political and worldviews. For example, I met anarchists whose engagement with trains was merely one important element embedded in their lifestyles of mobility, protest, and social networking. Another 30 year old man was only interested in trains as a form of adventure travel and worked full time when not traveling. Many riders conveyed a sense of respect or passion for the history of train hopping as well as the culture of folk music, travel, and class struggle that has often been associated with it. These interviews provide evidence that the potential or actual interaction between riders and employees is a significant factor in the way rider’s relate to freight trains. They offer an alternative vantage point from riders on the world I am studying and therefore my fieldwork must take employees into consideration; learning about their perspective on the world of freight trains and train riders as well as about how they factor into riders’ worldviews. They also support my claim that freight trains and train hopping emerge from history highly charged with notions of romance and reality. In your proposal you need to show this more than just keep telling it. Describe a historical macro context that will situate train hoppers today. You can even focus on that rare breed of train hoppers who are thrill seekers and adventurers who draw on the romantic past. And you can juxtapose them with the anarchist political organizer who sees himself as the historical reincarnation of earlier labor rabble rousers. In other words, one way to approach this would be to identify key types of riders and show how they participate in railroad riding for distinct reasons and purposes. This previous research combined with my personal experience riding trains provides a historical and culture background and context that situates and colors the current project. Through it I have discovered that the freight trains play a special role in people’s lives and imaginations in America; from train hobbyists who collect model trains and who derive lasting meaning from single train hopping experience, to people who ride trains on a regular basis, to those who claim no special relationship with trains and yet are compelled to tell stories that explain how trains have in some way played a role in their lives. Exploring how and why the trains variously factor into people’s lifestyles and imaginations is an additional way to contextualize my project and establish a fragmented network of people with trains as a focal point. My ethnography on freight-train culture opened my mind and influenced the direction of my intellectual life in a number of ways. For one, conducting interviews in the train yards sealed the deal with my commitment to anthropology. There were simply too many critical questions that needed to be raised. The experience also served as a reference point for much of the literature I would be reading in my final two years at UW-Milwaukee. For example, Cori Hayden’s multi-sited ethnography The Making and Unmaking of Bio-prospecting in Mexico (2003). In this ethnography Hayden bounces between various nations, governments, universities, communities, and individuals, revealing the true complexity involved when indigenous people are rewarded for plant samples. The style of ethnographies like these ingrained in me an impulse to seek out webs; not only symbolically but webs that implicate real actors in various overlapping projects that can and do effect whole social, economic, and knowledge systems. I titled my paper Romance v. Reality: A Brief Survey of Freight Train Culture. At this juncture a few things happened. During the summer of 2005 I attended an ethnographic field school in Guatemala through NC State University. Thus my interest in Guatemala was sparked, which led me to write Assemblages of Aid and Development: Pertinent Perspectives on the Role of USAID in Guatemala. In Guatemala I had been fascinated by the formative power of tourism, and the various ways in which indigenous, ladino, and expatriates were attempting to harness this power. But when I returned for my last term to write the ethnography, I was more intrigued by the historical role that other countries played in the development of Guatemala. Foreign aid gave me an opportunity to explore a diverse range of interests and to see in what ways they fit together into the current global picture. My major focus was the relationship between foreign aid and free trade, but out of free trade comes such hotly debated topics as intellectual property rights, privatization, and generic medicine. What people said in interviews resonates with the literature and other narratives. What do we find in people’s own narratives? Romance! Risk! The contrast of romance & reality which itself represents a binary which we must struggle to transcend? (I see it in every description, in every book, this “romance” v. “reality”! 9/11 is important because it shows a shift in our imaginary in relation to this hybrid object of core significance to our identity/imaginary. The trends of the nation are reflected in the pulse of the railroads; the blood/capital that runs through it’s veins and how; the train riders and the forces they come up against. “Future historians may well divide American life since the early nineteenth century into an Age of the Railroad, followed by an Age of the Automobile, and then an Age of the airplane. The Age of the Railroad is perhaps the most romantic.” Editor’s Forward/xiii- American RR’s/Stover. Ch : Why People Do What They Do Meeting my mentor. Start of long-time problem with asking a good question about actual riders What I got away with in undergrad would later come to haunt me in graduate school, where they were startled to learn I’d gone tramping into train-yards and slipping into buildings without any permission from anyone or any consideration or statement of ethics Ch 5: Archetypes and Typologies Generally ostracized by prejudiced Anglo tramps, the Latinos have not significantly incorporated traditional hobo rituals into their lifestyles (the two images on my wall from the same A Day in the Life of America: One is of two Mexican kids hiding under a train. The other is a white bearded man in the open boxcar. }}http://www.hobonickels.org/nbfred.htm Contrary to popular opinion, which would have us believe that rail riding is the fading pursuit of hardened derelicts and that hobo travel has been curtailed by heightened security concerns, the train-hopping population is being fed by a fresh incursion of young riders: Crusty punks and anarchists, dropouts and activists, professionals with a taste for adventure, art students and runaways and disenfranchised youth of all kinds, weaned in the information age and driven by a DIY aesthetic, are jumping freights right along with migrant laborers and other, more traditional types of tramps. In these widening hobo circles, Lee is known for being generous with his time and knowledge and open to first-time riders, including the many women who, according to longtime tramps, are taking to the rails in unprecedented numbers. Lee's biannual zine, There's Something About a Train, which began 12 years ago as an eight-page newsletter of rail-yard tips, practical advice, and helpful lingo, has expanded into a 125-page literary journal with poems, diaries, travelogues, drawings, photographs, stories, songs, and legends submitted by full-time and newbie riders alike. (quote?) Key to me in the movie Catching Out was the idea that if it “were up to me there wouldn’t be any trains even though it would make me really sad. This to me implies that the activity of hopping trains is kind of like embracing two parts of the self. Living out different moments of American history at once. A specifically American focus/problem/interest My ignorance in thinking I could become a train expert. Categories beyond me. A Mystical Arrival at Story-Life: Transcending the Hegemony of Romance v. Reality Who controls romance controls reality