Phantom Projects

One of the most difficult things about being an anthropologist is battling phantom projects. Those always occur at the same crucial moment in time: I think about a topic, develop some ideas on it, read up on the literature, start to write drafts and outlines, sketch a structure and timetables, methodologies and possible outcomes, and when the time comes to finish it up, suddenly a completely different idea grabs my fancy, seems very alluring and for a few days I am leading myself to believe that this is a much more interesting and fascinating project. Of course it isn't, just something entirely different, and after a few days I realize this and abandon it. The phantom projects spring from a fear of closure, of having to stick with and being identified with the final project while being unsure about its outcome. It's an anxiety that is linked with the open nature of anthropological inquiry and the doubt about whether it will generate any kind of interesting data.

Spider Season

There are a few days of summer that never seem to end. The heat seems to permeat everything and people throng the streets at night because it is too hot to sleep. The week I spent in Vienna coincided with this most magical stretch of summer where everybody appears to be happy and contended. But hidden from this general elation, the process of decay has already begun, autumn sharpens his knives to cut the thread that hold this precarious season together. One day you wake up and the sky seems much higher than usual and the rays of light have lost their glare and are golden and soft.

Were I live it is the spiders that are the harbingers of this change. It was quite hot and unpleasantly muggy yesterday, one of these days when the shirt sticks to your skin and the air seems trapped between the hot tarmac and the leaden sky. When I opened the door to my bedroom, dreading another short night with little sleep, there it was, the first spider, sat in the middle of the white wall across from me, without moving, as if someone had put it there as a remainder.
There are numerous spiders in this wooden house and as I am quite arachnophobic I managed to negotiated some sort of ceasefire . The spiders had to understand that they would be killed if entering my territory which I restricted to my bed, giving them free leeway on the rest of my floor. We usually get along fine, expect during spider season, that is, early spring and early autumn, when my bedroom seems to be a station on their migrating patterns from the great outdoors to the hidden bowels of the house. Faced with a month of spider-checking and jumping at the slightest touch at night, I sighed and went to get a towel. When I returned, the spider was gone.