5 June 2015–Abu Dhabi.
This is the end of our seventh year in the Abu Dhabi, with me teaching at Zayed University. I arrived in the summer of 2008, direct from Lahore, Pakistan. Angie Reed joined me a month later. We lived in temporary housing that did not accept pets in the Tourist Club area, and waited for the new building we’ve lived in ever since to be completed. We moved in on Christmas Eve, 2008, and our present to each other was to be reunited with Heathcliff, our much-loved German shepherd, who had been stuck in doggy prison–aka the kennels–for 5 long months.
During our last several months in Pakistan both of us had pneumonia, and co-existed with intestinal parasites. Reed also had a sinus infections she couldn’t shake, related to the air quality. I was intensely flattered at work and was getting sucked into the vortex of mission orientation, fuelled by adrenaline and caffeine.
Our time in Lahore was brief–briefer than we’d intended–but the combination of a Pk-Rupee that was predictably declining sharply against the dollar, the twelve hours a day without electricity in 110+ degree heat, and the uncomfortable proximity of large bomb blasts made some kind of exit strategy imperative.
I loved Pakistan and yet it was the hardest place I’ve ever lived at a purely existential level. Angie Reed found that she couldn’t get well and in Spring 2008 reluctantly agreed to stay with her family in Louisville while I finished out the academic year and left my job under amicable terms. It ended up being the longest period we’ve ever been separated–and, I hope, ever will be. The low point among several for me came when my single-speed, locally-made “Top Humber” bicycle was stolen from fifteen feet behind me at a busy market area.
The bike pictured above was actually Reed’s. Mine was almost identical, except with a black frame. The sight of a woman riding a bike in Lahore was enough to attract an exceptional amount of attention–and bad driving–on the streets, so she usually only rode with me. Top Humber, however, became my primary mode of transportation. I dressed in shalwar kameez and peddled my way unremarked for the five kilometres or so to work at the Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS), an excellent liberal arts college and a bastion of both liberal values and privilege.
In the Spring of 2008 I applied for a job at Zayed University (ZU) in Abu Dhabi. The advertisement for the position indicated they wanted someone to teach social science to UAE military cadets, and help develop core curriculum. Given my military experience, research and flexible teaching background–by that point I had already taught at six institutions–I seemed like a good fit. In the end I was interviewed by video conference–the usual ZU practice–in late May for a position that was to start in August. About a week later I got a job offer.
Getting out of Pakistan turned out to be more of an ordeal than anticipated. I was an old hand at moving by then, but was nearly defeated by the seeming impossibility of shipping myself, my books, and our dog to the UAE. The long version is ethnographically rich but slippery, pointing up the naive faith that I had in the magical reality of paperwork–for example, the official (real and yet completely unreal) papers I purchased which indicated that a certain type of rabies blood test had actually been performed. Somehow, with the support of the administrative staff at LUMS and Angie Reed’s encouragement, I managed to get myself, my books and papers, and Healthcliff to the UAE.
When we finally landed in our permanent housing, December 24, 2008, it was the fourteenth time we had moved house in eleven years. We had lived in six states and the UAE was our third foreign country. We more or less promised each other at that point that we would stay put unless pushed out by a land war or drawn away by a dream job. In retrospect we should probably have added a contingency clause about deteriorating employment conditions. Yet, here we remain in spite of the increasing appeal of more U.S. research time, specifically for our collaborative research on American veterans, and on stand-up comedy, and more time in the gallery Angie Reed directs: Garner Narrative Contemporary Fine Art.
Growing up in Boring, Oregon–a beautiful but depressed old (for Oregon) mill town between Portland and Mt. Hood–I never imagined myself as a long-term expat in Arabia. Even when I decided to study anthropology, well aware of the fieldwork commitment entailed, I thought of repeated trips to Germany, maybe Eastern Europe. I knew from an early age that I wasn’t going to stay in Boring or its vicinity–but Abu Dhabi simply wasn’t on my radar.
The journey from Boring to the UAE passed through four years in the Army (1982 – 1986), including basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, two years in a Pershing II nuclear missile unit in Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany, a stint on temporary assignment at White Sands Missile Range/Ford Aerospace Division in Newport Beach, California, and then finally as a clerk at the Ft. Sill Correctional Custody Facility (CCF), which I own as the weirdest job I’ve ever done.
I left the Army in 1986 during the George H. W. Bush administration and jumped right into college, enrolling in summer courses at Mt. Hood Community College while I was still on terminal leave. My service benefits more-or-less paid for college, and after a year at MHCC I transferred to Lewis & Clark College. I spent every spare moment engaged in progressive activism, and graduated with a degree in anthropology and sociology in January 1990.
A few months later I was off to New York, where I spent an impoverished year as a graduate student at the New School. I had a fellowship, but it didn’t cover living expenses and once my veteran’s benefits ran out I didn’t really have a way to continue. So in spite of the privilege of studying with Talal Asad, William Roseberry, Deborah Poole, and Brackette Williams, I took a leave of absence at the end of the 1990 – 1991 academic year and never made it back to the New School. I wish that I had understood at the time just how fantastic my opportunities were–but trying to live in Manhattan on veteran’s benefits and credit cards made continuing impossible.
Returning to Portland with the deranged notion of saving money to go back to New York, I was quickly recruited to an infant NGO, the Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD), where I worked at first as a volunteer and eventually as director of research and occasionally as executive director from 1991 – 1996. My actual work was a combination of field research, training, public speaking, opposition research, archivist, editor, graphic designer, fund-raiser, grant writer, community organizer, bookkeeper and what have you. It was the kind of “mission oriented” work that was intensely gratifying, but at the same time highly vulnerable to burnout. I loved the work. Along with my colleagues, we built an organization to be proud of–albeit by hyper-exploiting ourselves, working 70 or more hours a week often without pay, and only toward the end of my tenure for anything like a living wage with benefits: all of which was derived from funds we ourselves raised.
Like many veterans, my health and fitness deteriorated as I lived a work-obsessed life without a mess hall and mandatory physical training. This didn’t really start to turn around for me until I met my future collaborator, spouse, best friend and life-partner Angie Reed Garner. We met in the last days of Summer 1995, and a little less than a year later–July 1, 1996 we were definitively together. With her support I developed an ethos of self-care, though my military and activist ideologies were highly suspicious of the project, and returned to graduate school to complete my doctorate, this time at Cornell where they provided a reasonable level of funding for fellowship students.
My re-entry into full-time studies after 6+ years “running my own shop”–where I was regularly consulted as an authority on various elements of the American far right by the mainstream media–was not exactly smooth. Angie Reed and I had been together barely a year when we relocated from Portland, Oregon to “centrally isolated” Ithaca, New York. We were working out our relationship and I was not accustomed to toeing anyone’s deadlines but my own. My professors doubtless found me more than a bit off-putting since I refused the “ordeal” aspect of graduate training and did my own thing. Fortunately I ended up with Davydd Greenwood, a profoundly humane and progressive man, as chair of my dissertation committee. Davydd understood where I was coming from and was accommodating to my unorthodox approach to graduate studies: I suspect I hold the record for the least amount of time of any Cornell PhD on campus.
We lived a scant two years in Ithaca and then went to the field a year early on a DAAD scholarship at the Free University Berlin in 1999, before I had even completed my MA. I did my “A” exams while in the field, returning to campus only to defend. Then another year in Berlin, which was, again, intense living, doing ethnographic fieldwork with the Bundeswehr, and then instead of returning to Ithaca to work as a TA while I wrote my dissertation, we moved to Chicago.
It was October 2001, just weeks after 9/11, when we landed in the U.S., feeling utterly dislocated by the profusion of patriotic display. There were American flags everywhere. Chicago was distracting. Within a year I had more-or-less decided that completing the Ph.D. might not be for me. Eventually, Angie Reed and I moved in with her family in Louisville, where I completed the actual writing in about four months, with a degree award date of May 2004.
Unlike many of my peers, I’ve had the great good fortune of being constantly employed as an academic anthropologist ever since, starting with a part-time gig at Spalding University in Summer 2004, teaching ANTH 101 to professional nursing students, and then moving to a full-time visiting position at Beloit College, in 2004-2005. Then it was on to Miami University (Ohio) in 2005-2006, and Monmouth College in 2006-2007. At Monmouth I met Pakistani-American political scientist Farhat Haq, who suggested that I apply for an open position at the Lahore University of Management Science. This was the during the George W. Bush administration, and Angie Reed was strongly advocating for another expatriate experience. This, combined with my research interest in civil-military relations, made Pakistan a plausible destination.
I applied, was interviewed on the phone, and on the strength of Farhat’s recommendation was offered a job. A whirlwind of material off-loading later, we were on our way to Lahore.
Which in turn led to our landing in Abu Dhabi.
In Spring 2012 Heathcliff passed away. I’d been award a 6-month prize sabbatical and without our dog neither of us felt like spending the time in Abu Dhabi. We left the UAE in June 2012 and didn’t return until February 2013. The intervening months were spent mostly in Louisville, which largely as a consequence began to feel like home to both of us. We spent our days at the gallery, where I set up to write, and evenings discovering live music, local theater, and stand-up comedy. In a way, for the first time, we learned how to live a rich life.
Returning to Abu Dhabi was jarring, not so much because it was Abu Dhabi–which is nice enough–but because it meant going back to a work-a-day schedule of teaching and administration. Worse, in the latter part of Spring 2013, I agreed to take on the position of Department Chair. The corner office is nice, but in all other ways it’s a major drain on my creative and every other kind of energy. I hope to step down in 2015-2016.
I am looking forward to becoming once again an ordinary member of the faculty, focused on my teaching and research, and not responsible for some 18 faculty and 300 students. Angie Reed and I have ambitious research plans for Summer 2015.
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