So I think anthropologists are supposed to enjoy fieldwork, but are only licensed to do so in certain ways. Not going to the ‘field’ is bad enough, but researching ‘leisure’ activities is worse. So I have a double whammy.

The “too fun” test also seems to crop up in funding. I would love to know if you write your WoW subscription into your grant proposals (or even if anyone would fund it). Or would Blizzard ever offer someone free access because they were there for research purposes? My guess is no.

While studying the damage caused by cruise ships to local people, environments, and economies, non-anthro colleagues assumed I either spent grant money going on cruises or got free tickets from cruise lines. “Research, hmmm???” Far from thinking either of these would be unethical, they didn’t see how I could observe the effects without doing participant-observation to get the “other side”, you know the “fun” side of this particular story.

I remember when I was an undergrad, I served a couple of years in a row as the undergraduate representative on the anthropology dept hiring committee and I got to listen to people’s arguments about why different people who were shortlisted should get the job. There was one candidate who had done her research in a place that is extremely hot and humid, where women have to wear a lot of clothing to cover up, and apparently she repeatedly contracted malaria during her fieldwork. One of the committee members kept mentioning this and seemed to be arguing that she deserved the position because she’d stuck it out and persisted through hellish fieldwork conditions. Everyone around the table would nod sagely, even those who clearly didn’t want her to get the job, because this was an apparently unassailable argument.

And yet we are expected to be passionate about what we do! It seems the ideal is to be passionate about the research but not have much fun doing it. Hence, Rex, you might score some points if you wrote the preface of your book complaining about how much you hate online games but you forced yourself to enter this world because it was the only way you could answer x important research question. So you buckled down, said goodbye to your family and your personal goal to hike every summit in Hawaii, and turned on the computer. Despite the arduous and painful fieldwork conditions, you learned to value your relationships with your informants as you were warmly welcomed as first a child-like figure in their society and then, eventually, as a peer. You emerged the stronger for it, and in the end, you were able to answer that key research question that drove you to suffer for the sake of science.