Do you have more trouble articulating your frame (social theoretical questions) or object?I am surprised to say that I have more trouble with my object. I think that during research design I thought that my questions were harder to articulate, and only the object seemed graspable. Since starting data collection, my questions have become trusted guide-lines in the dark, where my object seems to dissolve every time I try to hold it.Do you tend to project-hop or to stick to a project, and what explains this?I am a big-time project hopper. The essay on "dynamic objectivity" has helped me reflect on why I resist the expectation to self-identify with my object. I have often felt rebellious about penning myself in as a "medical anthropologist," "Mexicanist," or for that matter "ethnographer." I have tried to wrestle myself and my past/current projects into isometric alignment. I think might have been imagining the project-researcher relationship as one of domination or codependence. Keller's "dynamic autonomy" and "dynamic objectivity" articulate beautifully how that relationship has shifted. I have been able to relax a bit lately into a loving, autonomous, open and curious relationship with my project.• Do you tend to be more interested in internal dynamics, or external determinations? In the terms laid out by Keller, do you tend to focus so intently on the object of your concern that context falls away (i.e. are you obsessive compulsive, rather than paranoid)? Is your desire is to name, specify and control your object? Is your desire is for figure, its ground your annoyance? Or are you paranoid, context being your focus and obsession? All is signal. Only begrudgingly will you admit that something is noise, outside the scope of your project? Figure is hard to come by. Its ground has captured your attention.Can I be both? I am obsessive-compulsive in my writing, paranoid in my imagining my project as it could be/will be in the future. Everything seems important, and I struggle to pin it all down.• What do you do with unusual or counter examples? Are you drawn to “the deviant,” or rather repulsed by it?I love them, I focus on them, and I don't know what to do with them.• Do you tend to over-impose logics on the world, or to resist the construction of coherent narratives?Some of both, but a lot of the former. I crave order and am very, very skeptical of it. I want to make things fit, but as soon as it seems to, I am very suspicious of that coherency. • Do you tend to over-generalize, or to hold back from overarching argument?When I hold back from over-arching argument, I worry it is not enough. I prefer making arguments that disturb generalities so I can have my cake and eat it too. But these are not always satisfying.• Do you like to read interpretations different than your own, or do you tend to feel scooped or intimidated by them?I like them! I am a lot more distressed by my own interpretations. Others' interpretations make me curious and agile.• Do you tend to change an argument as you flesh it out, or do you tend to make the argument work, no matter what?I form arguments as a flesh them out. When I try to do otherwise (and I always do), I never fail to be frustrated. My argument is seldom what I think it is when I set out to make it.• Do you tend to think in terms of “this is kind of like” (metaphorically)? Do you hold to examples that “say it all,” leveraging metonymic thinking?I tend toward metaphors over metonyms. I think.• Do you like gaming understanding in this way? Does it frustrate you that your answers often don’t fit easily on either side of the binaries set up by the questions? (Jakobson suggests that over attachment to a simple binary scheme is a “continuity disorder.”)I like this, as long as/because I know it is all provisional.
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