Google has this "team" thing pre-written, and since I, like many humans, often lack creativity, why not say someting about Team? Who is, or was, Team here at Rancho Provisional, Inc.? Officially, as a business-in-the-process, just me. But there has been Team: folks who did the hard work of hanging out with me, doing ethnographic things, inviting me to their Team.
Team who? Too many to count. I should do this alphabetically or something. I'll doubtless leave people out by mistake (or, worse, sloth). Like DP, whose actual name I can't find anywhere because I suck at organizing my notes and I lost about a year of the damn things in a computer fuck up some time ago. DP is short for Director of Photography. That was his nickname. We met thanks to Geezer, a nickname for an anthropologist in London. Geezer is Lucy Nieland, who is unafraid to continue doing trustworthy ethnographic things, about women and stigma, for example. DP is a filmmaker in New York (or where, now?) who helped out with a vanity project in London for me and the late singer/songwriter Gao Feng, an old friend and lover of mine, big-time-China-Team back when China was still crazy fun. Gao's death from HIV marked the first public person in China to be stricken by that particular pandemic. Ran into DP in the Madison Square Garden subway station one evening in the last century. We went out for Korean food. What a blast and what an artist. He had an unforgettably small bathtub in the kitchen of his Hell's Kitchen apartment.
Other filmmakers of note who let me Team for more practical ethnographic film things include Bruno Moynié, one of the best in the business, a superb hand with a kit, a fine editor and a genuine researcher (and a hoot); Tessa Jones, who now directs the Ipsos Ethnography Center of Excellence (fancy!) but who I wish were making more films instead, because she is a genius. Jason Eng, who drove a brilliant ethnographer (Jo Yung) pretty crazy in China for a while on one too-large international research project, then they got married. These things happen. He's a photographer and filmmaker, and when Jo is not watching, he's been known to climb mountains and drive around the Hi Lo with me. Some of his work is in that little slide deck on this site, of course.
Jo Yung, by the way, is a dear friend and Team ethnographer: right up there with Patti Sunderland, Rita Denny, Louise Lamphere, and Don Stull. (Look them up: I can't put links on everyone's name because it's too damn late, already). Shit is something Jo does not put up with, especially from me but also from a certain market researcher from P&G who didn't know their behind-the-glass-focus-group-ass from the bus ride that actually might have taught them something. Adding adjectives to suggest who among Team was the best at this oddball kind of work, this science/art ethnography stuff, is kind of dumb: like the Zen fellow said, the Great Way is easy, but it dislikes choosing. Anyhow, a big software outfit hired Jo, and they'd better treat her right, because a certain energy behemoth didn't, and they should be sorry that she told them, in so many words, to eat shit and die (but politely, of course). Jo helped me learn a little about China, which is actually impossible, because it's China for Christ sake. So did Ming Cheng, who ended up at the Defense Language Institute and eventually teaching at a fancy Military Graduate Program who deserves a hot husband (if one has yet to find him: I'm not sure) and a big smooch for Team.
No smooches for Tenshin Fletcher, Roshi, at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center, though, because you don't generally smooch your Zen Master. For Roshi, just a gassho—a bow—because koan study is just this life, anyhow, and eventually I may be taught not to fuck up at Sōtō Zen Team service quite so much. Or not.
Martin Hoyem, who wrote a dissertation in Norway with the fearless title: "I Want My Car To Look Like a Whore: Low Riding and Poetics of Outlaw Aesthetics," thus earning what looks like a Ph.D. in anthropology, but in Norwegian. (It used to be called a Hovedfagsoppgave; I had to look that up). Martin is an artist who let me Team; an ethnographer who is not shy about asking (and writing about) the tough ethical questions, like, why the fuck is working with fast food companies so damn depressing? Ask him about fjords, if you can find him: he may be hiding out beneath a retreating glacier, under a roof made of turf, with his spouse and kids.
Mike Agar. Don Stull. Ethnographer Steve Hagelman and Kansas City's Donna-Dress-Shop Artist and Entrepreneur Donna. Lou Heib. David Graeber (okay, I didn't meet David but he actually answered my emails and inspired plenty of anarchists and anthropologists, alike, without prejudice against us applied folks). Love all those humans because even if they rarely knew they were Team, they made me feel like I was on theirs. (I never got picked in grade school for Team-anything, so that Team feeling matters, still). And Daishin Julian Orr, who wrote The Book on Xerox repair people and in so doing made human-computer interaction folks re-think a lot of important thoughts and maybe even change the way work actually happens. Julian and our mutual Team pal Ken Anderson (yes, the amazing Ken Anderson who published a sweet piece in that damn Harvard B School review which helped a ton of Anthropologists get actual work and feed their families)—those two make a hella-great Team for Teaming. Especially when food and gossip and laughter about how silly anthropology actually is are Teamed.
And of course, Team Elizabeth Briody, whose compassion is only matched by her ability to work harder and smarter than anyone else—except maybe some of the senior cowgirls here in the Hi Low. Without Team Elizabeth (who let me do Team workshop and writing), I'd never have even looked at the University of South Carolina, and wouldn't have had a shot at finding the combination of coin and balls to escape that very place. Thanks to EB, Ms. Cornay, rancher and cowgirl extraordinaire for four score years, is really whose Team I'm on, with Ms. Abby, another of that ilk, and several others hereabouts right now and right here in the Hi Lo).
U of SC's B School Team is something of a hot mess, bless their hearts, but it can't help itself: it's in a University. They should have been more helpful to Michael Murphrey, whose Team I was glad to be on, because he deserved tenure, IMHO, but he's happier in Australia, anyhow. Also, U of SC is still home to some very smart and kind people in the B School who, once up on a time anyhow, understood that business could be about more than neoliberal dollars. Dr Kendall Roth, for one, and Mme. Beth Busby (who did more teaching as an admin than most of the theorists in that place) still have it right. They let me on their Team, which I hardly deserved.
A business school wasn't in the plan, by the way, but this girl's gotta buy boots.
So there you have it. The Team. Or some of the Team. Innumerable other teachers and friends and kin are also Team but this is already a bit much, and I'm supposed to be drafting some house plans for an engineer who doesn't do well at returning phone calls, but I need a fucking PE stamp from their Team or I'll never get this damn house built.
7/29/2023
Capulin, NM