"So ... what do you study?"
This question has become harder for me to answer now that I am a professor.
Graduate students on the job market must know how to answer this question. There are a lot of graduate students out there, and not a lot of jobs. As a result, convincing a department that you are a good "fit" with them is vital. When it comes to fit, what you study is important. But even more important may be how you tell people you study it. Are you the kind of person who can describe their work quickly and succinctly? Are you aware of how much "stretch" is built into your project but unwilling to profess to be an expert in whatever it is a department is interested in? Are you the flame, or the moth?
As a graduate student I had an answer to the question of "what do you study?" Several, in fact. In professionalization seminars and over beer at parties, my fellow students and I practiced the art of "telescoping." We carefully honed our intellectual lives into one-sentence sound bites. (Mine was "I study mining and indigenous people in Papua New Guinea.") I have entire paragraphs -- both academic and for "regular people" -- ready to go on autopilot in case people wanted to know more.
We had other versions as well: the one-page cover letter we sent out for job applications. The 10-page summary that served as the base for our grant applications. The 45-minute talk that was meant to be delivered on a campus visit. But the most extended, un-telescoped answer to the "what do you study" question was, of course, the dissertation itself.
The dissertation is the holy grail of "what do you study." However, none of us are Sir Percival. Writing the perfect dissertation is not the process of obtaining the unobtainable. It is the process of learning to settle for the dissertation you've got instead of That Big Dissertation In The Sky. Remember the scene in Indiana Jones And The Holy Grail where Indy is on the edge of a chasm reaching backwards to the grail just out of his reach, but is gently persuaded by his father, Sean Connery, to let it go? Writing a dissertation is like that.
An intensely narcissistic document, the "what do you study" of the dissertation offers a psychological knot that can never be particularly untied. Isn't what I'm saying obvious? Is it possible for me to say anything new or interesting? Is there an article out there I've missed that has already explained all this? Is my work any good at all?
Now, it's true that some of the old grad student tricks still apply. No one on my dissertation committee coddled me, but none of them were so insane that they revealed to me the heart-breaking truth: The dissertation is actually just the rough draft for your first book. So when asked "what you've been up to" as a young faculty member, you always have the option to just tell people "I'm working on my manuscript."
However, if the life of the mind is a peanut M&M, then the dissertation is undoubtedly the nut. Now that I am a professor, however, I find my intellectual interests have been coated in a thick coating of rich, delicious chocolate. Whereas people once cared about my specialty, they are now much more interested in all of the extra stuff I learned along the way.
The role of the student, I'm learning, is to produce specialized knowledge, while the role of the professor is to pass on general information. People used to ask me what my dissertation was about, but now they want to know how broadly I can stretch in my teaching and advising.
There are many reasons that people are interested in the periphery, rather than the core, of a new professor's stock of knowledge. The first is the inevitable responsibility of all newly-hired profs: teaching intro courses. After five years of extremely dedicated research I find myself teaching intro courses in which I am explaining stuff I last thought about when I was 19. Being thrown back to anthropology 101 is not a bad experience, but it is disconcerting to have to zoom all the way out to the big picture after so many years of illuminating one particular corner of it.
Other teaching responsibilities, while close to the "nut" of what I study, are still definitely in the "chocolate" realm. As a result of my dissertation work I think I could reasonably pass myself of as an "expert" in one or even two ethnic groups adjacent to the one I wrote on. But as a professor, people look to you to teach more general courses. No one wants a course on "Comparative Ethnography of Enga Province." They want courses on "peoples of the Pacific" or "political anthropology" or even "ethnicity". How does living for two years in Papua New Guinea license me to teach a class on a concept that began in archaic Greece and now includes phenomenon as diverse as the Harlem Renaissance and Borat? I feel competent? No. Having focused for so long on the hard center of what I study I have trouble teaching in "my chocolate zone."
I'm not complaining -- I realize that this is just a hang-up that new prof