Monday, July 23, 2012

The Written Word: Day Job Version

I remember the first time I said, "I am an anthropologist" rather than "I study anthropology." Despite a summer of fieldwork in Belize, I didn't make the linguistic shift until after I moved to Texas to start my PhD work. It just sort of fell out of my mouth one day. I am sure I looked more startled than the inquiry into my line of work demanded. Around the same time, I stopped referring to my reading and writing as "homework" and settled on just plain "work." This occasionally creates confusion for acquaintances, as I also hold down a non-academic job. The thing about "being" an anthropologist is that it never turns off.


During the daylight hours, I work as an entry-level bureaucrat for the City. It is my job to check that candidates have filed Schedule Zs and to help citizens find the section of the code that applies to fence heights and barking dogs. Thrilling. In some future post, I'll brag about how, despite the mundaneity, my workplace is very supportive of my academic pursuits. Today, however, I was validating a petition. In fact, just about everyone in my office has been working on this petition for the last week.


For those not versed in the intricacies of local government, in order to have an issue placed on a ballot, a petition has to be circulated and so many people must sign saying, "Yes, we want to vote on this." The petition must be validated before the process can move forward. On a practical level, someone has to check. Luckily, we use a random sample rather than going through name by name. For a petition with 30,000 signatures, 7,500 voters have to be run through a database verifying that they are registered voters. This takes days and is deadly dull. On the bright side, I can now unequivocally say I have been involved in large-scale data collection and analysis on a quantitative level I never imagined possible.


Interestingly, there are only two things that automatically disqualify an entry - lack of signature and a date more than 180 days before the petition was turned in. I have been thinking a lot about literacy and its role in our society. The signature becomes a testament, the written word standing in for someone's civic identity. It is my job to test the veracity of that symbol. It is not that someone agrees with the proposition, but rather than the fact that they endorsed it; they touched that very paper. Despite the fancy electronic data storage we have, it is *that* piece of paper which stands up in court. Talk about a fetish.


I imagine the relationships of the people who have signed, whether they knew the others signing around the same time, what location they may have been at. I read into the neatness of their addresses or the sprawl of their signatures their beliefs about identity and location. I can see patterns in names based on birth dates. People tend to write their first names more clearly than their last, perhaps because that is how they are primarily called?


I was just resoundingly reminded that my academic obsession with writing things down did not spring like Athena from the head of Zeus but is rather situated in this particular time and place. In a litigious society, doubt is cast upon whether someone's word is their bond, but the talisman of the signature still holds sway. It is a mark, saying, "I was here."


Then I think of all the petitions I've signed in haste, just to appease the earnest volunteers. I usually go with the whole "it's always better to vote on something than not" approach. Is the scribble across the signature line a display of conviction or people just going about their lives with two minutes to spare at the grocery store? The written word is polysemic and not uncomplicated, although the urge to reduce it to some objective truth is there. It was written down, so it must be somehow more real or more true.


Never able to turn off being an anthropologist. Now I look forward to checking thousands of more signatures.

1 comment:

  1. "The petition must be validated before the process can move forward. On a practical level, someone has to check. Luckily, we use a random sample rather than going through name by name. For a petition with 30,000 signatures, 7,500 voters have to be run through a database verifying that they are registered voters. This takes days and is deadly dull."

    I am shocked to my *core* that this isn't automated.

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