In the meantime, my professional metamorphosis accompanied a personal metamorphosis. I started to feel a certain discontent at home. Periodically, I get to feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I accumulate as a middle-class American. I sense that my home and possessions do not truly reflect who I am, my interests and the way I want to live, but rather who I was and the ways in which I used to live. Its been almost five years since I last moved, five years since my last major purging of stuff. And this time it was all those dusty old anthropology books on the shelf that lay in my cross hairs.

The physical presence of scholarly books on my shelf came to embody two emotional conflicts that I felt compelled to overcome.

The first, which doubtless you all share, is bibliophilia and the love of collecting. Books are wonderful things! Anthropology, with its esoteric leanings, produces some truly startling and doors-of-perception-opening works.  And this is to say nothing of the memories bound up in marginalia. The books that were gifts. The books I bought but never read. The books from that class with the professor I loved. The books from that class with the professor I hated. The book that made me say, “I want to write a book like this.” On and on and on.

All these things gather dust.

The second, which some will know but not all will acknowledge, is the book collection as totem. A symbol that represents professionalization. To a professional anthropologist a personal library is an indispensable tool for research, teaching, and socialization among peers. I am not a professional anthropologist, I am a professional librarian. These books are tools for a job I no longer perform. Yet, while my rational mind quickly comes to these logical conclusions, there is still a voice in the back of my head that says, “Maybe you will come back.” A voice that quickly changes to, “You ought to come back.” It’s hard to tune out self-doubt, you know? Especially after all the energy and resources poured into earning the credentials to be a professional anthropologist.

Sometimes I still drunk text anthropology, but let’s be honest. We’re not getting back together.

In the two weeks between the end of one job and the start of the next, I cleaned out my home office. Two laundry baskets of marked-up books DUMPED into the recycling bin. Two laundry baskets overflowing with photocopied articles and chapters outta here. I sold and gifted another thirty or so books to friends, colleagues, and former students. It broke my heart. Not quite as hard as cleaning my mother’s house after she died, but kinda like that. It bothered me on a psychic level. The whole process made me very grumpy, and for several weeks I couldn’t stop bickering with my wife. Finally, after the trash was gone and the cream was handed down to my fellow scholars, I loaded half a dozen banker boxes and hauled the clean copies to multiple used bookstores were I swapped what I could for vinyl records.

There’s still a lot to do. I still have yet to bury the remains of my dissertation field work. But, then, I still have a bin under my bed full of my mother’s mementos and she’s been gone almost seven years. Well, those are worries for another day and at least some progress was made. And look at these tidy shelves! It’s hard letting go, but I’m glad I did it.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Community Services Librarian for the public library in Suffolk, Virginia. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and has been blogging with Anthrodendum née Savage Minds since 2010.

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