A Manic Week of Cadence: Art and Self Ethnography

On election night, I got drunk. Really drunk. I had to get through that feeling of overwhelming despair in any way I could. I woke up the next morning with a pounding headache. But the dizziness as I stood up gave way to something else; it was something much stronger than any nausea. That feeling was mania! Before I’d even taken my pills, I was flashing like lightning through pages of paperwork and setting up connections with local organizations. I couldn’t sit still, even for a second. I couldn’t blink because I might miss some time in that brief darkness I could use to organize. I was no longer mad, really. More specifically, I wasn’t spiteful. Whether I was angry, whether I’m currently angry, I don’t know. But I do know now, as I did then, that my life is driven by love.

I finished an EP. In less than a week I wrote three songs. “YOU WILL NEVER”, “TAKE HER FROM ME”, “FUCKERS”. Cadence had been born long ago, but CADENCE, the album, was new. It’s a sequel to an EP I wrote in February, 2023 called Socialized Male. Nearly two years have passed since that original EP and many things about me have changed. I started hormones, I found a fulfilling path in life in anthropology, I found a social community I was so tied to. Cadence no longer represents an angsty feeling or longing. She’s alive and well, and she holds my hands when I struggle. You may have heard the phrase “death before detransition” before. It doesn’t mean that you’ll die rather than detransition, it means that no amount of violence can stop you from being who you are. Even if I were to die, Cadence wouldn’t leave my side. The name on my tombstone isn’t the name inscribed in my soul.

Something permanently changed in me that morning after election night. And something about me has permanently changed through my time in college. The more I’ve read in school, the more life I’ve lived outside it, the more I’ve hugged and cooked for and cherished my friends and partners, the more I’ve made art, the more I’ve realized that there’s something broken about specialization. The idea that all I have to learn and create from to be fulfilled is other anthropologists is absurd. The idea that there is some linear evolution for myself as a person or for anthropology as a discipline is absurd. I’ve reflected on what form “knowledge” should take. I started thinking about where I’ve really learned the lessons I apply to my writing and my ethnographies.

This semester, I undertook a massive project. After 28 pages and double digit hour long interviews, I completed an ethnography analyzing what success and diversity mean in my local fighting video game tournament community. I’m very proud of it, and I still have more proofreading and editing to do it with the help of my advisor. It’s the project I’m going to submit to graduate schools when I apply for my doctorate. It’s the work that will have the biggest impact on my economic status, on my ability to get a job. It required intense, long hours to create. It required a massive amount of background research and study of what other anthropologists have said and discovered.

But I’m not sure whether this project expresses more (or more effective) ethnographic information than CADENCE does. To be frank, I’m biased. Maybe I’m even a bad scientist. The ethnography project challenged many of my ideas, but it also proved my central hypothesis very strongly. I made a dense, scientific analysis of a community I’m close to, attempting to express the ways that the values of that community can have a positive impact on the rest of society. I want, maybe I even beg, the future readers of that paper to reflect on how they view competition in their lives. How they view happiness, hierarchy, diversity, communal support. Is that paper really the right way to do that? I think it’s effective. My advisor was very constructive and very impressed. But is it right?

Will I learn more about myself and my community and create change with that paper or with CADENCE? CADENCE is just a reflection of my life experience and experiences of those I love, after all. It is just as, if not more, impactful to express that knowledge in music as it is in scientific writing. I learned as many of my insights on human culture from a class on the history of board games as I have in classes devoted to anthropology. I learned as many of my insights on human culture from PLAYING board games with my friends and random strangers.

In the same way chemistry makes up all matter in the universe, anthropology makes up all human knowledge. Anthropology, that is the study of human culture, not the canon of anthropological works, should be required study in all fields. Anthropology as a segregated discipline that must provide its own knowledge is absurd as asking a chemist to make something from nothing. That absolutely does not mean anthropology should be defunded. No, it should be funded more. Much, much more. It should be funded so much that to ignore the way any field affects or is affected by human culture would be identical to throwing away a winning lottery ticket.

If you’ll pardon my unprofessionalism and perhaps my hasty generalization, moronic attempts at discrediting the idea of subjective cultural knowledge in the sciences like the Sokal Affair and the fact that humanities are always the first to go when shareholders or administrators or land owning senior citizens are unhappy reflects the primary reason this paradigm does not exist yet: right wing and capitalist ideology. If schools were forced to reckon with the idea that the way knowledge is created about the economy, the physical sciences, business, and everything else profitable is just as subjective and biased as any other field, they wouldn’t be a for profit company in the first place.

I believe that the work I’ve done on Cadence and CADENCE is just as valuable as anything I could publish in a journal. In a time where my very being is fetishized, hated, and beaten down by a broken society, I will continue to create ethnography, of myself and others. I will continue to create and express cultural knowledge and empowerment. I will continue to be biased, because ethnography serves much more of a purpose than just curiosity. It is the very essence of my being.

After a manic week of Cadence and CADENCE, a reminder: you will never take her from me, fuckers.