Qualifying Exams.

I'm not the first person ever to do exams, but you'd swear I was given how much I've been complaining about them. Essentially, the problem is that I'm afraid of hard work.

Four weeks to read over 80 items, including 36 full books, followed by 5 days in which to write 2 essays on questions emailed to me by my committee members. Then, an oral exam in front of my committee. I made it as hard on myself as possible by having been a lazy swine for the last couple of years. Everything on the list I should probably have already read, but hadn't. The reading list was split into three sections: Nation, Nationalism and the Politics of the State; Colonialism, Postcoloniality and Race; The Military and Masculinity. I read most of the list... but not all of it. The questions I got from my committee came out of left field, to whit: "What distinctive contribution, in your critical view, has anthropology made to the theorization of (i)modernist nationhood, (ii) the politics of the modernist state, and (iii) the hyphenation of the modernist nation-state?"

Er.... what??

I don't know how, but I got the two essays done, turned in on time, and then went in early on Monday morning for the oral. It started well: I killed a silverfish on the wall and asked if killing the beast was the test, and had I passed? Laughs all round, but no, that wasn't the test... One of my committee told us a story about how, during a job talk, a rabid squirrel had emerged from a fireplace and had attacked the faculty members interviewing her. Another committee member told us of how, in the middle of a lecture to 150 students, the departmental secretary had burst into the hall to tell him that his wife had called to demand he return home and rescue her from the squirrel that had invaded their kitchen. More laughs. But, eventually, we got down to brass tacks, and I waffled on for a couple of hours about the state, the military, Fiji, war memorials, race, the nation, the liberal subject, and something I fancifully called "generalized death."

After a while they got sick of me, and asked me wait outside. When they emerged, they told me I'd passed, and that I should immediately get started on the next phase, the departmental proposal. Oh, brilliant yeah, cheers, I'll get right on that! Amy was waiting outside, so we left to celebrate.