Is it too late to become a plumber?

It's all well and good to have a nice display of bifacials and hand axes, but the people of Ohio want more bang for their buck. What? You say you also know the dental formula for the Lemur? You know all about Linnaeus and Darwin? You can draw a kinship diagram for the Bantu AND the Yanomami??! Surely these are marketable skills. Surely any company worth its weight in field notes would scramble to add you to their payroll.

Surely...not.

It's a rude awakening, I assure you. To jump through the many fiery hoops of hell in grad school and then find that in the great big wide world your trade is a tad too esoteric to be applied to the labor market in any meaningful way is...well it's surprising.

But why surprising? Did you really buy that line that Anthropology is an exciting career choice with many a lucrative prospect at the end of the road? Did you also believe that should you fail to "apply" those much sought after anthropological skills in the real world, you could slip into a cushy ivory tower position somewhere in New Hampshire? The fact is, the point of anthropology is to generate more anthropologists (should you snag that coveted tenured gig, like the one sperm who gets through), but otherwise the profession has gone the way of the gentleman farmer. If you have independent means, why it's a nice diversion and will make you a big ticket item at suburban cocktail parties. If, however, you foolishly embarked upon a career in anthropology to EARN A LIVING, well...you were kind of fooling yourself, don't you think?

Now I know you're all thinking: But what of The Naked Archaeologist?? What of all of those sound bites we've seen on Discovery Channel documentaries, and for chrissakes the occasional CNN special interest blurb? Many an anthropologist has been dusted off and called upon to lend credence or an aura of erudite expertise to any given number of televised shows. And while I've never been called upon to say "Yes, Ardipithecus is an extraordinary find that will change the way in which we study human evolution," I don't need to be called upon to know that it's not enough to pay the rent.

Having said all of that, I applaud any discipline for which the only goal is pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and self-indulgent exploration of exotic locales. But that's why we have travel agents, when you get down to it. You should be an anthropologist on your own time, and not drag our economy further down the slimy tubes of depression.