Navigating doctoral socialisation in Anthropology KATHERINE NIELSEN AND ELI THORKELSON Ethnographers have constructed contradicting assertions, and indeed as- sumptions, about the nature of learning, how it is best accomplished, and how students internalise this learning in order to form both individualised and collective identities. Are the rites of passage, so often described in analy- ses of postgraduate socialisation – the oral examinations, the viva voce, the departmental seminar, or graduation ceremony – the only routes available for understanding how anthropological culture is inculcated into students? Is the role of the supervisor as mentor pivotal in the successful completion of a Ph.D? Or is this more of a master/apprentice relationship? Does this process maintain its relevance in a globalised field and with instant virtual access to experts from other institutions anywhere in the world? Such issues have been of interest to both students and faculty within the anthropology discipline, in particular, and the social sciences more generally. This project began originally in summer 2006, in the U.S.A., with a call for papers circulated by email to the U.S. National Association of Student Anthropologists and to many U.S. anthropology departments. At the time, there were three project organisers, all doctoral candidates: Eli Thorkelson at the University of Chicago, Amy Levine at Cornell University, and Saul Mer- cado at UC-Berkeley. Their proposal was very open-ended, asking people to ‘reflect on your socialisation as graduate students and anthropologists’, with no limits on format or genre. They got a fair amount of encouraging corre- spondence, with some seventeen people initially proposing to write essays and an equal number wanting to remain involved in some other fashion. They asked all the writers to circulate essay abstracts to the whole group, and requested that all the participants comment on the set of abstracts, in hopes of generating collaboration and dialogue among a quite diverse crowd. That did not work: faced with an open-ended discussion and a loose timeline, most of the participants simply chose not to respond. Amy Levine and Eli Thorkelson were both familiar with forms of par- ticipatory action research and pedagogy advocated by anthropologists like Learning and Teaching Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2012: 1–9 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10.3167/latiss.2012.050101 ISSN 1755-2273 (Print), ISSN 1755-2281 (Online)