Monday, November 15, 2010 

Does anyone remember "Neon" Deion Sanders? Of course you do! No, he wasn't always just the annoying person from the pre-game shows on Sunday. He used to be a really annoying person who played both professional football and baseball.


"Freeon" Deion Sanders could completely freeze up an offense's passing game back in the day. Here is Sanders in his trademark frost-colored suit.

In the early 1990s, Neion Deon was playing for both the the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and baseball's Atlanta Braves. His original NFL contract stipulated that he could play baseball through July , but then would have to devote himself solely to football from August onward. For this reason, Sanders missed out on post-season in 1991. In 1992, he reworked his contract to allow him to play in the post-season, and it was at this time that Sanders made sports history in an eye-grabbing but ultimately pretty insignificant way: dressing, but not playing, for two pro games in different sports in one day.

On October 11, 1992, Sanders played for the Falcons in a game against the Dolphins in Miami. He then flew to Pittsburgh, where the Atlanta Braves were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates in a playoff game. After arriving in Pittsburgh, Sanders was helicoptered to the stadium. Sanders dressed, and hoped to get in the game as a pinch-runner, but baseball history stopped at this point. He dressed, but didn't play.


Working in two fields, I can appreciate Deion's "dilemma." Too bad for Deion there were no "borderland" sports that he could have played. 

Memories of Sanders' love of two sports always strike a chord within me. Much like Deion, who was often chastised for playing two sports professionally, I've caught my fair share of flak for supposedly being neither a "real" Ottomanist or a "real" Russianist. Back when I was an MA student at Princeton, one of my professors tried to get me to drop Russian and take Arabic instead, while I was told more than once that my seeming direction towards Ottoman-Russian interests was "untenable." I had to "choose one field" and be either an Ottomanist or a Russianist. Fortunately for me, I was able to find an Islamic world position—because this "ambiguity" with respect to what region I'm supposed to be working on really was an issue whenever I was going up for a Russianist or Middle East job. The moral, as always: when riven by national or regional divisions, look to the Islamic world! Tayyip Erdogan would be proud.

Like Deion, I ignored the nay-sayers and followed my passions. Unlike Deion, however, I've never been given the opportunity to showcase some of my other talents in a music video.
 

Must be the funding! Deion explains why topics pertaining to Muslims have become popular of late in the field of Russian studies

Thinking in Deion

Anyway, the two professional associations that I belong to, MESA and ASEEES, both have their annual meetings the week before Thanksgiving. Usually, this means that I have to choose one over the other, except on those rare occasions when the two meetings overlap  meet in cities that are close to one another.

Such a coincidence occurred in 2008, when along with Norihiro Naganawa and Lale Can, I organized a panel on Muslim travelers between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. We took the panel on the road, doing it first in Philly at the Russia conference and then in DC at the Middle East conference. We had different discussants and chairs, but otherwise it was the same panel, and in doing so we made conference history. I think.


Back in 2008, my helicopter was a Chinese bus

In any case, this was the original "Neion-Deon" moment. And now this year I'll be doing something similar.

MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, is meeting this year in San Diego, while the ASEEES Russianists are meeting in Los Angeles over the same weekend.

On Friday morning I'm flying from Bozeman to LA, where I'll hang out all day and the next morning. On Saturday morning, I drive down to San Diego, where I'm chairing a panel at 5 pm. I'm staying in San Diego that night, then driving back up to LA Sunday morning for a panel that starts at noon. I'm staying in LA Sunday night, then flying out Monday morning.


Another Neion-Deon moment has arrived, sort of

So this is a bit Neion-Deon like, even if I'm not with the same panel or anything excitingly show-biz like that.

From "Triple Ass" to ASEEES

ASEEES, the Russianist group, used to be called AASSS. This was great, because we could call it "triple ass." Then, last year, AAASS started getting embarrassed by this mockery and decided to change the name of the organization to ASEEES: the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

The official reason for the change was that the old name, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, no longer seemed appropriate given the large number of non-Slavicists and non-Americans (not to mention all of the non-advancers!) involved in the society.

As someone who doesn't consider himself a "Slavicist," I welcomed the name change. Nevertheless, "ASEEES" is kind of generic. It's basically just a list of regions that are included in the field: Slavic studies, East European studies, and Eurasian studies.

I'm pretty sure the "Eurasian" part is supposed to refer to Muslim stuff, which is playing an increasingly large role in the field. For Russianists, it seems, you can't have Muslims without "Asia."

Anyway, I keep forgetting to call it "ASEEES," and keep wanting to call the organization by it's old name, "triple ass." Then I forget the new name altogether. It's not easy keeping track of all of these changes!

So I've taken to just calling the organization "Disco-roller-fishing," in honor of the new name's respect for solid categorization.


"Come on down to Ray's Russian, East European, and Eurasian Park. Muslim-oriented themes may be deposited in front of the "Eurasian" entrance." 

MESA vs. ASEEES: Clash of the Titans

MESA and ASEEES are pretty different from one another. MESA has always encouraged individual paper applications. In other words, you don't have to be part of a pre-arranged panel. If you don't have a panel, they'll try to put you together with other mavericks submitting something on their own.

As far as I know, nobody ever gets turned down from MESA. For this reason, it's pretty wide open. Sometimes the presentations can seem a bit half-baked (at least compared to the more professional, but more cautious, stuff at AAASS) , but it's often more provocative and interesting for that reason, too.


MESA is usually pretty fun, if sometimes half-baked

At MESA, I especially like going to the more "borderlandy" type of panels. Working on Muslims in Russia has made me a lot more interested in the Ottoman periphery than I used to be.

At ASEEES, by contrast, there is more participation by more senior scholars. Until recently, all of the panels were pre-arranged, and individual papers still constitute a very small part of the program. So topics tend to be a bit more seasoned and vetted, but also usually seem a bit more conventional. There's also a smaller number of panel topics that strike me as interesting, since a big part of the conference is devoted to non-interdisciplinary literature and Chechnya-pipeline type security-policy stuff. The security-policy stuff can be interesting, but there's usually much more of it on offer than I'm willing to sit through, while the literature stuff unfortunately doesn't usually engage historians or people in other fields. ASEES is different , I think, from MESA in this respect. At MESA, a lot of the literary stuff looks at politics, history, and cross-cultural interaction, while the security-policy stuff is there but not quite so dominant.

Personally, I tend to draw somewhat better audiences at ASEEES than at MESA. At MESA, people working on say, the Arab or Balkan periphery won't come to my panels. I tend to get pan-Turkist types, folks who are basically just interested in issues pertaining to Turkic communities in Russia.  At ASEEES, on the other hand, there always seems to be a fair bit of interest in the stuff that I do. Indeed, as I talked about in an article last year, issues pertaining to the imperial borderlands and Islam in Russia have become more popular, even fashionable, in Russian studies lately. That, I suppose, is why we get recognized in the society's new name ("put your hands together for Eurasia!").

Ultimately, I think most conferences are fun and useful largely to the extent to which one can see old friends and make new ones. In this respect, both conferences are usually pretty cool.

Even if I don't get my own helicopter.
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