The Search for A Point

I think I found A Point to my PhD. Maybe not The Point, but having just A Point is the goal of everyone's PhD, and generally people don't find it until the last few months before their deadline. Then they have to go back and rewrite things to make The Point. But that's fine, because they're so thrilled that they found The Point (or even A Point!).

My Point came through a very clichéd moment of discovery - jogging around Parker's Piece in the early morning fog. I was thinking about a talk I'll give in January to the Cabinet of Natural History, the seminar that I love and that I was in charge of last year. My talk is on my Chapter 4, which is about the fact that preparators emphasize how "creative" and artistic their work is. I'm only in the middle of Chapter 3, but I've been looking forward to writing Chapter 4 for seriously like a year. Making fossils as artistic! Like sculptors making sculptures! That's such a cool idea! And so unexpected.

Anyway, I was thinking about why preparators would want to present their work and themselves as creative, and my sweaty brain decided that it was all about status. Preparators don't have formal training or credentials, so they have to claim their expertise somehow... why not by presenting themselves as creative and their work as dependent on their artistic skills? That makes them sound irreplaceable, even though they don't have credentials to make them look legit.

If a quest for legitimacy makes preparators self-identify as creative, then maybe it also drives other parts of their behavior... like how they choose their techniques (Chapter 1) and how they train new staff preparators and volunteer preparators (Chapter 2) and how they interact with other groups of people who work with fossils (Chapter 3). Defining themselves as responsible for making good choices among a huge variety of possible techniques, training new preparators to be self-sufficient but also to ask lots of questions so that the existing staff's way of doing things continues, distinguishing preparation from the arguably similar work done by researchers and collections managers and conservators, and presenting the quality of prepared fossils as reliant on their creativity which is shaped by their preparation experience... makes them look like experts and professionals. 

Who needs a degree in paleontology if you construct a world in which experienced preparators have crucial knowledge and skills that no one else has? Such that preparators don't have to fear being replaced by volunteer preparators or people off the street who have never prepared before but might have a degree in paleo?

Bam.
(For now... in a few months I might think this is a ridiculous idea and my PhD will again be Pointless.)