Many thanks to a graduate student in my ANTH 601 course (no permission to name her) for sending me this link to something called “Uncyclopedia” and an entry simply titled “Anthropologist“:

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Anthropology

In my view, this is an emergent classic, and I expect we will see more of this in the future. For now, some memorable quotes for those not interested in reading the complete entry:

The difference between rich people who occasionally like to ‘slum it’ for a laugh, and anthropologists, is that anthropologists take notes.

Anthropology in the early days consisted largely of very overweight scholars reading the accounts of missionaries and adventurers and seeing if there were any patterns. They became known as the Armchair Scholars, because of their tendency to drop sheets of paper they were reading into the cushions of their armchairs occasionally, causing them to fish through the cushions and be humorously accused of studying the chair rather than the text.

Ethnography: The study of people by actually getting up off your ass and looking at them….The creation of ethnography has been widely documented as an attempt for socially awkward, unattractive, mousy pedants to gain free passage to a foreign country on the dollar of a taxpayer funder university in order to sleep with the young passport hunting girls of whichever exotic country they have chosen. This “scientific” study has been debunked by those who choose not to engage in a strange holding-pattern that is approximately between star-gazing and navel-watching and who do not believe in extreme forms of relativism which are lazily thrown out in serious debate in much the same way that a young child says “uh uh.”

Ethnology: Ethnography for the lazy. Involves trying to piece together things about a culture just by reading about it. Not dissimilar to writing fanfiction. Armchair optional.

Anthropology may be a career for you. However, since the recent research funding policy decision that health and medicine are the only topics social science need concern itself with, all future academic appointments will be in medical anthropology only. Sorry.

I encourage you to see the rest, and perhaps add a few gems of your own. For now, I think the “fanfiction” characterization is right on target.

As for mousy pedant…I am closer to the elephant end of the spectrum.