Of Beauty Queens and Vampires

I found myself in a Radisson hotel conference room at 11 pm listening to the emotional and spiritual benefits of drinking blood. My sister told me not to go alone--I didn’t tell my mother anything. But there I was, alone, in a room full of vampires. They call themselves Sanguinarians. These were people that you could meet on the street and you wouldn’t even suspect that they drank blood. In fact there is an entire multi-faceted subculture of Sanguinarians world-wide that meet via the Internet. It started out as a project for my freshman English class, but my anthropologist tendencies drove me to meet with the Sanguinarians. My fieldwork evolved into somewhat of an ethnography that I later presented in my anthropology classes. Recently, I was asked to give a lecture on the topic at the University of Otago in New Zealand while I was there for a research project. My mother nearly killed me when she eventually found out about the vampires.

Even more frightening than meeting vampires was when I participated in the Miss Utah USA pageant as Miss Provo.

The glaring stage lights flashed on, the music blared into existence. As I stood in the wings of the theater the thought flashed across my mind, “Holy crap! What in the world would motivate me to subject myself to this kind of embarrassment?” I pushed the thought aside as our cue came to the outdated, cheesy Ricky Martin song, The Cup of Life. The lyrics called out, “Do you really want it?” I and all the rest of the contestants screamed back, “Yeah!” “Do you really want it?” “Yeah!” as we strutted on the stage to perform the opening number dance for the Miss Utah USA 2009 beauty pageant. Albeit corny, the lyrics were true, we all desperately wanted that crown.

To this day I don’t know what made me decide to participate in a beauty pageant. I blame it on my craving for the exposure of things with which I am not familiar. But I learned a thing or two in the process. Besides how to cat-walk in a swimsuit, I learned how to stand up straight, how to write thank you cards for everything, how to get involved in the community, how to be a considerate and composed ambassador, and how to handle rejection gracefully. Once again my inner anthropologist commandeered and I turned my experience in the beauty pageant into an ethnography on the social construction of beauty. Participant-observation methodology to that degree is something I’m sure not a whole lot of anthropologists would ever be willing to do.

My experience among the vampires and beauty queens seemed crazy to others at the time. And to some people it probably still is. But to anthropologists these subcultures within society are enthralling. Whether you’re blood thirsty for a crown or just plain blood thirsty, it’s all part of how you construct your reality. Maybe I’m the crazy one--maybe anthropology is my calling in life. Whatever the case, I have the tenacity it takes to go where the average person hasn’t gone before. But next time, I’ll consider telling my mother first.