Last week as Kerim, Oneman, and I were having cigars and brandy in the ultra exclusive Savage Minds Gentlemen’s Society and the topic of Barack Obama and his anthropology connection came up, and Kerim eventually convinced me to share my Obama/Anthropology connection.
As many of you know, Obama is “from Hawai’i”:http://www.barackobama.com/learn/meet_barack.php and attended the elite prep school “Punahou”:http://www.punahou.edu/page.cfm?p=534. What some people may not be aware of is that Barack Obama’s mother, Anne Dunham, was a Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, where I teach. Her dissertation advisor, “Alice Dewey”:http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/faculty/dewey/ has long been a mainstay of the department, mentoring tons of students and liberally distributing lemons from the tree in her yard to faculty, staff, and grad students alike. Dunham herself wrote a massive dissertation on “blacksmiths in Java”:http://uhmanoa.lib.hawaii.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&ti=1,1&SAB1=ann%20dunham&BOOL1=all%20of%20these&FLD1=Author%20Name%20%28NKEY%29%20%28NKEY%29&GRP1=AND%20with%20next%20set&SAB2=&BOOL2=all%20of%20these&FLD2=Keyword%20Anywhere%20%28GKEY%29%20%28GKEY%29&GRP2=AND%20with%20next%20set&SAB3=&BOOL3=all%20of%20these&FLD3=Keyword%20Anywhere%20%28GKEY%29%20%28GKEY%29&CNT=25&PID=II5Oj_bwDGdPumhvfYFR3odn&SEQ=20080108081912&SID=2
We in the anthropology department have made a decision to respect the privacy of Alice, Obama’s family, and everyone else, so I won’t be blogging the intimate details of the case here. But just for the record, if you were wondering why “Obama is hip to Margaret Mead”:http://www.salon.com/politics/roadies/2007/11/28/obama_vignette/index.html?source=search&aim=/politics/roadies now you know.
I was wondering about that, but I was too lazy to do the background checking myself. I figured that one of his parents had to have been a UH grad or prof of some flavor. I wonder, did she ever take him along on field trips?
Does Prof. Dewey still teach kinship? I need a course in kinship pretty badly, and since Prof. Young-Leslie left I am unsure who to take it from.
Is Obama’s mother related to Katherine Dunham “the dancing anthropologist”?
Obama’s (first!) autobiography _Dreams from my Father_ discusses his youth in Hawaii and abroad in detail. He and his mother in fact spent several years in Indonesia – I don’t know if he went into ‘the field’ with her as such, but it was clearly a formative experience for him.
Valter: No.
Fascinating. Does anyone know if Obama ever took any anthropology classes in college?
It is rumored that Bush the Lesser took an anthropology class with Margaret Mead while at Yale (she apparently agreed to come up from NYC to teach one class). He no doubt worked hard for his gentlemen’s C. Nevertheless, it stretches the imagination to think that Bush is hip to Margaret Mead.
Here is the offical word from UH about learning more about Obama’s UH connection:
“All questions should be addressed directly to Jan Heu, Director of Admissions, at 956-7408. They will only be giving out limited information already available to the public because of numerous privacy issues.”