Reason, passion, and courage: these are the traits Gerry Berreman argued an anthropologist needed to address the problems of our times. These traits are as important now as they were when he wrote this forty-five years ago in Current Anthropology. He advised that anthropologists needed moral sensibilities and not just technical proficiencies to recognize the implications of our research. We needed to be involved with public policy. We needed to be responsible. We still need to be all of these things.

“Our professional obligation is to present what we know and the inferences we draw from our knowledge as clearly, thoughtfully, and responsibly as we can. This is a value position with practical and humane consequences and with scientific legitimacy.”

Anthropological champion of social responsibility, of a clear, ethical stance, and of scientific as well as political accountability, Gerald Berreman passed away on 23 December 2013 at age 83. He received his PhD at Cornell University in 1959, and then spent his entire four-decade teaching career at the University of California at Berkeley; click here to read the department’s moving tribute to Professor Berreman, including remembrances from Lawrence Cohen and Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

The 21^st century is not the era of Vietnam and yet many of the same issues remain with us. Berreman argued that the unconventional times of the late 1960s, of U.S. military and political events with world-wide consequences, called for an “unconventional anthropology,” including “unconventional responsibility for our acts, be they acts of commission or omission.”

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, as well as in other sites of U.S. empire around the world, there are familiar examples of U.S. military and political acts with wide-reaching consequences. I like to think that in the last four decades much of anthropology has moved in the directions advocated by Gerry Berreman and so many other scholars in the time of Vietnam (and since). And yet, his hope that “those days of anthropologists collaborating with government and military are gone forever I think” has not quite come true. Questions of funding, ethical commitment, and social inequality, as well as of how to be involved responsibly, to critique empire, and to move beyond anthropology as simply the announcement of knowledge remain with us. Some of these issues are particularly linked to the U.S.A., but at core remain questions at the heart of the discipline everywhere.

So, is anthropology dead or alive? Gerald Berreman argued for vitality: “Anthropology isn’t dead; it is just that many of its more nostalgic practitioners do not want to get involved.”

Be vital. Be involved. RIP Gerald Berreman, 1930-2013.

[Want to keep reading? In writing this piece, I re-read two classic articles by Gerald Berreman and highly recommend both: (1) “Is Anthropology Alive? Social Responsibility in Social Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 9(5), December 1968, pp. 391-396, and (2) ““Bringing It All Back Home:” Malaise in Anthropology,” in Dell Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.]

If you are interested in learning more about Berreman, you may want to check out two of his better-known articles, both of which have been posted online at his website: “Anemic and Emetic Analyses in Social Anthropology” and “Is Anthropology Alive? Social Responsibility in Social Anthropology“. We have a new generation of anthropologists who know not Berreman, not this influential work doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.