Ben was born on 1 October 1933 in Southern California, the son of a Navy man. Ben was part of the ‘silent generation’ of people born between the wars, such as Frederik Barth and Marshall Sahlins: Too young to serve in WWII, but too old to be a baby-boomer. He began surfing in 1953, and earned a BA from Berkeley in History, Economics, and Anthropology in 1955. Ben spent at least part of 1956 in Tahiti, surfing and learning French, and the rest of it working in Southern California’s aerospace industry, at places like Kaiser Steel and General Dynamics. He then did a stint in the Navy in 1957 and 1958, staying in the reserves until 1965.

In 1958 Ben went back to school, moving to Honolulu to begin an MA in anthropology. At UH Mānoa Ben worked with Katherine Luomala (her name was Finish, not Hawaiian) who wrote a thesis on Maui in 1936 with Alfred Kroeber. Luomala, a folklorist and mythologist, was a fixture in the department — she had arrived in 1946, taught Finney in the late 1950s, and was still teaching when he arrived as a professor in the early 1970s! Finney’s committee also included O.A. Bushnell and Ken Emory.

Finney’s 1959 M.A. thesis was on surfing — already a passion of his — and entitled “Hawaiian Surfing: A Study of Cultural Change”. The MA was inspired by Alexander Lesser’s The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand-Game, no doubt given to him by Luomala. Lesser’s ground-breaking work had studied the diffusion of a culture trait, as Boasians before him had done. But traditional culture trait distributions merely mapped out the distribution of a trait in space. Lesser traced the Ghost Dance Hand-Game developed historically, using the story of its distribution to tell the saga of the United State’s ruthless colonization of Pawnee lands and their subsequent removal.

Ben’s MA followed a similar path, looking at surfing as a cultural complex that had changed as moved through time and across space. Working with Mary Pukui, he reconstructed surfing in old Hawai‘i. He also studied the contemporary surfing scene. His MA is incredibly impressive, with maps of traditional and contemporary surf spots, diagrams of board shapes, photos of contemporary surfers, and rich historical and ethnographic detail. It was also extraordinarily long — 159 pages. Ben was to publish many pieces on surfing over the years, perhaps the most well-known being his 1966 book Surfing: Sport of Hawaiian Kings, co-authored with James Houston (new editions have a different sub-title). Today the history of surfing is a huge field undertaken by surfers, local historians, and professors. But Ben was there at the founding, doing something that would become typical of him: Taking something seriously because he was passionate about it, and proving to the world that it had far greater depth and importance than some would imagine. Today surfer-scholars like Ian Masterson, Jérémy Lemarié and many others (I apologize for not naming them all here) continue his legacy.

For his Ph.D., Ben went from Mānoa to Harvard, where he worked under Doug Oliver, one of the major institutional forces in Pacific anthropology at the time. Oliver was running the “Harvard Society Islands Project”, a multi-researcher study examining social change and economic development in French Polynesia. Between 1961 and 1963 Finney studied “Polynesian peasants and proletarians” comparing a group of farmers (the peasants) and a group of wage laborers (the proletarians) to see how their lives changed with the advent of the cash economy. He earned a Ph.D. in 1964. This research was published in condensed form in a long article in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in 1965, and then in several shorter papers. The book-length version, which incorporates this earlier work and more material from visits to the field in 1965, 1968, and 1970, was published as Polynesian Peasants and Proletariats in 1973.

After earning his Ph.D. Ben returned to Southern California, where he took a position as an assistant professor in the anthropology department there and, no doubt, spent a lot of time in the water. These were the golden years of expansion in higher education, when baby boomers were swelling enrollments and people with Ph.D.s were in short supply.  Ben was perfectly positioned to get precisely the job he wanted back in his native southern California. It was here in Santa Barbara that Ben returned to the topic of voyaging. At Mānoa Luomala had introduced him to an unanswered question in Pacific history: How did people get to Pacific islands in the first place? Some argued that they had sailed there knowingly, on good ships and using excellent navigational skills. But this seemed impossible given the distances involved. Others argued that Polynesian voyagers drifted aimlessly, or arrived on islands by chance after shipwreck. But this seemed impossible given the distances involved. The argument was at an impasse.

Ben had the solution: Why not rebuild a Hawaiian double-hulled canoe and see how well it sailed? In what we would today call a piece of ‘experimental archaeology’ Ben and his collaborator Steve Horvath got an NSF grant and built Nālehia (so named by Mary Pukui) to test how well it sailed. The answer was: pretty good. This suggested that Polynesians did not get to remote islands by chance. The next step, which Ben described to the NSF in his initial grant proposal, was to get good enough at sailing the canoe that he could actually take it from Hawai‘i to Tahiti.

But before Ben could return to this project, his attention was diverted. In 1967 Ben received a Fulbright award to go to Australia, where he joined the New Guinea Research Unit, a part of the Australian National University. Between February and August 1967 he conducted fieldwork in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, of the Trust Territory of New Guinea (what would become the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, or PNG).  His topic was local entrepreneurs’ participation in cash cropping. Australian colonialism in PNG was quite mild compared to colonial regimes elsewhere. In Goroka indigenous people were being encouraged to become entrepreneurs, growing and selling coffee and other crops, and the took to these practices eagerly. They were, it seemed, “pre-adapted” to capitalism, with a strong, culturally-specific drive to excel.

For Ben, Goroka must have seemed like heaven. Tahitians, he saw, were “vulnerable” (or “precarious” as we would say today) to economic and imperial power. Their traditions and customs were being eroded by capitalism, leaving them depressing lives of work on plantations and in town. In PNG, in contrast, it appeared that economic development and traditional culture were leading hand-in-hand towards development (btw Goroka’s future was not as rosy as Ben predicted, and Tahiti’s was not so dire). In addition to an open access report based on this research, New Guinean Entrepreneurs Ben’s fullest statement of this research can be found in his 1973 book Big Men and Business. His then-wife, Ruth Finney, also produced a report entitled Would-be Entrepreneurs? A Study of Motivation in New Guinea  which deserves to be read as well.

Ben continued on as a research fellow at ANU’s Department of Pacific History until 1970, when he took a position as an associate professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Hawai‘i had been made a state in 1959 and the 1960s were a time of tremendous economic growth and development (or, depending on how you look at it, settler colonialism and dispossession). High rise tourist hotels rose up in Waikīkī and former farm land was converted into housing. Development and tourism replaced plantation agriculture as the central movers of the economy. The University of Hawai‘i grew at a tremendous pace during this period, strengthened by federal funding of science. According to Bion Griffin’s history of the anthropology department, Ben arrived after the politics of tenure, promotion, and the Vietnam war shredded the department. Dick Lieban had been appointed as chair from outside the department. I imagine Ben arrived as an attempt to bring the department back on track. He must have been seen as an incredibly promising mid-career scholar. 1973 was perhaps the height of his strictly academic career — his books on PNG and Tahiti both came out at the same time.

At this point Ben was known as an expert in the anthropology of economic development in the Pacific. But this was not a topic he wanted to continue. I asked him once why he gave up his PNG work and he told me it was “too depressing.” Although his books use the language of “social change” and “development” in person Ben talked about the racism of Australians in PNG and the power of French colonialism in Tahiti. He was ready for a change. Or rather, a return to his pre-PNG interests.

In 1973, the same year Ben published his two books, he became one of the co-founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. For people who know what the PVS is, or are closer to it then I am, there is almost no point in my trying to explain how important it is to contemporary Hawai‘i. When Ben began teaching at Mānoa, it had been around 80 years since a group of American missionaries and businessmen overthrew the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani. Loss of political power was coupled with a loss of culture, history, and pride. The constant pressure to assimilate only became more intense after statehood.

All of this led to a reaction. In the early 1960s, Hawaiians such as John Dominus Holt (who wrote “On Being Hawaiian” in 1964), became interested in returning to and redeeming their heritage. This was part of the world-wide resurgence of ethnic pride. The result is what has been called the “Hawaiian renaissance”. But the Hawaiian renaissance was not like the Italian one. In Florence, cultural activity was supported by wealthy elites like the Medici who patronized the arts to build their legitimacy and maintain their grip on power. The Hawaiian renaissance was a popular movement which helped validate, recover, and revivify Hawaiian culture.

Once of the great landmarks of the renaissance was the voyage of the Hōkūle‘a from Hawai‘i to Tahiti 1976. The PVS — founded by Ben, along with Herb Kane and Tommy Holmes — was the group who put it together. The goal was to create a double-hulled sailing canoe and sail it to Tahiti and back, as Ben has wanted to do for years. Hōkūle‘a’s first voyage to Tahiti and back (with Ben on it) with traditional Micronesian navigator Mau Pialug was a validation of Ben’s hypotheses about the skill of traditional voyagers. But it was also, more importantly, a tremendous source of pride and encouragement for Hawaiian people. Over the years the racial politics of Ben’s engagement in a Hawaiian project have gone through their bumps. But today he is recognized as a founder of the voyaging revival, and Hōkūle‘a is sailing around the world without a map or an engine, not just recreating the voyages of the past, but expanding the work and mission of the navigators in whose footsteps they walk.

Ben continued to be involved in the PVS and to publish about its work. His 1979 volume Hokule‘a: The Way to Tahiti was widely read. In fact, it was a ‘book of the month’ club pick, which was significant back then. Other volumes, such as Voyage of Rediscovery and Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors continued to update this story. Throughout, his clear prose mixed engineering, narrative non-fiction and anthropology. As a result, he established himself as a unique blend of academic, practitioner, and public anthropologist.

But as early as the 1980s Ben was on to his next project — the colonization of space. Ben was, after all, from Southern California, where the aerospace industry was a constant presence. So he began turning to his last major project, how human beings could colonize not the ocean, but the universe. Much of this work took the form of conference papers, grey literature, and book chapters published in places where anthropologists do not normally look. Probably one of the major statements of this period of his career was his small 1992 book From Sea to Space, based on his Macmillan Brown Memorial Lectures at Massey in New Zealand. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ben began working on Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, often collaborating with Mila Finney, his wife.

Ben continued to be of service to UHM as well, serving as chair of the department from 1986 to 1995. His 1994 article “The Other One Third of the Globe” was tremendously influential and widely-taught at UH Mānoa. It gives an overview of the entire history of human settlement of the Pacific from the first voyagers to the Hōkūle‘a, emphasizing the centrality — not the irrelevance — of the Pacific and its people to human history. His under-read 1991 article “The Sin at Awarua” dove into the ‘invention of tradition’ debates of that period, using a detailed account of voyaging in the past and present to disprove that there was something illegitimate or inauthentic about cultural revival in Polynesia.

Ben became emeritus in 2000 but continued to come in to the department regularly. He had the office two doors down from me — he chose it shortly after our building had been built because it had an extra nook in it, which he used as a small private library. I first met him in 2004. He made a big impression — he was tall, lean, and weather-beaten. Laconic but intelligent, you didn’t have to spend much time around him to recognize that his reputation was well-earned. After his stroke, when he finally stopped coming to his office, I inherited his PNG books. I often come across his hand writing in the margins, and they are stuffed full of pieces of paper with hand-written notes on them, drafts of book reviews, and correspondence with publishers and authors.

Ben received many accolades. The UH’s Regent’s Medal for Excellence in Research, the Royal Institute of Navigation Medal, the French University of the Pacific Medal to name a few. In 2012 he was declared a living treasure by the Hongwanji Mission here in Hawai‘i.

It is sad to see Ben go. But he lived a good life. He found a career that made intellectual and emotional sense, knitting together disparate projects into a coherent whole. And, less we end on too pious a note, he enjoyed himself tremendously — and always found a way to do it without too much trouble. In the era of modernization theory, he studied economic development. When ethnic awareness grew worldwide in the 1970s, he worked to revive voyaging. At the height of the cold war, he worked with NASA. In the Post-soviet era, he studied Russian space theory. I don’t think it would be disrespectful at all Ben deserves to be remembered for being good at making sure he lived the life he wanted!

But Ben was hardly driven by self-interest. He leaves behind bright young scholars such as Joe Genz, whose work has been featured in the New York times. Sam Low (another Harvard anthro Ph.D.) continues Ben’s work documenting Hōkūle‘a. The PVS has grown to include not just voyaging, but also cultural resurgence and an environmental justice program. Ben will be missed, but he lives on in so many of the people and institutions that he was part of here in Hawai‘i. His memory truly is a blessing.

I only had a chance to meet Teresia a few times, and I can’t speak to her life the way that so many others can, except to say that she was an impressive figure in every sense whether it be reading poetry or rethinking Pacific Studies. She had mana. She was a trenchant critic of colonialism and other things, but in person she was hardly austere or intimidating. She was an approachable person, down to earth, with a sense of humor. I think in her mixture of dignity and a willingness to laugh she was deeply Pacific.  So many people counted on so many more years of work and inspiration from her. I can’t say I knew her enough to mourn her the way her family and friends do, but her presence and project impacted everyone who ever met her or read her work. Just being in the same room was enough. She was on a journey, and still is. But we had hoped to spend more time traveling with her then we were allowed.

Teresia was a prolific author, and much of her work is open access. However, google searches for her work produce a maze of citations that is hard to find your way around in.  I feel like my way to contribute to her memory is to help provide a guide to her work which can help future readers stop digging through search results and start reading Teresia. What follows is a quick bibliography of work that is available open access. I’ve included both poetry and academic publications. I’ve linked to stable repositories as much as possible so the information on this page will age well. Many of these links will take you to a repository entry and you will then have to click through to the PDF. Others are online journals which lack librarian-friendly meta-data. In all cases I’ve tried to give reasonable citations but I’m sure there are irregularities in the format that I’ve used. There are also probably typos. Also, please note that these are just the open access texts

Sole-Authored Pieces

2015. What Makes Fiji Women Soldiers? Context, Context, Context. Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37.

2014. Porirua market with Susana and Jessie, 2009 and a trip to market with Margaret, 
2007. In “Baninnur: A Basket of Food, 2014″. Black Market Press 36.

2013. “Dyed in Paru”, “Makariri”, and “Draft Manifesto for a Feminist Asthmatic in Aotearoa” (three poems). 4th Floor Literary Journal.

2012. disarmed (13 poems, including audio). Queensland Art Gallery for the Asia Pacific Triennial. 

2010. The Thing About It Is… (Part of Special Section “Essays in Honor of Epeli Hau‘ofa”). The Contemporary Pacific 22 (1): 105-108.

2007. niudity (I-IV). Pacific Studies 30(3&4):103-105.

2006. On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context. The Contemporary Pacific 18 (1): 71-87.

2006.  The Classroom as Metaphorical Canoe: Co-operative Learning in Pacific Studies. World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium.

2005. Articulated Cultures: Militarism and Masculinities in Fiji During the Min 1990s. Fijian Studies 3(2): 201-222

2004. Review of The Network Inside Out, by Annelise Riles. The Contemporary Pacific 16 (2): 443-45.

2002. Review of Te Rii ni Banaba. Journal of the Polynesian Society 111(4):402-405.

2001. An Analysis of The Current Political Crisis in Fiji. In Coup: Reflections on the Political Crisis in Fiji, edited by Brij Lal and Michael Peters, p. 31-34. Canberra: Pandanus Press. (N.B. This link is to the 2008 reissue of this book by ANU Epress).

2001. L(o)osing the Edge. Special issue, The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 343-57.

 2001. Review of Compassionate Exile by Bob Madey and Larry Thomas. The Contemporary Pacific 13 (1): 302-06.

2000. Review of Gauguin’s Skirt, by Stephen F. Eisenman. Pacific Studies 23(1&2):103-111.

1997. Review of Speaking to Power: Gender and Politics in the Western Pacific, by Lynn B Wilson. The Contemporary Pacific 9 (1): 290-94.

1997. Learning…to Love it: Some thoughts on Teaching History. The History Teacher: Magazine of the Queensland History Teachers’ Association 35(1):1-7.

1996. Review of A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa. The Contemporary Pacific 8 (1): 214-17.

1994. bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans. The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 87-109.

Co-Authored

2013. Teaiwa, T. and Slatter, Claire. Samting nating: Pacific waves at the margins of feminist security studies. International Studies Perspectives, 14(4):447-450.

2012. Kihleng, E. and Teaiwa, T. Review of The Orator/O Le Tulafale [feature film]. The Contemporary Pacific 24 (2): 434-438.

2010. Teaiwa, T., and Marsh, S. T. Albert Wendt’s Critical and Creative Legacy in Oceania: An Introduction. The Contemporary Pacific 22 (2): 233-248.

2006. Fairbairn-Dunlop, Peggy; Asmar, Christine; Teaiwa, Teresia; Davidson-Toumu’a, Ruth.  Inventory of Pacific Research at Victoria University of Wellington 1999-2005. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences: Victoria University of Wellington.

2006. Teaiwa, Teresia and Malakai Koloamatangi. Democracy and Its Prospects in the Pacific. In Pacific Futures, edited by Michael Powles, 20-35. Canberra: Pandanus Books.

2005. Teaiwa, Teresia and Sean Mallon. Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand. In New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, edited by James H. Liu et. al., 207-229.

1994. Ochoa, María and Teresia Teaiwa. Introduction to “Enunciating our Terms: Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict”. Inscriptions 7.

It seems like I’ve been writing a lot of obituaries lately. Between Elizabeth Colson, Edie Turner, and Anthony Wallace and Raymond Smith, I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about the past. Now, in close succession, we have also lost Paul Friedrich and Dennis Tedlock. It’s sad to record these passings, but I take some consolation in the fact that the people we remember have been so productive and matter so much to the people who mourn them — the world is richer for them having been in it. But in remembering these two today, I also want to talk briefly about how our discipline is changing, and what these demographic shifts might signal for anthropology’s future.

Paul Friedrich was… a polymath. He was present at the origin of linguistic anthropology, but also an important historical anthropologist… but also central to ethnopoetics… but also in some way a postmodernist, if his eclectic approach preceded and, in some sense, surpassed postmodernism before it even got off the ground… and he was also a specialist in comparative literature, reading Walden against the Bhagavad Gita and through the Odyssey, and via his fieldwork in Mexico. And he also wrote poetry. A professor at Chicago in anthropology as well as UofC’s unique and high-flying Committee on Social Thought, Friedrich created a unique and idiosyncratic brand of anthropology that few others have followed up on — possibly because no one but him was well-read enough to do it. But in other ways, Friedrich quickly slipped the bonds of disciplinarily early in his career and never looked back. He should be better-remembered than he is probably going to be.

Dennis Tedlock also passed away  recently. As an intellectual and a writer, Tedlock contained multitudes. On the one hand, he served as the editor of American Anthropologist in the late 1990s, thus making him the very definition of ‘institutionally central’. And yet he was hardly that. Tedlock and his wife Barbara (with whom he co-‘d so much, including AA) introduced several changes in the journal that many found scandalous, including it’s size (as in the physical size of the paper journal — there was only a paper journal back then) and, iirc, adding photos on the cover, which a few more conservative critics thought signaled the end of anthropology as a legitimate scientific discipline. Tedlock was a Mayanist with a deep connection to Mayan people and culture, a translator and student of the people who he learned from. Coming of age academically in the late 1960s, his interest in poetry and humanistic anthropology perhaps had more in common with Edie Turner (and Carlos Casteñeda) than the trio of Clifford, Marcus, and Fischer. By the mid- to late-1980s he was part of the ‘dialogical moment’ that used anthropology, psychoanalysis, and poetics to understand the interpersonal relationships in the field out of which ethnography was made. By the late 1980s he had moved, institutionally at least, out of anthropology altogether, to English. I suspect he will be far more remembered for his translation of the Popol Vuh than he will be for his Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation — a sign of his commitment to poetry and to the Mayan community, a commitment that was greater than any desire to produce theories about poetry and the Mayan community, as far as I can tell.

Both of these men deserve more space than I have given them here. But I wanted to end this already-depressing piece on an even more depressing note: I will doubtless be writing more of these memorial pieces in the future. We are, sadly, watching the passing of what some would call the ‘silent generation’ — scholars born between the two world wars. There were not many anthropologists who come from this generation because back in those days, there just weren’t very many anthropologists. Although it’s hard to generalize, many of these scholars received the bounty of Cold War funding as early-career professors, training up a baby-boom generation who was close to them in age.

It was really after the end of World War II that anthropology as a discipline exploded, the way many disciplines exploded: New departments, more money, more Ph.D.s, and so forth. These memorials on SM will probably also end up tracking the discipline’s growth: We will end up reading more and more memorials since more and more anthropologists were produced during this period.

I’ve often wondered what sort of respectful, positive meaning we can take when we consider the passing of these scholars. One of the reasons I write these pieces is because I think moments like these give us a sense how important these people really were, how much we care about the discipline, and what they contributed. They are a way of helping us understand where we came from, and how we have been shaped by history (for both good and ill, I’m sure). In doing so, we can begin to understand what we value about the past and what we don’t: What we want to persevere, and what we wish there had been more of.

In this way, these passings become not just endings, but way marks – chances for us to orient ourselves as we move into the future, and as our students, friends, and colleagues take the discipline forward (or backward) make progress (or unravel it), enrich (or trouble) our existing understandings, and continue the work of authors such as Paul Friedrich and Dennis Tedlock. Vale.

Colson’s life followed an unusual trajectory. Born in small town Minnesota, she majored in anthropology at UMN before doing a doctorate at Harvard with Clyde Kluckhohn. In addition to doing work with Indian communities, she was also part of Alexander Leighton’s project to study the ‘relocation camps’ the US army set up to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. About this experience she has said “I can only say that we regarded the internment as a gross violation of civil rights. But I thought then as I think now that witnesses were needed and that anthropologists had skills suited to that task.”

But Colson is most well-known for her role in the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the center for research in Zambia which helped spawn the Manchester school of anthropology. The RLI became a place where anthropologists studied social change, urbanism, migration, and other contemporary aspects of African life which did not fit into stereotypical images of Africa as a place untouched by history or colonialism. Colson was the director of the institute from 1947 to 1951, and helped relocate it to Lusaka as well as develop its seven year plan for this period.

Her 1953 article “Social Control and Vengeance in Plateau Tongan Society” was the first to develop the concept of ‘cross-cutting ties’ — relationships that individuals had between groups and which helped tamp down inter-group conflict. This paper, perhaps Colson’s most well known, is an example of the hard-headed, empirically detailed political anthropology she would spend the rest of her life producing. Her commitment to Tonga speakers resulted in a large body of work studying displacement, migration, politics, and law. This work included analyses of order in ‘stateless societies’ — a topic anthropology has unfortunately relinquished as unfashionable, only to have it taken up by the likes of Jared Diamond — as well as the social consequences of resettlement caused by development projects. Hers was a wide, deep expertise.

Colton taught in many places, including Manchester itself. But her longest academic appointment was her twenty years at Berkeley, where she influenced professors like Laura Nader. Public recognition of her work peaked in the mid 1970s, when she gave the AAA’s distinguished lecture in 1975, and the Morgan Lectures in 1973. In 1977 she was elected to the American National Academy of Sciences. But this also meant that the last decades of her career were overshadowed by a baby boomer generation interested in rethinking what anthropology could be.

A rigorous and unstoppable fieldworker — over sixty years of fieldwork in Africa from 1946 to 2006 — she drew on Hume, Rousseau, and Locke when discussing social order. This meant that her work was not as attractive as more ‘theoretical’ approaches drawing on Marx, Freud, Weber, Heidegger or French thinkers such as Foucault or Bourdieu. These facts, combined with her willingness to pursue her own work and life in and on Africa, rather than train disciplines to spread a ‘Colson school’ mean that she was perhaps not given the attention she should have received in main stream anthropology.

Colson’s longevity ensured that she would be remembered by peopel working in her area, however. There are two festschrifts for her — one published in 1984, and the other in 2006! It’s telling that the second, The Tonga-speaking Peoples of Zambia and Zimbabwe: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Colson has such a strong areal focus.

Colson was an important part of anthropology’s history, showing us how a single person could blend together seemingly-disparate research topics through a strong commitment to areal ethnography and a keen analytic focus. She deserves to be remembered as one of our discipline’s great ethnographers.

Open Access Selected Sources on Elizabeth Colson’s Life and Work In Case You Decide To Write A Biography Of Her

Long biographical interview with Colson featuring and important and personal foreword by Laura Nader

Colson, Elizabeth. 1976. Culture and Progress: Distinguished Lecture – 1975. American Anthropologist 78(2): 261-271.

Opportunity, Constraint, and Change: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Colson. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 1984:64/65. (includes a thorough bibliography)

Alan Macfarlane interview with Colson

University of Florida’s archival footage of an old-school interview with Colson

Podcast interview with Colson focusing on regugee studies

Update 4 Oct 2016 — here’s some more references:

Buchignani, Norman. 2016. A New Bibliography of Elizabeth Colson

Remembering Elizabeth Colson, 1917-2016 from Berkeley’s Center for African Studies

Professor Elizabeth Colson 1917-2016 A long detailed blog entry from Remnants of Empire

Video of an Interview and Talk by Colson Her talk covers the history of the ASA and reflections on the history of anthropology

Rumors in my graduate school days were that her shamanism class at UVA included her actually being possessed. I don’t know if that is true, but it probably wasn’t far off the mark. Today in anthropology some more theoretically recondite researchers coquettishly hint that ‘supernatural’ phenomenon might be real, or ought to be considered real, or The Other’s idea that they are real out to be taken seriously. Turner’s anthropology took this idea and radicalized it decades before the ontological turn — indeed, she was in some ways an influence on the Stragnerian (Roy Wagner + Marilyn Strathern) branch of this school. But in preceding them she also exceeded them. Her question was: What would anthropology be if spirits are real? Her answer, in books like Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy and Among the Healers: Stories of Spiritual and Ritual Healing around the World was an affirming, spiritually engaged, orthodoxy-busting anthropology.

In many ways, Vic and Edie were godparents to the entire baby boomer generation of anthropologists. While other members of the Silent Generation examined them, peer reviewed them, hired them, and promoted them, Vic and Edie stayed above the fray and kept the countercultural fires stoked by scrupulously avoiding any institutional authority capacity in which they would have to say no. Edie’s anthropology was a pan-spiritual kinda-Catholic pre-and-post-New-Age shamanism that epitomizes some of the most cosmic influences of the baby boomer generation she not only nurtured, but learned from.

This was not and is not my cup of tea — indeed, her style of anthropology is pretty much diametrically opposed to mine. But I think it is amazing that anthropology is a discipline where Edie’s work could find a home. It’s value lies not only in the use that it’s practitioners get out of it, but for the way it informs the anthropological imagination of all of us who are exposed to it, whether we follow in Edie’s footsteps or not.

If Edie’s life or work moved you, I’d encourage you to donate to the Edie Turner Anthropology Award if you feel so inclined.

A Curated, Short List of Open Access Resources on Edith Turner

The best source on Edie’s life is chapter 5 of the superb book The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith by Timothy Larsen. But if you would like to learn more about Edie’s life there are…

The Reality of Spirits, by Edith Turner
An open access version of an article from the journal Shamanism from 1997.

A CV of Edith Turner
From 1996, but still useful.

But it is really in this YouTube clip where you can catch a sense of Barney’s remarkable personality. Asked by the interviewer what duty Tamil speakers have to preserve their language, Barney immediately turns the question around. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he says. “What joy of preserving your language, I would say. I mean, it’s not a really a duty.” And then, switching into Tamil, he walks the walk by talking the talk, ending with the line “it’s your duty to enjoy your language.”

Barney’s emotions were always very close to the surface and — remarkable — they were always positive emotions. Joy is an overused cliché in today’s world, but Barney was a genuinely joyful person. We often memorialize professors by saying they had lots of energy, but Barney seemed incredibly vital and alive. Enthusiasm is a quality we often mention when discussing great students. But Barney had a special sense of immediacy about him. He wanted to crack moments open and live inside of them. He wanted something to happen. And around him, it often did.

Scholars often come with warts: Precision can ride alongside small mindedness, and drive is sometimes accompanied by unseemly ambition. One of the things I appreciated most about Barney was his ability to find a healthy, positive way to be a scholar. He was driven by positivity, not negativity — and that is a remarkable thing to find in someone, regardless of what their profession is.

One of the things I hear people say most about Barney is that he had time for them. And he did — everyone I’ve spoken to remembers the ten or fifteen minutes they spent with Barney at AAA meetings. It is another cliché, but when he spoke to you, you felt that you were the only person in the room, or the only thing that mattered to him at that moment. A towering presence — he was a tall guy — Barney was naturally giving and willing to talk, about literally anything. Look at me: We had almost nothing in common theoretically or areally, but I was just one of many people who got folded into Barney’s life as a friend.

Barney was sharp as a tack. But more then that, he was a highly trained scholar. Between the Tamil literary tradition, South Asian studies, and the anthropology department at Chicago, Barney knew intellectual life as an apprenticeship in a great tradition, one that shapes who you are, and of which you were just the smallest and most recent link in a long, long chain. He cherished that tradition. I could see it in the syllabi he sent me, littered as they were with Jakobsen, Saussure, Peirce, and Bakhtin. And, like many South Asianists, the idea of ‘ethnographic theory’ seemed a nonstarter — he was already teaching Guha, Chakrabarty, Kaviraj, and other South Asian scholars as if they always already were central to anthropology. Because they are.

But at the same time, Barney loved what he called ‘the newness of old things’. He was immersed enough in tradition to know that it innovated — that, indeed, there can be no  innovation without an inherited past. But he was steeped in tradition but not pedantic. This is probably why Yale-NUS appealed to him so. The idea of reading Plato one week and Confucius the next and then seeing what would happen: Barney was made for a position like that.

I think Barney’s love of novelty came form his love of language, and especially his love of the spoken word. One of the central tenants of linguistic anthropology is that speech can be art — ‘verbal performance’ as the put it. But for Barney, this was not a theoretical tenant, but a deep and profound love of speech, and a fascination at its power. He came from a tradition where educated people memorized poetry — one friend remembered the time Barney recited the entirety of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from memory spontaneously — and his book is embroidered with poetry. But he also loved the spoken word, the moment of speech, the ‘breakthrough into performance’ when someone says something new for the first time in the world. This was why he always had such an appreciation of immediacy: He saw life as a work of art.

Barney saw life as a work of art. His own life was a work of art. It was too short, but in the time he had he filled it with beauty, and shared that beauty with us. He showed us how to be good scholars, and good people. His memory is a blessing.

We mourn the loss of her brilliant mind, quick smile and mischievous humor. She was known for incisive scholarship on politics and social justice. She wove a keen artistic sense for poetics into her ethnographic observations, as evident in her 2013 book Political Oratory and Cartooning: An Ethnography of Democratic Processes in Madagascar. Her eye-opening insights into the language of American politics were featured in national media. Jennifer served the American Anthropological Association, first on the Executive Board’s student seat then the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Executive Board.

There will be a memorial in her honor at the AAA in Denver. I didn’t know her personally, but here in Taiwan we are honoring her by reading her ethnography. It is a great book and well worth reading for many reasons, but I especially loved her description of the discipline of linguistic anthropology in the introduction (pp. xxiii-xxv). (It’s a long quote, but I couldn’t see anything in it that I would want to cut.)

what we do as linguistic anthropologists, in particular as ethnographers of speaking/communication/communicative interaction/ social interaction or all of its variants. We generally leave behind the classroom, the textbooks, the grande no-fat no-whip soy lattes, the complacent gaze at familiarity that comes from being completely “at home” in a place, and we head for places that look, feel, sound, smell different. Even if this is within our same home country, the subtle suddenly appears more obvious. We engage deeply and over a long period of time with people in their everyday lives in order to observe language in its context of action. We yearn to know how people use words, gestures, grunts, and even silence and to what effect; what they think and say about those acts and the people who do them; and how this all changes over time, space, or other context. These everyday micro-practices – little acts of talking, writing speeches, drawing cartoons, talking about doing these things, interacting with one another at the dinner table, buying rice at the marketplace – may appear as stand-alone practices by separate individuals; however, each of these tells us something about patterns of social life over time and across populations. The patterns are what is key. Each choice in word, tone, prosody, order, the way someone might recall or reenact a story, hearkens to those patterns. These are ways of doing things that are shared among communities of speakers, point to something beyond the speech act itself, and they generally sit just below the threshold of awareness. But they are there, very much there, and they “mean” something out there in the world they reflect and shape. In fact, this is generally where meaning in language is located, some-where other than the linguistic act itself. Syntax no longer means just word order in a sentence but an index of social discrimination. Phonemes are no longer minimal units of sound but sound patterns that point to a river or mountain that creates just enough physical distance between speakers to account for an accent or dialect difference. And out of this difference grows evaluations about who says what and how. Each of these individual moments in the everyday reflects these patterns while also tugging on them just a bit, sometimes a lot, to the extent that either they reinforce situations and the social roles in them, or they change. And we have to be there, long enough and with a steady handle on the social, historical, and political forces that prevail, to reckon with the ways in which these patterned micro-practices come together as shared, tacit understandings of ways of doing and being that combine to shape macro -orders, such as institutions, laws, belief systems, and language itself. It is a constant trip between the everyday and the over-the-long-term, from the individual speech to the institutionalization of, say, class hierarchies, the reproduction of some standard of speaking across multiple contexts over time – in other words what happens right here and now with some larger issue or institution out there we might otherwise think of as a black box, a “they,” the work of some invisible hand. We bring the practice of words into abstract social categories and constructs such as colonialism, gender, the state, and civil society, to activate them, unpack-ing and reframing them not as things but as existing insomuch as they manifest through practice. We make these connections between micro-practices and macro-institutional orders so that nothing gets away without an explanation of its creation, its shape, its reproduction, its growth, its death through social change. For all of these reasons linguistic anthropology, particularly through its ethnography, to my mind, is both methodologically and theoretically grounded to go after both realms of human activity – from chunks of the obvious to the grains of the subtle – and to show their connection and the ways in which they articulate with various social, cultural, and political dynamics. It heads straight for the voices of the everyday to see the ways in which their talk and talk about talk coalesce otherwise disparate signs to produce new signs that look like, point to, and symbolize grander, momentous frameworks for organizing experience. And we locate the character and movement of power embodied, the power to create, to constrain, to convince, to erase as predicated on this continual discursive production and reproduction of signs culminating in the semiosocial matrix in which we all live. In a sense, we show our readers how the rabbit got put in the hat in the first place, exposing the location of the seeming illusiveness of power as embedded in the semiotic practice of social actors. Doing things this way, that is, reading social phenomena as founded in practice and ideologies about those practices and the people who do them, allows us not only to describe what is going on across a broader scale of social life, but to show to what end and what is at stake that things are the way they are.

Raymond T. Smith was a social anthropologist who earned his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1954 at Cambridge, where he worked with Meyer Fortes. His work focused on the Jamaica, Guyana (then British Guiana), Trinidad, and Chicago. For most of his career he taught at the University of Chicago, and the best short summary of his life can be found in the UofC’s finding guide to his papers. Something like a CV can be found on his personal website as well.

Smith was a rigorous, empirical, and prolific social anthropologist with a focus on race, class, and kinship.  The Matrifocal Family, his 1996 book of collected essays, is probably the best place to start reading his works. Smith also made his books British Guiana and The Negro Family in British Guiana open access and available on his website. Smith was at the forefront of social anthropology in the postwar period, when authors like Michael Banton were expanding the discipline’s focus on kinship to a broader evaluation of how families were shaped by their economic position and political status as colonial dependencies or newly-independent nations. Much of this was to happen in the 1960s in the UK, but Smith was doing it a decade earlier.

After his arrival at the University of Chicago in 1966, Smith also developed a focus on kinship. This was the same time that David Schneider was working on American kinship, and they did collaborate. Smith became a strong critic of the concept of the ‘culture of poverty’.

I know almost nothing about the Caribbean but according to people on Facebook Smith’s work is widely read and influential there. At the same time, students at Chicago (including myself) did not always have an extremely positive memory of his ability to mentor future professors. As a result, he did not create students who would be willing to, as Ruth Underhill once put it, pull his chariot for him. As a result, I am afraid anthropologists will not remember his work as much as they should. Smith was an excellent ethnographer and analytically precise thinker who should be a role model for anyone interested in race, class, inequality, and kinship in the New World. Or anywhere else for that matter.

 Anthony Wallace passed away on 5 October 2015. There is a fine long biography of Wallace in the finding guide to his papers which cover his long and esteemed career. In a nutshell, Wallace was a great inheritor of the Boasian tradition at one of anthropology’s oldest and most esteemed department at the University of Pennsylvania (a department which actually predates the Boasian take-over of the discipline). As a student with three degrees from Pen, and later faculty member  and chair at at Penn, Wallace was an Americanist whose contributions focused on Iroquois groups. Like Smith, he is remembered by area specialists as a deep and engaged ethnographer.

Wallace was a Boasian, and focused on ethnohistory and psychology as keys to understanding Indian life. He received his Ph.D. in 1950, at the moment when a tremendous boom in higher education was getting underway in the United States. Wallace was, like Julian Steward and Clyde Kluckhohn, The Future of Anthropology in the post-war era. An influential theorist, in 1956 he developed the concept of ‘revitalization movement’ in his best-known article,  and he was involved in componential analysis and ethnoscience. The best place to start looking at his work is the two volumes of his selected essays, Revitalizations and Mazeways and Modernity and Mind. 

Forty one years old during the Summer of Love, Wallace’s concept of ‘mazeways’ and his attempt to build out a fully scientific, Boasian anthropology got swamped  by more exotic and swinging exports like Victor Turner. Wallace was hardly stodgy, and his interest in religious movements and psychology fit the times very well — witness his 1969 essay “The Trip”. And his overarching interest was understanding how individuals used culture to make sense of the historical circumstances they found themselves in, even when those circumstances (like colonialism) were disconcerting. Somehow, though, his works were never canonized into the post-boom canon the way that Geertz, turner, and Douglas were. Wallace’s themes are themes of long durée of anthropology, but somehow we find them today in Foucault and not Wallace.

Once the future of anthropology, Wallace is just one member of an entire postwar generation who get cut out of survey courses when they jump from Mead to Geertz and/or Wolf. True, there may be a good reason that we don’t read Kluckhohn’s Rimrock study as a theoretical breakthrough in the study of value. But Wallace certainly deserves far more airtime then he gets today in contemporary anthropology. Perhaps now to honor his passing, we should return to Tony Wallace and his work to recognize how important it really is.

It impressed me that in one version of the [myth of the] Bagre God and the spirits had organized life. Another version was about how the water-spirits, the fairies had helped mankind to invent culture. And in a third version man himself had gone out and invented how to build a house and the rest. All these were within the same myth, theological and humanistic versions together. It gave me a different idea about human beings, that the LoDagaa were always thinking “Was it god or was it mankind that invented this?”

It was very important to me that some of my friends could become university lecturers, having been brought up in a small, oral village and now learn everything from books. Certainly they lost a lot on the way, they lost the Bagre because Goody’s written version was the real one, done with old men whom they hadn’t known. I had to explain to them that my version was chance, I could have written down a hundred other versions if I had the time, the money and the energy. The written version was only one of many (J. Goody 1972, The Myth of the Bagre, Cambridge).¹

So what follows is mostly based on oral memory. I have published four essays on Jack Goody’s writings and this one is something else.²

Professor Sir John Rankine Goody, FBA (aka Jack) was born in July 1919. He died just before his 96th birthday. His grandmother was a Scottish lady from Aberdeen who married a Londoner; Jack’s middle name came from her. She and her son (Jack’s father, eventually a telephones engineer like mine) were deserted when her partner decamped and may or may not have spawned a family of gangsters in Fulham, one of whom masterminded a famous hi-jack, the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Jack went to St Alban’s School in the London suburbs. After school he read English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he came under the spell of Hugh Sykes Davies, a surrealist poet, novelist and communist. Everyone was a communist at Cambridge before the war and Jack was probably no exception. There is a carefree photo of him riding with friends in an open car on the Champs Elysées in 1939. He had not completed his degree when the war broke out.

Jack joined the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (Sherwood Foresters, shades of Robin Hood, also miners, as he reminded us in his last book on metals) and was commissioned. He then embarked on an adventure that shaped the rest of his life. He was struck by the originality of North Africa’s Islamic civilization. He was captured, then locked up in prisoner-of-war camps from which he escaped several times, including some months on the run in Italy’s Abruzzo.

He returned to Cambridge in 1946 to complete his degree and then took a diploma in anthropology. He became an education officer in Leicestershire, married and had three children. He then took up anthropology at Oxford and completed a Cambridge PhD with Meyer Fortes in 1954 based on fieldwork in Northwest Ghana. Fortes subsequently hired him as an assistant lecturer. His marriage did not survive the prolonged absences. Jack spent much time teaching in the department and his college, but only received a fellowship at St. John’s in 1961, when Fortes put pressure on the colleges to appoint his lecturers — Jack, Edmund Leach and G.I. Jones. He married Esther Newcomb, his American doctoral student, in this period and they had two daughters. Jack and Esther Goody became a team in the following decades, frequently spending time in Ghana and publishing together and separately.

I recall vividly the primal scene when I joined Jack and Esther briefly at the beginning of my own doctoral fieldwork. I had travelled North overnight by bus from Accra. The driver had a girlfriend somewhere and we were all eaten alive by mosquitos until he chose to continue in the morning. I arrived in Bole at 2pm when it was really hot and eventually found the house where they were staying. Completely silent. I looked around and found them all – Jack, Esther and the two little girls – asleep naked in shallow water in the shower/bathroom.

Jack fully embraced the anti-colonial revolution after the war and the Gold Coast was its epicentre in Africa. He joined Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party during his first fieldwork. He soon saw that an independent West Africa would need histories of the precolonial past in order to chart a postcolonial future. He then switched his focus to the precolonial history of West African kingdoms. In the process he led the move from ethnography to history that marked African anthropology then and African Studies in general today.

This was also when he completed the book of his PhD thesis, Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962). Although Jack has published some forty books, the majority of them since his retirement three decades ago, I consider this one to be his masterpiece. The three words of his main title say it all. What does humanity care most about? Our mortality. What can we do to transcend our fate? We can try to live on through the real estate we bestow on our descendants or we can become an ancestor. Jack practised both assiduously. He managed to acquire a huge pile in a posh area of Cambridge from his college and did his best to ensure that all his children had a house. But his real money was on being an ancestor and how can an intellectual achieve immortality if not through writing books? I once asked him why he published so much and he replied, “Because I was behind (Leach) and had to catch up”.

This book is grounded in meticulous ethnography, but it is also a wide-ranging compendium of social theory, featuring the tradition of comparative jurisprudence on which social anthropology was founded (Maine, Maitland etc). In the 1960s Jack proposed, in popular magazines and the press, that his discipline should be renamed comparative sociology. He insisted that his graduate students should study modern social life in Africa: teachers, local government, migrant entrepreneurs. He envisaged a new synthesis of sociology, politics and anthropology, much to the dismay of Meyer Fortes who had built up Cambridge social anthropology as a world leader more or less from scratch. By now, however, a bruising dialogue between Fortes and Leach in the 1950s had given way to the more peaceful moiety system of Leach in King’s, Goody in St. Johns and their respective students.

Jack Goody duly succeeded Fortes as head of department in 1973. He did not try to merge social anthropology with sociology and politics. But soon after he launched his series of books on world history, at first contrasting Africa with Eurasia and later Europe with Asia. He also developed his interest in the significance of literacy in the 70s. His collaboration on literacy with the critic, historian and professor of English, Ian Watt, began in 1963. In Technology, Tradition and the State (1971), he confronted head on the reasons for the divergence of African states from Western feudalism. Now, with Production and Reproduction: A comparative study of the domestic domain (1976), he projected his comparisons onto the (old) world stage; and then he took on Lévi-Strauss in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977).

Meyer Fortes had been something of a trade unionist manqué and a very good one (he also worked for MI6 during and after the war, honourably I would say). Jack was in many ways the opposite, bringing to his belated position of leadership the spirit of his own research and writing. He had no respect for disciplinary boundaries, telling us “You must find a question and follow it wherever it takes you”. As a result, Cambridge social anthropology when he was head became an assemblage of solipsists, where PhD students often pursued topics unknown to their supervisors. This was exciting and contrasted vividly with LSE, for example, where a sense of collective tradition was more onerous. The new Cambridge laissez faire model was open and dynamic, but fragmented and it didn’t do much for intellectual reproduction. Jack Goody himself never left behind a coherent school of followers.

Jack was, however, extremely gregarious and he entertained large crowds in his Cambridge home, treating them to cheap red wine and delicious pasta cooked by devoted clients, one of whom was Italian. At some stage his second marriage to Esther broke down; she has always been a stalwart supporter for me. He then married Juliet Mitchell, the eminent feminist psychoanalyst and writer, in 2000. Her devotion to him was remarkable. Near the end, Jack fell down at home and was admitted to a geriatric ward in Addenbrookes Hospital. Having to endure the night cries of demented old people and being treated like one of them was intolerable and he signed himself out. I asked him if he broke anything when he fell and he replied, “Only my spirit”.

‘Jack’ and its derivatives has the most separate meanings (seventeen at the last count) in English, a residue of the language’s pre-Indo-European phase: lift a car, hold up to steal, masturbate, increase, iris, flag, knave, a lad’s name, money, objects in a game and so on. The root meaning is erect penis.

-Michael Jackson 2012: 175

How many dead people do you know on Facebook? I know three. Well, maybe two because one was aware that she was dying and took her page down. For the others, death was a surprise, even though in one case it was planned. Plans can be surprises of sorts.

Many people worry that social media is changing the world for the worse. It is pretty common to hear people lament the lack of face to face communication these days or worry that people are ‘disconnected’ in the age of digital connection. I don’t worry about this. If the undergraduate students I teach have shown me anything, it is that the medium of communication doesn’t over determine its purpose or possibility. Plus, I am a linguistic anthropologist and a human being so I know face to face interaction isn’t a connective walk-in-the-park. One thing I have been dwelling on is how social media alters how we know death.

Two months ago, I saw on twitter that a friend/mentor/colleague died. JJ was the first professor I was a teaching assistant for. We are not far apart in age as she was a veritable academic superstar and I arrived late to the PhD party. She told me early on in the term she had cancer as we walked out of an exam carrying armfuls of Scranton sheets. She was as thoughtful a teacher as she was a thinker and writer. I find myself channelling her when I’m explaining Saussurian linguistics.

The last time I saw JJ was two or three years ago. We were beside each other at a conference. She raised her hand to engage the panel (whose theme I forget) by telling a story about a coyote in her neighbourhood and a string of missing cats, including a three-legged cat she and her partner named Tripod. She said something to the effect that while we might know in the abstract that the coyote and Tripod’s disappearance were connected, we certainly would not want to know this relationship intimately. We purposefully hold things apart. This allows us to love even what may be gone. Like Tripod the cat.

I was angry that she died. I was angry I saw it on Twitter. Tweets don’t hedge. There are no “Are you sitting downs?” or “I have some bad news’”. There are none of the stock phrases that prepare you for imminent pain. The specter of doubt also seems greater when the news of death is sandwiched between hashtags, humble brags and stories about dress colours as optical illusions.

My friend/mentor/colleague AA also died this year. Facebook told me. Someone tagged him in a photo and wrote that they would miss him. His account is still up and sometimes he crosses someone’s mind and they will write to him or about him and their message will show up in my feed as if AA has posted it himself.

AA was a quiet ringleader of a group of grumpy Marxist anthropologists I have hung out with for many years. They like to get together to drink scotch, smoke American Spirit cigarettes and lament  the US economy.  Like me, AA studied mining. AA always made me feel like my ideas were good ones, even if they strayed from Classical Marxist Thought. AA’s grumpy political rants stood in stark contrast to his frequent, sentimental photo uploads to Facebook which chronicled the many birds of his backyard. He had elaborate feeders set out to draw in fowl from far and wide.

In times of distress like the loss of two very wonderful anthropologists, I turn to the insights of Buddhist teacher Micheal Stone. Micheal knows a lot of philosophy and practices from East and West. He has published many books including conversations with French feminist-theorist Luce Irigaray. Since finding his work, I’ve become a devout podcast Buddhist. Feeling the weight of the news of JJ’s and AA’s deaths, I cleaned my kitchen while listening to a talk titled, “Save a Ghost”. In it, Michael says “when we lose someone, all the other losses in our lives pile up”. He also says that our personality is constructed by how we mourn and that mindfulness is the ability to mourn. Micheal isn’t big into the McMindfulness sweeping corporate America. He says that we need to be intimate with what’s happening, but at the same time we need to not hold onto it, like how JJ was with Tripod and AA with his birds. “As we mourn the dead, the dead are alive in us making culture” Michael says. Anthropologists fight a lot about what culture is and isn’t. For some time I had to give up on my commitments in the culture debates and side with Micheal. Social media brings the intimacy of pain and loss. Hurt piles up. News feeds refresh. We can’t hold on.

Goody had a long and prolific career. I remember reading his Culture of Flowers in 1993 and thinking “well, even the author of the driest studies of inheritance should get to pretend to be Mary Douglas in his final book.” How little I knew then! Although he was seventy four at the time, Goody would go on to write thirteen more books. The total count as of today is just over thirty. The sheer volume of Goody’s output demonstrates a healthy relationship to work that most academics envy. But it also speaks to an intellectual project which deserves to be remembered far more than I fear it will be.

When Goody became a faculty member in 1954, social anthropology had finally taken over the British academy, replacing the Victorian anthropology that Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski had (a bit unfairly) derided as old-fashioned. But what was social anthropology? Both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski had argued that it was a generalizing science, and comparative: Part of a larger sort of sociology  but not (for some vague but extremely important reason) something to be merged into a sociology department.

Different people had different answers regarding the future of anthropology, many of them unjustly forgotten today. By the time Goody became professor in 1973, anthropology was well into the ‘Arjun Appadurai’ era of theory — that is, one in which you wrote programmatic statements about what anthropologists should do, and then never carried out the program.

Goody was a bit like J. Clyde Mitchell, in that he had an answer to “what is social anthropology” and then actually implemented the program, even though it moved him far from mainstream anthropology. Mitchell ended up becoming a founding figure in formal modeling and social network analysis, and his festschrift hardly looks anthropological at all. Goody, on the other hand, took the idea of a comparative, generalizing account of kinship systems, and then historicized and super-sized it.

Goody’s overarching project was a comparison of kinship and social reproduction that had time-depth and was global in scope. It was, in many ways, an example of the sort of work that Jared Diamond might have done if he had bothered to seriously read about human society. There were lots of pieces to Goody’s puzzle: Actually comparing East and West, rather than assuming that the West was unique (a powerful assumption in the first world during the cold war), examining the differences between literate and non-literate societies, and studying patterns of material culture tied to everyday reproduction like cooking and (yes) flowers. In the end, it was interdisciplinary and perhaps more like Annales school history than Radcliffe-Brown. But Goody needs to be given credit for finding the project and then Just. Doing. It.

I never found Goody easy to read. There were good and bad reasons for this. Like a lot of hyper-prolific people, not all of his work was ruthlessly polished. Yes, Goody always wrote clearly and with a minimum of jargon, but I sometimes found signposting missing. His book on the comparative study of renaissances, for instance, really fails to give up its secrets until you read all of it — there’s no skeleton key to the book in the first couple of chapters as (imho) there should be.

And then of course, when you’re dealing with technical issues like inheritance there will be jargon. One of the reasons why Goody’s earlier work won’t be read is that it is actually about something. It concretely engages ethnography and abstract problems of social organization. It limits one’s readership to fellow specialists. Which, I suppose, is the point.

Goody was probably the last living anthropologist whose intellectual horizons were formed by the 20s triad of Marx, Freud, and James Frazer. He also took Weber seriously. Indeed, his comparative work far more successful than Weber’s, and not just because he had better sources to work with. It seems to me (and I could be wrong here) that Goody’s initial, genius, move was to see that Marx’s focus on mode of production grew out of the same Victorian jurido-legal scholarship that produced Radcliffe-Brown. I’m hardly a Goody scholar, but it seems to me that he read Marx as a descendant of Henry Buckle and Henry Maine as much as Hegel. Goody was materialist. Perhaps he got that from Pul Eliya as much as Marx. But he got it.

While the French would spend the seventies trying to figure out how structural marxism could make sense of ‘primitive’ societies, Goody’s Marx-inflected lens focused on how different regimes of inheritance and ownership (modes of reproduction) affected kinship systems. It is interesting to compare him to Eric Wolf (only five years younger than Goody), who also went macro using Marx. Both produced big-picture syntheses, relished ethnographic detail, and managed to talk in macro terms without falling back on essentialized and reified concepts of Cultural Wholes and Essences the way that, for instance, Toynbee did. Wolf, like other American Marxists of his time, also connected Marx to anthropology via the nineteenth century, typically by focusing on Engels’s use of Morgan.

But Wolf was a Marxist, while Goody described himself as “not a non-Marxist”. Wolf really genuinely participated in political struggles and actively identified as a leftist. Goody was a contrarian with a populist streak and a commitment to decolonization, but he was an insider and academic politician. True, those roles can be combined (for instance, in the career of Goody’s contemporary at Oxford, Chris Hill), but Goody’s real contribution to the sort of political anthropology I do comes more from the influence he had on his students. Keith Hart came of age in Goody’s Cambridge and went on to influence David Graeber’s Debt. It wouldn’t even be too much to see Tanya Li’s work as existing in Goody’s wake, since Li worked with Alan Macfarlane, who worked with Goody. That big-picture, inequality -focused flavor of British economic anthropology was influenced by Goody.

But maybe those who knew Goody well will tell me I’m getting some of these details wrong. I don’t want to speculate too much, and I’m hardly an expert in this area, and haven’t read much of Goody’s work (let’s face it, with thirty books, who can say that?) All I’m saying is: Vale. He deserves to be remembered.

If you’d like to learn more, here are some open access sources on Goody:

An interview with Jack Goody about his life and career

Alan Macfarlane’s remembrance of Jack Goody

Jack Goody’s autobiographical essay in Annual Review of Anthropology

An article from History and Anthropology where Goody summarizes his views of the differences between Europe and Asia. 

Alan Macfarlane’s video of Jack Goody:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eg6gZkRLRr0

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ITRrAbns5D0

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7CZBSAIUCmc

News that Karen McCarthy Brown passed away after years of deteriorating illness reached me earlier this month. I kept it to myself. When more official announcement from Drew University–where she was Professor Emerita of anthropology and sociology of religion—showed up on my Facebook feed this past Sunday, I shared it with the following comment:

Reading Karen’s Mama Lola kept me in grad school. Vodou got a human face from her. A tremendous loss, indeed.

When the first email arrived from UCSB’s Claudine Michel who penned the preface to the third edition of Brown’s award-winning ethnography in 2010, I had a flashback to nearly two decades ago.

I was sitting across from the department chair. We were in his office on the first floor of the LS&A building on S. State Street. I wanted out of the anthropology Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. In our long conversation, I disclosed more vulnerabilities then I ever would again professionally. Tormented, I grappled with the racist history of a discipline in which I would always be a subject. I did not belong in this white institution and was exhausted from feeling I was desegregating the department all over again. Hang in there, he said. Minority retention at the doctoral level is a huge problem all over this country. It may not get easier but at least it will become more manageable. You can do it. Just don’t give up you will be a pioneer. I broke into sobs. I can’t be a pioneer, it’s not the 1950s. Was there anyone whose work really interested me? Well, there was this book, Mama Lola, about a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Did I know the author? No I did not. The subject was close to home. We had inherited responsibilities that have been overstretched by migration. It’s not something that we talk about. Maybe after your dissertation on Jamaica, you’ll write another book on your family’s story. In the meantime was there enough interest in this work to bring her to campus? Mere thoughts of that someday became inspiration enough to help me keep my eyes on the prize.

Karen McCarthy Brown did come to give a talk at UM on Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Between the mainstreaming feminism project led by a group of senior graduate students and supporting faculty, the event occurred a year or so later. Since I don’t do revisionist history—full disclosure—I remember sketchy details of this and my first encounter with Karen.

Mama Lola was published by the University of California Press in 1991. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, Brown became an initiate of her subject, as a condition to deeper research and writing her life history. The resulting ethnography with its radical crossings blurred methodological and scriptive lines. Brown took creative liberties fictionalizing various strands of Lola’s familial and spiritual genealogies. The cover illustration of the first edition featured a doll from Lola’s altar representing the spirit Ezili Danto.

The book was hailed as a “new postmodern ethnography,” or “new feminist ethnography” (2001:ix) exemplary of this new genre of ethnographic writing that simultaneously weaved narrative analysis, the autobiographical and critical insights. Brown actually eschewed this connection. As she noted in the book’s second edition, which had a photograph of Lola herself on the cover, “I cannot claim to have self-consciously positioned my book in those niches” (2001:x). To the end, she re-asserted that she considered the work “primarily an exercise in interpretation” as she had done a decade before (2001:x). Brown would become a renowned religion expert and one of the founding members of KOSANBA—The Congress of Santa Barbara, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou.

A highly recognized work, Mama Lola was awarded the best first book in the History of Religions of the American Academy of Religion (1991) and the Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association (1992). But it was not without its critics. Chief among them was premier Haitian anthropologist, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot who rightfully asked a most fundamental question: how much fiction is ethnography? Moreover, he questioned various tensions between Brown’s ethnographic authority and totalizing narrative. To that end, he wrote, “those unfamiliar with Haiti will lack the means by which to evaluate the global assertions of the transcendental narrator” (1994:653). I had not read Trouillot’s review in American Ethnologist until years later after a conversation with him at the AAAs.

Indeed, in many ways, Mama Lola was something of an insider ethnography. In retrospect, I formed an attachment to it precisely because I had some knowledge to discern fact from fiction, to fill in the silences and to decipher practices layered in an opacity that was part of a historically damaging trope. Simultaneously, it expanded my lexicon as I learned so much about religious practices in my birth country that to this day remain trapped in obscurity, familial and otherwise. In that sense, the book had done for me what anthropology is supposed to do, make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It also sensitized me to the restrictions of genres, fieldwork dynamics and negotiations among so many other things. I knew there would never be an ethnography of my family’s story. Performance, maybe?. Memoir, definitely. Some stories are not mine to tell.

Since I began teaching years ago, I routinely used Mama Lola in my staple Haiti course. Despite my own feminist critiques, it’s an excellent project with which to debunk stereotypes, explore conflicts between researcher and subject and point to other disciplinary shortcomings. What I appreciated then and still do despite its limits is that this book, which kept me in grad school, actually managed to accomplish something that had been quite elusive until its publication. By (re)/constructing the So-Called Life of Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Margaux Kowalski, Karen gave Vodou a human face, at least in anthropology and one step beyond. Considering the long history of demonization and stigmatization that marred the religion, this is a Herculean achievement indeed, for which Karen McCarthy Brown should be recognized. Chapo ba!!!!!!!

Karen McCarthy Brown 2001 [1991] Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot. 1994. Review of Mama Lola. American Ethnologist 21(3):653-654.

At the moment, the current wikipedia entry as earning “a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and anthropology”. So if Wikipedia says it it must be true? Hmmm…

Wikipedia lists three citations for this assertion: Rivers’ New York Times obit, her (superbly named) memoir Enter Talking, and a Washington Post obit. In fact, the Times obit gives her major as English. This morning when I checked it the WaPo obit listed her major as anthropology, but now that has been removed for some reason and her major is not specified. In Enter Talking (which Wikipedia cites without a page number, tsk tsk) what Rivers actually says is: “I was an English literature major” (that’s page 55 of the 1986, NYC, Delacorte press edition).

The preponderance of the evidence is against Rivers as an anthropology major, unfortunately. Perhaps she was an anthropology minor? It’s unclear. Its fascinating to imagine Rivers sitting through classes taught by newly-minted Ph.D.s like Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz, and she may have done so. But, alas, not as an anthropology major.

Its intriguing to think of Joan Rivers as a paradigm for what anthropology could or should be. And since she deserves far more attention than even her death could bring her, perhaps its a fitting memorial for Rivers for us to imagine what she has to teach to anthropology.  Perhaps her gimlet eye provides a model for a critical anthropology yet to emerge.

I mean, let’s face it: Who needs ontology when you have Joan Rivers?

UPDATE: Evidence continues to surface: The Columbia Lion paints Joan Rivers as an anthro major who took courses with Mead while commenter ‘Jiminnc’ points us to a  photographer who says Rivers claimed she was an anthropology minor

UPDATE: Our intern Angela Chen contacted the registrar’s office at Barnard about this issue. They responded: “Joan Rivers majored in English. Although she apparently took Anthropology courses at Connecticut College before transferring to Barnard, she did not take any anthropology courses at Barnard.”

I only met Tambiah once, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Although Tambiah had taught there for only three years a quarter century ago, I was shocked by how well he was remembered. People — even the persnickety people who filled Chicago’s halls — were enthusiastic about his returning to the campus. I was voluntold (as they say) to organize a dinner for him to have with the graduate students. It ended up being an incredibly punishing task for me, I had to find the restaurant where we would eat and drive Tambiah there. Problems began immediately: we were given ‘more money than usual’ to take him out, but not enough to actually take him out somewhere nice. I had no car, had not driven regularly in a decade, and had never driven in a big city like Chicago. The department secretary lent me hers (yes, Chicago people, another good deed by Herself) and I had ended up navigating traffic, sweating profusely, with a Luminary sitting contentedly in the car with me.

Throughout all of this, one of the biggest problems was Tambiah himself. Although I attempted to cater to his needs, this proved almost impossible: in his presence I could do nothing wrong. Any kind of food would be acceptable. It didn’t matter if we got to the restaurant on time. We could have wine, or not, depending on what the students preferred. He was more interested in what we were studying than his own work. Gracious, quiet, and polite, Tambiah was almost too much of a gentleman. So you can see: I don’t study Buddhism, South Asia, or Southeast Asia, so I feel like I am not the right person to write a remembrance of him. But until a fuller appreciate comes along, this is what I will try to do.

The outlines of Tambiah’s career have been convered by most of the googleable sources: he was born in 1929 in the Christian community in Sri Lanka and grew interested in anthropology there. He eventually found his way to Cornell, an area studies center, and earned a Ph.D. in 1954 by writing a dissertation on peasant communities in what was then Ceylon. After graduating, Tambiah began doing work with UNESCO in Thailand (1960-1963), and he eventually became a specialist in this area.

Tambiah worked with many anthropologists on his Ph.D. (Lauriston Sharp, Morris Opler, etc.) in the course of his Ph.D., which dealt with issues raised by Robert Redfield. But I think a real turning point in his intellectual development came in 1963, when he began a ten-year stint as a reader of anthropology at Cambridge. It was there that he became influenced by Edmund Leach. At this point in his career Leach had finished up Pul Eliya, his ethnography of Sri Lanka, and was turning towards Lévi-Strauss. Leach was producing the essays that would later go into Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, and edit The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. I think we can see Leach’s influence on Tambiah in Tambiah’s essays on classification, ritual, magic, and symbolism.

In 1973 Tambiah came to the University of Chicago, as I mentioned, where he taught for three years. I think these years were also highly influential for him, since he helped contribute to the University’s strength in South Asian studies and conveyed a sense of the social-anthropological encounter with structuralism. At the same time, I think Tambiah was influenced by the linguistic-anthropological focus at Chicago, and American versions of symbolic anthropology. This influence is evident in his 1985 volume of collected essays Culture, Thought, and Social Action. His Morgan lectures of the previous year were eventually published in 1990 as Magic, Science, and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Tambiah’s project was, roughly, to understand how it was that ritual was efficacious — this meant understanding how words did not just describe the world, but change it (how they were ‘performative’). It also meant understanding how people deployed classificatory systems and cosmologies in the course of everyday life, and how those shaped action. At the time, Tambiah was one of the many people creating what Sherry Ortner would call, in 1984, ‘practice theory’ by examining how cultural categories were used in action. He never achieved the fame of Victor Turner or Marshall Sahlins — I think he was too interested in ethnography to engage in high-level theorizing. What commanded attention was his powerful ethnographic analysis: not what he said about theory, but how he employed it. He would take this awareness of the cultural/symbolic/cosmological dimension of action with him to his analysis of the religious dimensions of ethnic tensions and mass actions in South Asia.

In 1976 Tambiah moved to Harvard, where he worked until he retired in 2001. There, his interest turned back towards South Asia and ethnic violence, a long-standing preoccupation of his. He produced books in 1986, 1992, and 1996 on this subjects, working in both Sri Lanka and India. As he grew closer to retirement he also began work memorializing Edmund Leach, producing an exhaustive biography of his teacher in 2002.

As I said, I don’t feel confident about my ability to speak about Tambiah’s work in South or Southeast Asia. But if you are interested in learning more about Tambiah, I highly recommend watching Alan MacFarlane’s 1983 interview with Tambiah. The good people at HAU have made one of his most well-known pieces, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia” available in golden (completely free to read) open access — an important way to salvage his legacy, since much of his work was published in obscure journals and collected in edited volumes that are not easily (or cheaply) accessible. I would also recommend Tambiah’s memoir of Edmund Leach, which is, frankly, so well-done that it is the only thing you will ever need to read about Leach, a small masterpiece of rigorous intellectual history. For those of you with access to Culture, Thought, and Social Action, I’d recommend… well, really there aren’t any bad essays in that book. But “A Performative Approach to Ritual”, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit”, and “On Flying Witches and Flying Canoes” are good places to start.

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.