Introduction
This is an account of some of the main intellectual influences on my life as an anthropologist. It's testimony to the variety of people and the variety of agendas that help provide any one of us with the intellectual dispositions and tools of our trade.
When I was nine years old, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be an anthropologist when I grew up. I doubt that many nine year olds in 1960 aspired to be anthropologists, since (despite Margaret Mead) it was then still a rather small and esoteric field of study. My interest, however, had been piqued by two other Verne Dusenber(r)ys—my grandfather (FF), Verne D. Dusenbery, a progressive lawyer with archaeological interests, and my first cousin twice removed (FFFBS), Verne Dusenberry (who, like me, had been named after my grandfather).
Cousin Verne taught in the English department at Montana State, but he spent much time with the Rocky Boy Chippewa-Cree in northern Montana and eventually earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from a Swedish university for his dissertation on Cree religion. (Cousin Verne is the positively-portrayed, non-"objectivist" anthropologist in Robert Pirsig's book, Lila.) During a summer that he taught in our home town, Cousin Verne had encouraged my interest in American Indians through his stories and the gifts made for me by his Cree friends. In third grade, I worked for several months producing an American Indian scrapbook—my first anthropological project—that, along with the diary, is among the prized keepsakes of my youth.
Although I didn't keep an exclusive anthropological focus as I went through primary and secondary schools in Oregon (not least because no one taught anything called anthropology!), I can in retrospect see certain anthropological sensibilities at work. In high school I was always interested in what would now be called "subaltern studies" —that is, the accounts from below of those people left out of mainstream histories. Thus, when asked to write research papers in American history, I would write about the role of American Indians in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War or the role of African Americans in WWII. Ruth Benedict—or was it Margaret Mead? —observed that American anthropologists tend to be—or, at least, feel themselves to be—marginals in their own culture. And I think I always had that sense of being somewhat estranged from what then passed for mainstream American culture (despite my privileged upbringing) and thus an interest in and empathy for others living at the margins.
When I went off to college, at Stanford University, I had a vague idea that I might be interested in majoring in English (which both of my parents taught) or in Biology. I knew that I liked to read and write, and I liked evolutionary theory and ecology. My "Introduction to Anthropology" course in freshman year at Stanford had been a 500-600 person course co-taught by George and Louise Spindler (of Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology fame). I still remember getting praised for my final paper in the course, which required us to contrast three of the cultures we had been studying. For the paper, I had imagined each of the three groups commenting upon the others in what I imagined to be their own voice. It had been a lot of fun. Still, I resisted as long as I could declaring a major, since I wanted to take courses in all sorts of fields. In the end, I declared Anthropology ("an intellectual poaching license," in Clyde Klukhohn's terms) as my major, but I also continued to take courses in the Humanities Honors Program.
As an undergraduate Anthropology major at Stanford, I participated in what was then a rather laissez-faire major. Aside from the Spindlers, my major intellectual influences at Stanford were Shelley and Renato Rosaldo, who had just come from graduate school at Harvard. Shelly's course in structuralism convinced me that I might want to go on to do graduate work in anthropology. And Renato, who served as the advisor to those of us doing honors projects, gave me a sense of both the intellectual vibrancy and the political implications of the discipline.
My senior honors thesis was on the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization (3HO), one of the new religious movements that had sprung on the scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through my course work in the humanities, I had become interested in 19th century utopian communities and utopian literature. Naturally, I was intrigued by the similarities between the utopian impulses in 19th and 20th century America, and I hoped that I might be able to do a senior project that would serve both the Humanities Honors Program and the Anthropology Department. However, when I proposed to do a fieldwork-based account of an existing community, I was told by the Humanities folks that the proposal was "too sociological." Consequently, my honors thesis ("Why would anybody join? A study of recruitment and the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization"), based on my three months of participant observation in a 3HO ashram in Portland, Oregon, was written for Anthropology alone.
By the time I graduated, I knew that I was interested in going on to graduate school, but I wasn't sure where or when. I contemplated accepting a Peace Corps assignment to Zaire, spending a free year at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, or entering the joint JD/PhD program at Northwestern, but in the end I decided to go directly to graduate school in anthropology. In deciding between offers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Chicago, I was swayed by my Stanford mentors to put aside qualms about living in the Midwest for the intellectual stimulation I was sure to find at Chicago.
And Chicago was intellectually stimulating. Clifford Geertz had already left, but Chicago in the mid-1970s was still the center for symbolic anthropology. Our first semester theory course was taught by Marshall Sahlins, who had recently come from Michigan after his conversion to structuralism from neo-evolutionism. Lectures were basically an early version of his masterful book, Culture and Practical Reason. The two-semester kinship course was taught by David Schneider, whose American Kinship: A Cultural Account had both challenged conventional wisdom about the biological bases of kinship and helped make American culture a legitimate object of anthropological investigation. And Milton Singer, who had once been a student of Robert Redfield and W. Lloyd Warner, was then offering a stimulating workshop on Amercan culture.
My undergraduate honors thesis had been fairly well received and I was subsequently able to get funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities Youthgrant to do follow-up research between my first and second year of graduate school. This time, I traveled to visit 3HO ashrams throughout the western U.S. and Canada. And using some of the insights from Sahlins, Schneider, Singer and other meaning-centered anthropologists, I wrote a masters thesis ("Straight -> Freak -> Yogi -> Sikh: A 'search for meaning' in contemporary American culture") that focused on how 3HO ideology provided a collective, mythic life history that helped 3HO members make sense of their lives.
My first proposal for dissertation research was to follow upon David Schneider's kinship work by doing "American Friendship: A Cultural Account." My argument was that, like kinship, American friendship is a culturally-specific system of symbols and meanings (drawing on American individualism and egalitarianism) that should neither be presumed to be universal nor reduced to biological or psychological explanation. I still think it would have been an interesting project (and there have been subsequent anthropological studies of friendship), but I couldn't get Schneider to agree, and that basically killed that project. (I think part of the objection was that I needed to do some non-U.S. based fieldwork first to get a proper cross-cultural perspective on U.S. culture.)
Instead, I went back to my work with 3HO. 3HO members had come to represent themselves as orthodox Sikhs, and this had led to confrontations with Punjabi Sikh immigrants over who were the better Sikhs -- the recent North American Sikh converts of 3HO or the Indian immigrant Sikhs and their descendants. By proposing to look at the cross-cultural misunderstandings involved, I got connected with the South Asianists at Chicago. My dissertation research in Vancouver, British Columbia, was still initially conceptualized in terms of North American issues of immigration, ethnicity, and religious conversion. But when I got back from the field and began writing up, I found myself drawn to McKim Marriott's South Asian ethnosociological writings as a way of making sense of the interactions and mutual misunderstandings between the Sikh converts and the Sikh immigrants. Marriott's intellectual influence was central to my subsequent dissertation ("Sikh Persons and Practices: A Comparative Ethnosociology") which contrasted the ethnosociological premises of the converts and immigrants. (The other main intellectual influence on the dissertation was the New Zealand-based historian, W.H. McLeod, the leading figure in Sikh studies.)
Two other key intellectual influences from graduate school were George Stocking and John Comaroff. Not only was my understanding of anthropology significantly informed by Stocking's courses on the history of discipline, but I also relied on his personal support in getting through the graduate program at Chicago. John and Jean Comaroff arrived at the end of my time at Chicago, bringing with them Manchester school sensitivities. John and I talked about my dissertation research. And, although not much reflected in the dissertation, his insights for bringing the political and economic into conjunction with the social and cultural have been crucial to my subsequent work on Sikh diasporic experience in postcolonial multicultural states.
This research trajectory, subsequent to the dissertation, has included research with Sikhs in Southeast Asia in 1992-93 and in Australia in 1999 and 2001and in India in 2005-06 and over subsequent breaks. (See the section on Research Interests for more details.)
Since leaving graduate school, my intellectual influences have been diffuse. My work on the Sikh diaspora has led me into the literature on globalization and transnationalism, multiculturalism and the politics of identity, ethnonationalism and the postcolonial state. Here, the work of Arjun Appadurai has been especially influential. Given our contemporary "Age of Revolution" (to use John Comaroff's characterization), I find that a lot of our received understandings of the world are up for grabs. That makes it both an unsettling and potentially exciting time to be thinking about the human condition. Being an anthropologist who has been directing an international studies (now, Global Studies) program, however, gives me the license to read widely and co-opt other peoples' ideas when they seem useful.
I guess I'm a big-picture kind of guy. But, in terms of what George Stocking refers to as anthropology's "epistemic dualisms", I feel very much torn between my interests in understanding the general (anthropos) and the particulars (ethnos) of the human condition.
Finally, I've learned much anthropologically from my wife and colleague, Liz Coville (who was forbearing enough to let me accompany her during her dissertation fieldwork among the Toraja in Indonesia), and from my other departmental colleagues and from the students in my courses, both at Hamline and elsewhere (Carleton, Reed, Deep Springs, Lewis & Clark). Lifelong learning means that (I hope) my intellectual autobiography will never be completed.
Research Interests
In 2005-2006, I spent the academic year in India as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar affiliated to the Punjab Centre for Migration Studies at Lyallpur Khalsa College in Jalandhar, Punjab. I was there to conduct a collaborative research project with the centre’s director, Dr. Darshan S. Tatla, a fellow scholar of the Sikh diaspora, who had returned from the U.K. a few years earlier to start the Centre and to reconnect with Punjab.
Darshan and I had been in correspondence as far back as the mid-1990s about the possibility of collaborating on a project that would look at what was happening as a result of the remittances being sent back to Punjab by Sikhs living in the diaspora. In particular, we were interested in the philanthropic projects in Punjab being funded by Sikhs living abroad. And this became the focus of our research – both the motivation of diasporan Sikh philanthropists and the effects of diaspora philanthropy on Punjab.
While we were conducting our research, the United States Education Foundation in India (which administers CIEE Fulbright Awards) suggested that they would like to co-sponsor, with the Punjab Centre for Migration Studies, a workshop around the topic of our research. So, Darshan and I ended up putting together an international workshop on Diasporan Sikh Philanthropy in Punjab. The workshop, held in March 2006 at Lyallpur Khalsa College, brought together scholars, philanthropists, government officials, and journalists to discuss papers, hear philanthropist’s reflections, and visit selected philanthropic projects in the area. The manuscript of the revised workshop papers, Sikh Diaspora Philanthropyin Punjab: Global Giving for Local Good, which includes our own research findings, was published in August 2009 by Oxford University Press.
While in India, Liz and I and our younger daughter, Lisa, maintained a flat in New Delhi, while I divided my time between cosmopolitan New Delhi, where we lived in upscale Defence Colony, and rural Punjab, where I lived in Darshan’s village and visited philanthropic projects (schools, hospitals, village development projects, etc.) throughout the state. I thus was able to experience the two faces of contemporary India. During our ten months in India, we maintained a family blog, New Delhi Notes, which captures some of our experiences and reactions to life in India circa 2005-2006.