CARLOS CESAR ARANA CASTANEDA, believed to have been 72, the self-proclaimed
"sorcerer" and best-selling author, died of liver cancer April 27, 1998,
at his home in Westwood, CA, the same way he lived: quietly, secretly and
mysteriously.
Castaneda's tales of drug-induced mental adventures with a Yaqui Indian
shaman named Don Juan once fascinated the world. And though his 10 books
continue to sell in 17 languages, he died without public notice. According
to Deborah Drooz, a friend and the executor of his estate, Castaneda didn't
like attention, making certain not to have his picture taken or his voice
recorded. No funeral or public service was held; his cremated ashes were
spirited away to Mexico, according to the mortuary that handled his remains.
According to varying records, Castaneda immigrated to the US in 1951.
He was born Christmas Day 1925 in either Sao Paulo, Brazil, or Cajamarca,
Peru. He was an inveterate and unrepentant liar about the statistical details
of his life, even his given name is in some doubt.
"Much of the Castaneda mystique is based on the fact that even his
closest friends aren't sure who he is," wrote his ex-wife, Margaret Runyan
Castaneda, in a 1997 memoir that Castaneda tried to suppress.
As an anthropology graduate student at UCLA, Castaneda wrote his master's
thesis about a remarkable journey to the Arizona-Mexico desert. Hoping
to study the effects of certain medicinal plants, Castaneda said he stopped
in an Arizona border town where met an old Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico,
named Juan Matus, a brujo--a sorcerer or shaman--who used powerful hallucinogens
to initiate the student into an world with origins dating back more than
2000 years.
Under Don Juan's strenuous tutelage, which lasted several years, Castaneda
experimented with peyote, jimson weed and dried mushrooms, undergoing moments
of supreme ecstasy and stark panic, all in an effort to achieve varying
states of nonordinary reality. Wandering through the desert, with Don Juan
as his psychological and pharmacological guide, Castaneda said he saw giant
insects, learned to fly, grew a beak, became a crow and ultimately reached
a plateau of higher consciousness, a hard-won wisdom that made him a "man
of knowledge" like Don Juan.
The thesis, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, was
published in 1968 and became an international bestseller, striking just
the right note at the peak of the psychedelic 1960s. A strange alchemy
of anthropology, allegory, parapsychology, ethnography, Buddhism and perhaps
fiction made Don Juan a household name. Castaneda's subsequent best-sellers
include A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan.
Although Castaneda's death certificate lists him as never married,
he was married from 1960-73 to Margaret Runyan Castaneda, of Charleston,
West Virginia, who said Castaneda once lied in court, swearing he was the
father of her infant son by another man, then helped her raise the boy.
JOHN (JACK) HENRY CHILCOTT, 74, an authority on American Indian education,
died at home on June 23, 1998, in Tucson, AZ, after a long illness. Born
in Evanston, IL, February 21, 1924, he attended Harvard (BA, Anthropology,
1948), Texas A&M (Engineering, 1943-44), U of Colorado (MA, Education,
1952), and the U of Oregon (PhD, Education and Anthropology, 1956). His
undergraduate years were interrupted by World War II service as a combat
medic in the 103rd Infantry Division in Europe. A sergeant, he was awarded
the Bronze Star for heroism at the battle of Climbach south of Marburg
in Hesse, Germany. Before beginning his university teaching career as an
Assistant Professor of Education at the U of California, Santa Barbara
(1958), Chilcott taught at Tabor Academy, Massachusetts (1949-51), was
principal of Glenwood High School, Washington (1952-54), a research assistant
on a Kellogg Foundation program at the U of Oregon (1955-56) and Academic
Assistant to the President of Menlo School and College, California (1956-58).
He came to the U of Arizona in 1963 as an Associate Professor of Education
and Anthropology and retired in 1990 as Professor of Anthropology. In the
1960s he directed NSF Summer Institutes at UC Santa Barbara; Arizona State
College, Flagstaff; and the U of Arizona, and in 1970-71 he ran an NSF
Cooperative College-School Science Program in Anthropology at the U of
Arizona. In 1967 he was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional
de Trujillo, Peru, where he carried out an extensive educational survey.
From 1968 to 1970 he served as Director of the Southwest Center of the
National Study of American Indian Education at the U of Arizona and continued
educational research in Indian and Mexican-American communities until his
retirement. The records of his research on American Indian Education are
in the Arizona State Museum Archives at the U of Arizona. Chilcott was
the founding editor of the Quarterly of the Council on Anthropology and
Education (1973-76) and an associate editor of the American Educational
Research Journal (1985-89). He received the George and Louise Spindler
Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Anthropology and Education
(1996). Jack Chilcott was an excellent and popular teacher who spent a
good deal of time outside the classroom interacting with undergraduate
students. He is survived by his wife, Martha Jane Dunkel (whom he married
in 1950), three children (Kurt, Bret and Cynthia) and three grandchildren.
Donations in his memory may be made to the UA American Indian Scholarship
Endowment Fund, Graduate College, PO Box 210026, U Arizona, Tucson 85721-0026.
DANIEL J CROWLEY, 76, anthropologist, art historian and world traveler,
died February 24, 1998 in Oruro, Bolivia.
Crowley was born November 27, 1921 in Peoria, IL, and while serving
as a Naval Lieutenant JG in World War II, was disabled by poliomyelitis.
He earned an MA in art history from Bradley U and PhD in anthropology from
Northwestern U, under Melville Herskovits and William Bascom. During research
in the Caribbean, he married his "favorite informant," Pearl Ramcharan
of Trinidad, and after a year in the then-Belgian Congo as a Ford Foundation
Fellow, joined the U California, Davis faculty (1961) with a split-appointment
in anthropology and art history, where he taught until retirement (1993).
A specialist in the arts and folklore of Africa and its diaspora, especially
Carnivals and festivals, Crowley spent his life "to rehabilitate the image
of Africa denigrated to justify slavery."
Besides 4 books, a commercial recording and over 350 articles and reviews,
Crowley published I Could Talk Old-Story Good; Creativity in Bahamian Folklore,
a classic of "performance-oriented" folklore studies. President of the
American and California Folklore Societies, he received the Stafford Prize
in American Folklore (1952), Fulbright Research and Indo-United States
Grants, was a member of the US National Commission for UNESCO (1974-80),
and served on many journal editorial boards. Having received the UC Centennial
Citation (1968) for his services to the Santa Cruz campus, he was Archer
Taylor Memorial Lecturer for the California Folklore Society (1986), and
Distinguished Lecturer of the Southwestern Anthropological Association
(1993). Avid collectors of art, he and Pearl donated much of their collection
from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Aboriginal Australia to museums and
universities throughout the world. His archives of photographs of African
art, card references, photocopied African tale texts and musical tapes
have also been preserved in national and university archives.
Crowley was a true humanist. In an age in which theoretical debates
and the meaning of discourse increasingly dominated anthropology, Crowley
affirmed his stand as a particularist in his studies. He was founding director
of the U of California Education Abroad Program, U of Ghana-Legon (1969-71),
and enjoyed teaching appointments at universities throughout the world.
For two decades he ran University Research Expedition Projects to Carnivals.
Crowley was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most
traveled disabled person," having visited every sovereign nation except
Iraq, and 295 of the 311 political and geographic entities listed by Travelers'
Century Club. He will be remembered as a pioneer and advocate for the disabled
and role model for all who sought to overcome any kind of handicap.
Crowley is survived by his wife of 40 years, Pearl Ramcharan-Crowley;
children Peter, Eve and Magdalene, and 2 granddaughters. He once said that
his obituary would read "He died as he lived: crushed by 50,000 Brazilians
doing the samba." In fact, while Crowley died peacefully in his sleep,
of congestive heart failure he died on Mardi Gras Day while leading a U
of California Research Expedition to study Carnival in Bolivia. After a
funeral mass on Ash Wednesday, he was interred in Oruro, Bolivia. (Pearl
Ramcharan-Crowley, Peter Crowley, Eve Crowley Eyzaguirre, Magdalene Crowley)
E IRENE DIGGS, 91, anthropologist, authority on Afro-Latin culture and
society, and the history of the African diaspora, died in her sleep at
home in Baltimore, MD, March 14, 1998, a month before her 92nd birthday.
Born in Monmouth, IL, Diggs attended Monmouth College, received her BA
in economics and anthropology (U Minnesota, 1928), was the first to be
granted a master's in sociology from Atlanta U (1933), and was awarded
the doctorate in anthropology from the U of Havana (1944).
Diggs's adviser at Atlanta U was W E B DuBois. For 11 years she served
as DuBois's research associate, and co-founded the journal Phylon: A Review
of Race and Culture. During this period, she developed an interest in the
African diaspora and African historiography. Her research focused on the
contributions of peoples of African descent in the physical, cultural and
social constructions of the Americas and Africa.
In 1941, Diggs began her research outside the US as a student of the
distinguished Cuban ethnographer, Fernando Ortiz. She received a fellowship
to attend the U of Havana, studying the impact and continuities of African
cultural elements in Cuban society. In 1946, she spent a year in Montevideo,
Uruguay, doing archival and fieldwork on the African presence in the Plantine
region of Uruguay and Argentina.
Shortly after her return from South America, Diggs joined the faculty
of Morgan State U, a historical black college in Baltimore. For 29 years,
she was a member of the department of sociology and anthropology, retiring
in 1976. Like many black women intellectuals of her era, Diggs spent much
of her time training young minds instead of publishing scholarship. She
was a prominent teacher and taught countless Morgan State students such
courses as introduction to anthropology and race relations in the Americas.
Diggs produced numerous articles, reviews and lengthy monographs on
the African diaspora cultures and histories, and African history including
Black Chronology: From 4000 BC to the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1983);
"The Biological and Cultural Impact of Blacks on the United States," (June
1980); "The Socio-Anthropological Background of Africans and Their Descendants
in South America (1978); and "Tribute to William Edward Burghardt DuBois"
Freedom Ways (winter 1965).
Diggs was honored as a Distinguished Alumni by Monmouth College. In
1978, the Association of Black Anthropologists gave her their Lifetime
Achievement Award. Diggs, who never minced words, made this comment on
the discipline of anthropology in her acceptance speech. "I do not agree
with many of the theories and findings in anthropology which have to do
with non-white people. I believe that more studies need to be made using
the same techniques, on whites, especially poor whites in the United States.
I sincerely believe though, that anthropology can be, if properly taught,
one of the most beneficial subjects blacks and whites can study."
Diggs did not want to stop doing scholarship, even though her body
was slowing down. She is remembered in The Pioneers of African American
Anthropology. (forthcoming). (A Lynn Bolles)
ADRIANUS ALEXANDER GERBRANDS, 80, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology,
Leiden U, The Netherlands, died in Breda, November 6, 1997.
Gerbrands was born May 15, 1917, in Menado, Celebes, the Dutch East
Indies. He studied Indology (an interdisciplinary study of the Dutch East
Indies) and cultural anthropology (under J P B de Josselin de Jong) at
Leiden U, receiving his M Phil (Doctoraal) in 1941. From 1947 to 1956 he
was curator and then associate director of the National Museum of Ethnology,
Leiden. In 1956 he was awarded the PhD (Doctoraat) by Leiden for his dissertation
Art as Culture Element with Special Reference to Negro Africa, (1957).
His research in the early 1960s among the Asmat in what was then Southwest
New Guinea resulted in two major achievements: the internationally acclaimed
documentary film Matjemos (1962) and the 1963 Museum exhibition "Wow-Ipits:
Twelve woodcarvers from the Amanam Key." The latter formed the basis for
his book Wow-Ipits: Eight Asmat Woodcarvers of New Guinea (1967).
In the meantime, in 1966, he was appointed professor of cultural anthropology,
a position that he held until his retirement in 1983. In the early 1970s,
he was also Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Southern
Illinois U, where he worked closely with Philip Dark. Fieldwork then took
place among the Kilenge of West New Britain that resulted in more publications
and 5 ethnographic documentaries. He was a guest professor at Universitas
Jakarta during the 1979-80 academic year.
Gerbrands's contributions were in the areas of art and what might be
termed ethnoaesthetics. A major concern he had was to show that the artist
in tribal culture, like the Western artist, was a unique individual with
an individual style, and not the one often stereotyped as slavishly constrained
by collective thought and tradition. Another was his attempt to analyze
as unique texts, artifacts and art objects and their decorations in their
cultural contexts. This theoretical interest was clearly evinced in his
inaugural speech when he assumed his professorship at Leiden in 1966, The
Language of Things (De Taal der Dingen, 1966) that led to further research
in nonverbal communication. Thus, he made a number of ethnographic films
which focused on the analysis of material culture, pioneering in an approach
termed ethnocommunication.
Gerbrands will be remembered as a kind, gentle and unassuming scholar
who was always more than willing to go out of his way to provide assistance
to those who needed his help.
His publications include: Gerbrands (ed), The Asmat of New Guinea:
The Journal of Michael Clark Rockefeller (1962); The Language of Things:
Studies in Ethnocommunication in Honour of Professor Adrian A Gerbrands
(1990); Gerbrands et al, Asmat Art: Woodcarvings of Southwest New Guinea
(1993).
JEAN CARL (PINKY) HARRINGTON, 96, died April 19, 1998, in Richmond,
VA.
In 1968 the Society for Historical Archaeology, just established by
Harrington and a few of his peers, asked its membership: "What do you consider
the relationship of anthropology to be to historic sites archaeology?"
Harrington's succinct answer was: "Relates if you want to do anthropology.
I have found it difficult to do. Even most of those who insist they are
doing anthropology are really just doing history!"
That is just about all there is to it 30 years later. Harrington was
strictly to the point in all his 36 published articles and reports, 25
typescript unpublished reports of fieldwork, and numerous notes and book
reviews on historical archaeology. At his death after only two weeks in
a nursing home where he "just gave out," he had participated in the making
of modern archaeology, was the acknowledged dean and founder of the subdiscipline
of historical archaeology in America, and had seen Halley's comet twice.
Harrington's last published work was an article, "The Mules Knew the
Way" (Historical Archaeology, 1997). A notable raconteur, he told of his
exploration on muleback in Yucatan in January of 1936 with J Eric Thompson,
who had chosen him as the only archaeology graduate student (or anyone
else) who could manage a theodolite and chronometers to determine exactly
where on earth the expedition and its sites were. That was because math
and physics were Harrington's first love. Born in Millbrook, MI, October
25, 1901, Harrington's 1924 BS degree at the U of Michigan was in architectural
engineering, and he had done scale drawings of southwestern Spanish missions
for the School of American Research. Three years of graduate school in
anthropology at the U of Chicago under Fay Cooper Cole were given up for
the Yucatan job, and Harrington never picked up his MA or completed his
PhD.
Harrington had the perfect and unique training for historical sites
archaeology, when he was chosen to direct (1936-42) the first excavations
of the entire community of an historical settlement, at Jamestown, VA.
Here he married his one-time student Virginia Hall Sutton, who had been
in his class when he was a graduate instructor at Chicago. Virginia was
a fellow employee of Colonial National Historical Park, and the first woman
Ranger in the National Park Service. Since then Virginia Harrington has
been close to her husband's research.
Until his retirement in 1965, Harrington managed or directed 7 major
site investigations in the Southeastern Region of the NPS, and after, he
investigated and published on the early 19th-century Mormon town of Navoo,
IL. He was especially noted for his pioneer work on dating stem fragments
of 17th and 18th century clay tobacco pipes and for his definitive 1954
booklet for the Society for State and Local History, Archaeology and the
Historical Society, which introduced historical archaeology to scholars
in other fields.
Harrington is survived by his wife, daughter Jeanette Mynett, and two
daughters of their late son, Robert. (John L Cotter)
GEORGE L HICKS, 63, associate professor of anthropology at Brown U,
died May 5, 1998, at his home in Foster, RI, from congestive heart failure.
Hicks relished teaching American culture and anthropology. He was a consummate
teacher. Professorial and demanding in the classroom, his students all
say they came to know him as "kinder, gentler and softer." He asked much
of his students: that their purpose and effort be serious and the quality
of their writing, evidence and argument meet the highest standards. He
expected them to know, understand and engage the scholarship that preceded
them. Beyond that he encouraged them to follow ideas where they led: across
disciplinary boundaries, to problems outside the mainstream, to conclusions
contrary to his own. Hicks was awarded the Occasional Award for the best
Graduate Instructor in 1995, the only time thus far this award has been
given by the graduate students at Brown. His influence will be ongoing
for many years to come.
Hicks had just finished revisions on a major work, to be published
by the U of Illinois Press, on Utopian communities in the US and Europe,
tentatively entitled Experimental Americans: Community in the Twentieth
Century. In 1976, he published Appalachian Valley. The original edition
was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, as one of the case studies
in anthropology edited by George and Louise Spindler. A revised edition
came out in 1992. He coedited a volume with Philip E Leis, Ethnic Encounters,
Identities and Contexts (1976). In addition to these Hicks published numerous
articles in professional, scientific journals and chapters in monographs.
Hicks's research interests included not only the local people in Appalachia,
but the Catawba Indians of the southern US as well as other Indian groups
in the southern and eastern US. Additional research interests ranged from
utopian communities in America to oyster fisherman in Apalachicola, FL.
and to Azoreans--both their migration and change, in New England and the
Azores.
Hicks received his AB in history from Florida State U (1960); MA, also
in history, from the U of California, Berkeley (1961); and PhD in anthropology
from the U of Illinois (1969). During his graduate years, he received various
fellowships, including the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He was an Army veteran
of the Korean War.
Hicks's professional appointments began with his taking on the role
of Archaeologist's Assistant with the Research Laboratory of Anthropology
at the U of North Carolina (1961-62). In 1967, he became an assistant professor
of anthropology at Brown U, and in 1972, associate professor. From 1976
until 1982, he assumed the position of chair of the Department of Anthropology
at Brown.
Those of us who knew him well join his widow, Linne (Hall) Hicks, and
children Beth Johnson and Leslie Douglas Hicks, in a celebration of his
life. (Norris Lang)
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LOCHER, 89, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology,
Leiden U, The Netherlands, died December 3, 1997. Born in 1908, Locher
was from a Zurich family which migrated to Holland in the late 1800s. Locher's
degree from Leiden U (1929) was in history, which he studied under Johan
Huizinga, whose influence can be discerned in many of Locher's publications.
He then pursued his terminal degrees in cultural anthropology under J P
B de Josselin de Jong, earning his doctorate cum laude (The Serpent in
Kwakiutl Religion, 1932).
On graduation Locher worked pro bono at the National Museum of Ethnology,
Leiden. His first paid professional position came in 1934, when hired as
a research assistant by the Museum of Geography and Ethnology, Rotterdam.
Three years later, he moved back to the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden,
but as curator.
In early 1940, Locher went to the interior of Timor for fieldwork to
study the relationship of myth to sociopolitical order. When Japan invaded
the Dutch East Indies, he was able to escape--sans fieldnotes--to Australia,
where he served in the military until the end of the war.
On his return to Holland in 1946, Locher was appointed director of
the National Museum of Ethnology. The following year he visited Mexico
and US at the invitation of UNESCO to learn what other anthropology museums
were doing in the postwar world.
Under Locher's leadership the National Museum of Ethnology was modernized
and expanded, including the addition of a film library (1951) and education
division (1953).
In 1954, Locher was appointed professor of cultural anthropology, with
special reference to non-Western peoples, and was given the additional
charge by the Leiden U Board of Regents to establish the Institute of Cultural
Anthropology and Sociology of Non-Western Peoples--an institution that
opened its doors in 1956. The regental charge to Locher was expanded in
1963, when he was asked to found the Faculty of Social Sciences, a major
division within Leiden U, of which he served as dean. Locher retired at
65, but continued to be active in anthropology until his death. He was
recognized for his contributions when elected to the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Sciences (1969).
Locher's major interests were structuralism, history's proper role
in anthropology, culture theory, development theory and Marxism. In the
early 1950s he took a keen interest in M Escher's creations that eventually
resulted in a series of classroom lectures and a publication on structuralism
and Escher. His contacts with Escher developed into a lifelong friendship
with this Dutch artist and led to his collecting a number of original Eschers
at a time when the artist was not well known outside his own country.
Locher also published one of the first comprehensive interpretations
of Levi-Strauss's theories written outside France (1961). Locher's most
significant publications translated into English appear in his edited Transformation
and Tradition (1978).
A "modest and erudite" anthropologist, G W Locher delivered carefully
crafted lectures, always leaving his audiences exhilarated and spellbound.
FLOYD GLENN LOUNSBURY, 84, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology,
Yale U, died May 14, 1998, in Branford, CT, of a heart condition and other
complications. He is survived by his wife Masako Yokoyama Lounsbury and
daughter Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury. Memorial contributions may be made to the
Endangered Languages Fund, Dept of Linguistics, Yale U, New Haven, CT 06520.
Lounsbury grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. At the U of Wisconsin, Madison
(BA, 1941) he majored in mathematics with a minor in physics, and the equivalent
of a major in German with concentration in linguistics. His education was
interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, when he served as
a master sergeant meteorologist in the Army Air Force in Brazil. Fortunately
for anthropology and linguistics, he became strongly attracted to these
fields while still an undergraduate. He was greatly influenced by his teacher,
Morris Swadesh, who asked him to conduct the WPA-funded Oneida Language
and Folklore Project in Green Bay, WI (1939-40), to teach adults to write
their language and collect texts. From this experience and an additional
6 months of linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork, Lounsbury gained an
impressive command of Oneida. This led to his theses in anthropology at
Madison (MA, 1946) and at Yale (PhD, 1949) on Oneida phonology and morphology
respectively. He began teaching at Yale in 1947 and retired in 1979.
Throughout his career, Lounsbury combined broad theoretical and comparative
insights, the use of innovative methods and field techniques and a sharp
eye for critical detail, with in-depth empirical research and clear precise
writing. He earned international scholarly recognition for his outstanding
publications and research on structural linguistics, semantic systems,
American Indian languages, psychology of language, social organization
and systems of kinship, and the ancient writing of Middle America. Uncompromising
in the pursuit of quality, he made a succession of seminal and preeminent
contributions in each. Lounsbury became the founder and leader of 20th-century
descriptive and comparative Iroquoian linguistics, was a principal innovator
in the formal analysis of kinship terminologies and structural semantics,
and played a major role in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic texts
and the study of Maya numeration, computation and calendric astronomy.
Lounsbury was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1969), and
received many other awards: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976),
and American Philosophical Society (1987). He received the Wilbur Cross
Medal from Yale Graduate School (1983), an honorary Doctor of Laws from
U of Pennsylvania (1987), and the Tatiana Proskouriakoff Award from Harvard
for distinction in Mesoamerican research (1993). He was the Distinguished
Lecturer at the 86th AAA Annual Meeting (1990).
Aside from his continuing work on Oneida in the US and Canada, Lounsbury
also carried out fieldwork on all other surviving Iroquoian languages as
well as on Natchez, two Mayan languages and 6 Brazilian Indian languages.
Over the years, he attracted, guided and influenced scores of scholars
from many fields. He is remembered fondly by his Oneida friends and their
descendants, and would have been pleased and honored to know that his passing
was noted in the late June issue of News from Indian Country (Hayward,
WI). (Harold C Conklin and William C Sturtevant)
JOON-HEE PARK, 73, a specialist in education, died of heart failure
on February 15, 1998, in San Diego, CA. Born on August 25, 1924 in A-san,
Chung-Nam Province, Korea, Park received his BA in education from Seoul
National U, Korea (1950) and PhD in education from Ewha U, Korea (1975).
Park's major publications include Japanese: Who Are More Apt to Socially
Expand (Japan 1976); Cognition of Identified Culture (Korea, 1974); Koreans'
Traditional Views on Education (Korea, 1975). In addition, he published
more than 23 books under major Korean and Japanese publishing companies
and contributed almost 70 technical papers and articles to well-known expertise
groups or associations.
Park's distinguished teaching career included appointments as Professor
at the Kong-Ju College of Education, Korea (1954-56); Professor at Ewha
U, Korea (1956-89); Invited Professor, Tsukuba U, Japan (1985-88); and
Professor at Fukuoka Woman's College, Japan (1990-95). In addition to teaching,
Park served as Vice President of Student Affairs at Ewha U (1964-70); Graduate
Dean of the Graduate School of Education, Ewha U (1967-68); President of
the Research Institute of Human Development (1970-75); President of the
East West Research Center of Education (1979-88); member of the Executive
Committee of the World Education Association (1982, until his death); President
of the Korean Institute of Comparative Education (1982-85); and member
of the Executive Committee of the Institute of Higher Education of the
Pacific Region (1987, until his death).
In 1967 Park was honored with the Korean Association of Education's
Distinguished Award for his contributions to Korean education; and in 1976
he was given the National Medal of Honor by the President of Korea. (Yong-Ja
Park)
EARLE L REYNOLDS, 87, physical anthropologist, pacifist, social activist
and accomplished seaman died in Southern California on January 11, 1998.
Reynolds was born October 18, 1910 as Earle Schoene to German parents who
came to America to perform as trapeze artists in the Ringling Brothers
Circus. His parents later stopped him from running away to Hollywood to
work in films with Charlie Chaplin. He later took on the family name of
his stepfather, and as Earle Reynolds he worked his way though college
at Ole Miss as a tennis pro and then went on to study anthropology at the
U of Chicago (AM 1943) and U of Wisconsin (PhD 1944).
After receiving his degree Reynolds taught anthropology and playwrighting
at Antioch College. At the end of the Second World War he was appointed
to the Atomic Energy Commission and studied the effects of radiation on
survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1953 he authored a detailed
report entitled "Growth and Development of Hiroshima Children Exposed to
the Atomic Bomb." At the end of this work Reynolds sailed around the world
in his hand-built sailboat, The Phoenix, with his family and 4 members
of the Hiroshima community. He recounted the adventures of this voyage
in his book, All In the Same Boat. He was later arrested for a protest
in which he deliberately sailed the Phoenix into the area of a US nuclear
bomb test site (documented in Reynolds's The Forbidden Voyage, 1961) and
was put on trial in Hawaii. The events surrounding this trial served to
further his beliefs in pacifism and instilled in him the belief that activism
was the duty of every citizen.
Reynolds's work to bring medical supplies to Hanoi during the Vietnam
War, as well as a friendship voyage to Leningrad were documented in the
Canadian Film Board production, "The Voyage of the Phoenix." He became
a dignified leader and spokesperson of the movement to end the war in Southeast
Asia. In his later life, Reynolds and his second wife Akie moved to the
Santa Cruz area of California, where they worked as caretakers at a Quaker
retreat center and he occasionally taught college courses. After the death
of his wife in 1994, Reynolds moved to be near his daughter in Southern
California. Earle Reynolds is survived by three children and 5 grandchildren.
(David Price)
BERTA G RIBEIRO, 73, died in Rio de Janeiro on November 17, 1997. She
had devoted her life to researching Brazil's Indian peoples and cultures.
As researcher, staff member and teacher at the Museu do Indio and the Museu
Nacional in Rio, she came to see museums as ideal resources for public
education. They were the means of realizing her most cherished hopes for
her country and profession--the understanding and appreciation of the cultural
accomplishments and beauty of Brazil's indigenous cultures.
Ribeiro was born in Romania in 1924. She and her family migrated to
Brazil in the 1930s. In 1948 she began working with Darcy Ribeiro. That
year she accompanied him to Kadiweu, Kaiwa and Terena villages in southern
Mato Grosso. Her field research continued throughout her life and included
tribes from many regions of Brazil: the Kaingang, Kaapor, Yawalapiti, Kayabi,
Juruna, Arawete and Asurini, and the Desana, Tukano and Hohodene.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in geography and history (1953
U of the Federal District), Ribeiro established herself as an expert in
indigenous material culture at the Museu do Indio and Museu Nacional. When
Darcy moved to the new capital of Brasilia in 1958, to set up the federal
university there, she went with him. The couple continued their collaboration
with The Indians and Civilization and the Americas and Civilization, published
under Darcy's name.
When a military regime took over Brazil in 1964, Darcy was one of the
first opponents to be jailed. The government suspended publication of The
Americas and Civilization and ordered all copies destroyed in 1968. The
couple went into exile in Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile and Peru. Berta returned
to Brazil (1974) and continued working on indigenous material culture.
She completed her PhD in anthropology (U of Sao Paulo, 1980).
The 1980s marked the peak of Ribeiro's career. She published 8 books
and 50 articles, participated in innumerable working groups, seminars and
congresses, did field research, worked at the Indian Museum and supervised
graduate students at the Federal U of Rio de Janeiro. She was named assistant
professor of anthropology (1988) and promoted to associate professor (1989).
Ribeiro found time to organize the exhibition, "Amazonia Urgente, Cinco
Seculos de Historia e Ecologia" and produce a guide. The exhibition opened
at the Brazilian Congress in 1989 and was displayed to thousands during
the 1992 Earth Summit in a downtown Rio subway station.
Ribeiro applied her broad expertise in Brazilian ethnology to her organizational
and editorial work on the 3-volume SUMA Etnologia Brasileira, a translation
of the Brazilian portions of the Handbook of South American Indians, plus
new articles. Her most beautiful work is Arte Indigena, Linguagem Visual/Indigenous
Art, Visual Language (1989). Other publications include O Indio na Cultura
Brasileira and Diario do Xingu.
In 1995 Ribeiro received the National Order of Scientific Merit from
Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology. She left a collection of almost
500 indigenous objects, which she, Darcy Ribeiro and Eduardo Galvao had
accumulated, to the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas, a museum under construction
in Brasilia. (Linda Rabben and Dolores Newton)
LINDA SCHELE, 55, died on April 18, 1998, after a struggle with pancreatic
cancer. The decipherment of Maya glyphic writing is one of the century's
great accomplishments in the study of the past. Schele was a vital and
central contributor to that effort. She was a charismatic teacher, dedicated
and courageous scholar, prolific writer and illustrator, loyal friend and
mentor. The Maya field has witnessed a century and a half of remarkable
individuals; Schele stands with the best. Her 8 books and monographs, dozens
of articles, hundreds of technical notes and reports, have helped to elucidate
the meaning of Maya art and writing, and establish the fact of Maya ancient
history as an endeavor transcending the particular methods of epigraphy,
archaeology, art history, ethnohistory and ethnography.
In The Blood of Kings (1986), Schele and Mary Miller demonstrated that
we could now discern the Maya as mindful actors and agents in events and
developments in their civilization--not just through the famous carved
stone stelae, but across the range of materials Maya artists worked. In
the face of loud and often vociferous skepticism from some archaeologists
to the effect that Maya public writing was unreliable propaganda, she insisted
that Classic Maya texts made reference to real historical events, however
couched in the language of religion and myth. At the 1996 Society for American
Archaeology meetings she reviewed the retrospective Late Classic glyphic
histories of Copan's dynastic founder and the fragmentary evidence of Early
Classic texts from that site which demonstrated the presence of public
writing in the Early Classic. She hypothesized that the Copan founder was
a real, historical individual and not a contrived mythical hero. She lived
to see the confirmation of that hypothesis in Robert Sharer and David Sedat's
tunnel excavations deep in the Copan acropolis, and to see the bones of
Yax-K'uk'-Mo', the dynastic founder. As she repeatedly cautioned, the glyphic
texts and public imagery left to us refer principally to the Maya elite.
Nevertheless, her investigation from the perspective of actors has challenged
Mayanists to increasingly seek patterns in the tangible record as the product
of intentional and conscious cultural behavior.
Schele's interest in the ancient Maya as people segued into her dedication
to the living Maya as inheritors of the history and culture she was studying.
She articulated this commitment in Maya Cosmos (with Freidel and Joy Parker),
and reiterated it in the final chapter of Code of Kings (with Peter Mathews).
In the last decade of her life, Schele worked with collaborators Nikolai
Grube and Federico Fahsen to give 13 glyph workshops to Maya-speaking people
in Guatemala and Mexico. She regarded teaching and learning among contemporary
Maya people as an essential and rewarding responsibility for people studying
the Maya past.
Schele's is a work in progress. From the iconography of Maya star lore
and the migrations of the Itza, to the commonalities of Mesoamerican religion,
she leaves her students, collaborators and colleagues lifetimes of challenges
to explore. When the history of this era in Maya archaeology is written
from the dispassionate distance of a future generation, she will soar like
the Ceiba in the forest, majestic and inspiring. She is survived by her
husband David. (David A Freidel)
BARBARA J SIBLEY, 65, died in Linthicum, MD, under hospice care on May
10, 1998, following a 5-year battle with breast cancer. At the time of
her death, she was retired as a result of her illness.
Sibley began her higher education with an undergraduate degree in biology
earned at Iowa State Teachers College (now Northern Iowa U). Following
a year of teaching high-school biology in Muscantine, IA, Sibley earned
a Merchant Fellowship and began graduate studies in anthropology at the
U of Chicago (1955-56). There she met and married anthropologist Will Sibley
and, following the customs of the 1950s, accompanied him as he began a
university teaching career in 1956.
During the succeeding years, Sibley raised three children, accompanying
them and her husband to the Philippines twice, during which she engaged
in independent fieldwork focussed on child-rearing practices. She also
earned two MA degrees, in human biology (Miami U of Ohio, 1958 ) and social
psychology (Washington State U, 1971). Moving with family to Cleveland
in 1971, Sibley worked first in a drug education project based at Case
Western Reserve U. During the 1970s, she spent 8 years working in large
engineering firm in Cleveland, combining anthropological perspectives with
her work on such varied projects as environmental impact studies, citizen
participation in public projects, fast track wind tunnel design and hospital
facilities design. During this time, she participated in numerous workshops
and academic sessions at AAA and SfAA meetings, discussing nonacademic
opportunities for anthropologists--at a time when academic appointments
were shrinking rapidly just as the number of women trained in anthropology
were becoming relatively more numerous.
When environmental work suffered following Reagan's election to the
Presidency in 1982, Sibley turned to nursing, earning a Doctor of Nursing
degree at Case Western Reserve U (1985). While engaged thereafter in adult
acute psychiatric nursing at University Hospital in Cleveland, Sibley allied
herself with nurse-anthropologists, now contributing her anthropologically
oriented insights into problems of health care. Despite her lack of a formal
degree in anthropology, Sibley was elected a Fellow by the Society for
Applied Anthropology in the late 1980s, recognizing her contributions particularly
in the joining of anthropology with other disciplines and orientations.
When she moved to Maryland in 1992, Sibley began yet another career, consulting
about conflict resolution in health care settings. The cancer diagnosis
in 1993, however, forced cancellation of further career plans.
Sibley is survived by her husband, Will Sibley, three married children--Sheila,
Tony and Michael--and 7 grandchildren. Nearly 200 friends, relatives and
admirers attended her memorial service in July 1998. (Will Sibley)
IAN M (SANDY) THOMPSON, 57, former Executive Director of the Crow Canyon
Archaeological Center, died of cancer on April 20, 1998, in his home in
Cortez, CO. Born August 28, 1940, in Topanga Canyon, CA, Thompson lived
most of his life in southwestern Colorado and received his BS in Political
Science (Colorado, 1968). Although he had no formal education in anthropology
or archaeology, Thompson had an avid interest the archaeology, history
and cultures of the American Southwest. Through his various roles as author,
journalist, researcher, administrator and public servant, Thompson worked
tirelessly to promote archaeological research, historic preservation, public
education in archaeology and involvement of Native Americans in interpreting
the past.
In 1964 Thompson was founding President of the San Juan County Historical
Society, which promoted historic preservation and created a museum that
still operates in the historic mining town of Silverton, CO. As Mayor and
City Councilman in Durango, CO (1980-83), Thompson sponsored a municipal
archaeology ordinance, requiring archaeological mitigation for city projects
and creating guidelines for private developers. During his tenure as public
servant and guest editorialist for the Durango Herald, Thompson campaigned
locally and in Washington to increase federal funding for the Dolores Archaeological
Program from the required 1% to 4% of project costs. The increased funding,
which was approved by Congress, resulted in significant research accomplishments
and the creation of the Anasazi Heritage Center, a public museum where
the project artifacts and documents are curated.
Thompson served as a board member for the Colorado Endowment for the
Humanities (1979-83) and the Center for American Archaeology (1985). Thompson
served as a Trustee (1982-98) and President (1990-98) of the Ballantine
Family Charitable Fund, which supported many archaeological and Native
American cultural projects, including NAGPRA programs at Santa Clara Pueblo,
the Zuni Gardens project, replacing Navajo fruit trees destroyed by Kit
Carson's campaign in 1864, and the graduate research of many archaeology
students. Thompson was a consultant (1992-97) to the Four Corners Heritage
Council, coordinating the Traditional Interpretation Project, which provided
a forum for Native Americans to discuss interpretations of their cultures,
past and present, to the world at large.
Thompson was a key figure in developing the Crow Canyon Archaeological
Center into a nationally recognized leader in archaeological research,
public education and involving Native Americans in the study and interpretation
of the past. The Center was awarded the President's Award for Historic
Preservation and the El Pomar Foundation Award for Excellence.
Thompson served as Crow Canyon's Executive Director (1985-90), Board
member (1985-90) and Research Director (1995-97). In 1997 Thompson was
awarded the Crow Canyon Chair, an endowed position devoted to public interpretation
of archaeological research.
Among Thompson's enduring contributions are 5 books: Four Corners Country
(1986), The Towers of Hovenweep (1993), The Escalante Community (1994),
Historical Guide to the San Juan Skyway (1994), and Houses on Country Roads
(1995). As Crow Canyon Chair, Thompson was working on a new book, Searching
for Community, which he did not complete. He is survived by his sons, Geoffrey
and Jonathan. (Ricky Lightfoot, based on information from Mark Varien)
COLIN E TWEDDELL, 98, Professor emeritus at Western Washington U, who
died January 20, 1998, in Mt Vernon, WA, wrote a gentle trajectory through
the expanses of time and touched many people along the way. His Introduction
to the Peoples and Cultures of Asia (coauthored with L A Kimball, 1985)
distilled the insights and understandings of a lifetime of experience and
learning about Asia. His achievements were gained through hard, sustained
work, illuminated with a sharp sense of how different ethnographic patterns
may appear in various guises, and sharp perception which often showed familiar
materials in a new light. Tweddell was born March 19, 1899, in Melbourne
Australia. The child of hard-working parents, he completed high school,
then served in World War I. Tweddell was a hawk-eyed proofreader, who once
told his coauthor, "I am going to do to you what my sargeant-major did
to me," and proceeded to point out every single typo and infelicity of
wording. He felt called to the mission field, and went to China with the
Inland Mission in 1924. There was a love-story here. His fiancee in Australia
could not pass the health test for the Mission; so she released him from
his vow. In China Tweddell met and married Gertrude Brooks, and the adventures
of raising a family there were considerable. This was the warlord period;
Tweddell recounted how he stood on the battlements of a city and watched
the war below, "A shell will not make you any more dead there than if it
hits the roof of your house." In World War II Tweddell was language instructor
for the military at the U of Washington. Commissioned Captain in the Marines,
he was sent over the Pacific as interpreter for the Commander of the Seventh
Fleet, Admiral Barby.
When others might have been thinking of rest, Tweddell sought new challenges.
He resumed missionary work, first in China, then in the Philippines. He
earned his PhD in linguistics, with work on Salishan linguistics, Chinese
and Filipino (U of Washington, 1958). From 1965-78 he taught courses on
Asia, anthropological linguistics and peoples of the Pacific at Western
Washington U. Retired as Professor Emeritus, he worked on his book and
scholarly articles. Several hundred people gathered to honor him on his
90th birthday, organized by Esther L Sward, whom he married after the passing
of his first wife. The respect, admiration and affection shown by the many
there, and the perky liveliness with which Tweddell greeted all, were surely
among the greatest honors and pleasures an anthropologist could know. Tweddell
remained sharp and articulate, and continued to write poetry until the
end. In the race to name and fame he took no part, in the grand exploration
to live a deeply meaningful life to the fullest he was among the foremost.
He is survived by his wife, children Colin B, Tom and Gladys Nancy, 2 step-children,
9 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren. (Linda Kimball)
VALERIO VALERI, 53, Professor of Anthropology at the U of Chicago, died
April 25, 1998, at his home in Santa Monica, CA, following a two-year fight
against brain cancer. Born in Italy August 4, 1944, Valeri had a classic
continental training at the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa (degrees in
1964, 1970) and the Sorbonne (PhD in ethnology, 1976, "Le brule et le cuit:
Mythologie et organisation de la chefferie dans la societe hawaiienne ancienne").
He joined the U Chicago faculty in 1976.
A man of great erudition and broad scholarship, Valeri knew some 16
languages, ranging from ancient Greek and classical Latin to three Indonesian
languages and Native Hawaiian, as well as all the major tongues of Western
and Northern Europe. He had a broad philosophical background and wide knowledge
of art and literature. Everything he touched in his particular discipline
of anthropology was thus informed by a more general intellectual significance,
linking what had generally been thought on such subjects in a long scholarly
tradition. If anthropology is a project of finding universals in particulars,
human significances in relative differences, Valeri was a master.
Valeri did over three years of intensive anthropological fieldwork
in the small community of Huaulu in central Seram, Indonesia. After writing
numerous articles on his field studies--ranging over topics from economic
exchange to concepts of time--Valeri, in the last months of his life, finished
two further books on the Huaulu: one on morality and identity, and another
on "blood and money." These will be published, along with two collections
of his essays, including a number of previously unpublished papers and
translations of French and Italian articles. The latter include works from
the famous Einaudi Encyclopedia that have made Valeri well known in Europe,
including studies of caste, ritual, regalia and festival. Valeri's major
work is Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii. This
widely proclaimed book, rich in ethnographic detail, offers an innovative
theory of sacrifice, as well as a theory of divinity, that engages with
the best Western writings on comparative theology--and takes its place
among them. At the same time, it is a major contribution to the anthropology
of Oceania. He was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (1982-83); and earned
fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Social Science,
Princeton, 1990-91) and Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities,
Santa Monica (1995-96).
Valeri was known to graduate students as a teacher who demanded the
highest standards both of himself and others, a lecturer of great clarity
and learning. Few will forget the memorable day in a seminar at Chicago
on history and anthropology when he criticized Thucydides for not taking
advantage of all available inscriptive sources. All of Valeri's field notes
and research papers will be bequeathed to the Getty Research Institute
in Los Angeles. Valeri is survived by his wife, Janet Hoskins, son, Tancredi,
and daughters, Sylvana and Artemisia. (Adapted from an eulogy by Marshall
Sahlins)
HERNAN JULIO VIDAL, 40, was killed in an automobile accident on May
11, 1998, while doing doctoral dissertation research in Patagonia. Between
graduation from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1983) and enrolling in
the FLASCO program in Ecuador (1991), Vidal lived in Tierra del Fuego,
where he became Director of the Archaeology Department of the Museo del
Fin del Mundo. During this period he became deeply committed to, and active
in, a wide range of issues concerning the native people of Tierra del Fuego.
This included a project to help native people recover their own history,
a political campaign to establish a cemetery at Usuhaia for native people,
and organizing a poor people's food cooperative. This last project was
part of a growing concern for the Chilote people, who migrated to Tierra
del Fuego from Chiloe as shepherds and then as miners. After receiving
his MA in anthropology from FLASCO, Vidal came to the Graduate Center of
CUNY (1993) to do a PhD in anthropology.
The shift in Vidal's concerns, from the native people of Tierra del
Fuego and claims against the state rooted ultimately in prior occupancy,
to the Chilote migrants and claims rooted in the fundamentals of human
rights, marked an important development in his work on the historical anthropology
of power and violence. From his association with the early work of the
Forensic Archaeology Group in Argentina, Vidal deeply understood the potential
antagonism between history and coercive power. Beyond this, he was developing
an exceptional understanding of the complex relations that marginalized
and despised peoples have to the histories they themselves both recount
and create.
Vidal was a deeply political intellectual with an intense engagement
with his family. He leaves behind his wife, Sylvia, and two young children,
Magdelena and Valentin. And he leaves his saddened colleagues with a special
example of the ways that analysis and commitment dignify each other, the
anthropologist and the people studied. His unpublished papers and field
notes are being reviewed for potential publication. For information contact
Gerald Sider, CUNY Graduate Center; sider@postbox.csi.cuny.edu. (Gerald
Sider)
MARK ZBOROWSKI, 82, medical anthropologist, died of heart failure in
San Francisco, CA, April 30, 1990. He was born in Uman, Russia, on January
27, 1908, and came to the US in 1941. Zborowski was educated at the Sorbonne
and is best known for his ground-breaking research on the cultural mitigation
of pain (People In Pain, 1969), and his ethnohistorical account of Jewish
life in the Shtetls of Eastern Europe (Life is With People, 1952, coauthored
with Elizabeth Herzog).
Outside of his anthropological work, Zborowski had a long and complex
involvement in Soviet espionage, which began in 1932 when he infiltrated
Leon Trotsky's inner circle of family, friends and advisers while living
in France. By his own account he was involved in the 1936 destruction of
Trotsky's archives at the International Institute for Social History in
Paris, and some historians believe that he may have been the individual
responsible for introducing Trotsky's assassin Ramon Mercader into Trotsky's
household. Recently, a number of previously classified KGB communiques
intercepted as part of the CIA and NSA VENONA program have been released,
revealing a number of intercepts mentioning Zborowski under his KGB cryptonyms
of Etienne and Tulip. In testimony before the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee, Alexander Orlov identified Zborowski as a NKVD agent. Subsequently,
in 1958 Zborowski was found guilty of perjury charges stemming from misleading
statements he had made to the Senate subcommittee about his earlier espionage
work. This conviction was later overturned, though he was retried in 1962
and served a 47-month sentence.
After coming to the US, Zborowski found employment, with the assistance
of Margaret Mead, as a research assistant at Harvard. He worked as a consultant
for the US Army (1941-45), and as a consultant for the Studies in Contemporary
Cultures project at Columbia (1945-51). He became an American citizen in
1947. He conducted research at Cornell (1951-54), and under the auspices
of the Institute for Intercultural Studies (1951-55). In the 1960s Zborowski
moved to San Francisco and continued his research on the cultural components
of the experience of human pain, and he helped establish Mt Zion Hospital's
Pain Center. After observing that patients from different ethnic backgrounds
seemed to react differently to similar exposures to pain, Zborowski undertook
an extensive cross-cultural study of the effects of culture on the human
experience of pain.
Mark Zborowski is survived by his wife Regina and son George. (David
Price)
ALSO NOTED: DENYS LOMBARD, 60, Director of the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient,
died January 8, 1998. Born in 1938, Lombard started his career as a historian
of southeast Asia. He saw the "Javanese crossroads" as comparable historically
to the Mediterranean, introduced a new interest in social sciences--especially
anthropology--to Franch orientalist studies. He concentrated particularly
on the study of mercantile networks in Asia and the effects on Asian economies
of the introduction of Islamic ideology and law and Muslim mystical orders.
In 1996 he joined the ethnology section of the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique.
HELEN MCKAIG (MAC) SPUHLER, 80, died of exposure outside her home in
Santa Fe, NM, on February 28, 1998. Her death was initially treated as
a possible homicide, but was resolved as an unintended death. Spuhler was
born on Pine Island, MN, in February 1918 and graduated from the U of Minnesota
with a major in music and minor in anthropology. She served as an officer
in the US Navy (WAVES) during World War II. She met anthropologist James
Norman Spuhler, also a naval officer in Washington, DC, whom she married
in 1946. Spuhler accompanied her husband whenever possible throughout his
military and academic career, notably to Japan during the Korean War and
on the Ramah Navajo Project, participating as needed to facilitate his
activities. She routinely edited scholarly papers and speeches.
In later years, Spuhler's intense interest in the legislative process
and politics led her to an appointment as mayor of the unincorporated Los
Ranchos de Albuquerque, NM (1979), and its first elected mayor (1980-84).
In recent years, the issue of evolution vs creationism engaged much of
her attention, during which time she supported like-thinking members of
the State of New Mexico Legislature and State Board of Education and attempted
to convert others armed with stacks of her husband's reprints copied at
her own expense (including titles such as Anthropology, Evolution and "Scientific
Creationism" 1985). (Shirley Hill Witt) |
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