The Life of an Academic: A Personal Record of a Teacher, Administrator, and Anthropologist

An account, spanning 50 years, of how I became an anthropologist, my graduate education at Columbia University, and my academic positions at Brooklyn and Queens College and at Duke University. I discuss my fieldwork among the Chippewa of Wisconsin and among modern Greeks in Boetia and Athens. I comment on the new ethnography as it applies to modern Greek studies and discuss how and why I turned to gender studies. I comment on teaching, university administration, and trends in contemporary anthropology and make a recommendation for a future thrust of the field. Reconnecting biology and cultural anthropology is, I believe, a necessary step if anthropology is to continue to be useful for ameliorating the human condition.