Sherry Ortner

Transcript of Interview of Sherry Ortner

(00:00:00)

Mark: My name is Mark Turin and it’s Tuesday, 3 March 2020. I’m delighted to be sitting down here with Dr. Sherry Ortner at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Sherry Ortner is a Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles and a MacArthur Foundation fellow. Welcome Sherry.

Sherry: Thank you.

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Mark: Could I start by asking a bit about your early childhood? Where were you born? To whom were you born and would you tell us a bit about your family?

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Sherry: Well I was actually born in Brooklyn, New York. My parents were already living in New Jersey, which is where I grew up. But I think I was born in Brooklyn because my grandma lived there, and my mother went back to be with her mother, in some traditional way, when I was born. So I was born in Brooklyn, which made me a Brooklyn Dodger fan my entire life. And then when they moved to Los Angeles I was devastated, but I’ve come to love the Dodgers again. I know this is a little bit roundabout, but anyway. My father, at that time, was a salesman and eventually created his own very small business in stapling machines which later was expanded into other kinds of devices related to shipping and closing things and opening things and stuff like that. And my mother was a (air quotes) “classic” housewife from that era. And I have a brother who lives in Oregon. And we grew up in Newark, New Jersey. The family was Jewish, all sides. And I started out—they sent me to some sort of all-day Hebrew school, which I loathed. And I remember it as a kind of dungeon-like place—I don’t know if it really was, but that’s how I remember it. So, when I was ten or so, we moved to a different neighborhood and I lobbied to go to public school. So then I got out of that and I went to public school. From then on I went to public school.

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Mark: Could I ask to pull back a little bit beyond your own early childhood. You mentioned your parents are both Jewish, but going back a generation or two, how long had your family and ancestors been in the States and what do you think they know about where they came from?

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Sherry: All my grandparents were immigrants, so my parents were all first generation. I actually regretted later, when I became an anthropologist, not collecting stories from my grandparents about their histories. I tried to do it a little bit with my grandmother, my mother’s mother, but I don’t think they wanted to think about the old country. It was interesting, but they weren’t interested in talking about it very much, or maybe I didn’t do a very good job of asking questions. So there’s not a lot of background about that. The one thing—they left, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the sort of Russian-Polish border area, and that’s where they were from. And then some of the family stayed behind in Poland and were wiped out during the Second World War. But my family was all from this earlier wave of immigration.

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Mark: And was Ortner, which sounds like quite an assimilated German or Austrian kind of name—was that the original family name on your father’s side or do you think it was an Ellis Island creation?

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Sherry: There’s a great little story there. So, Ortner seems to be the name on my father’s side—my father’s father. We all got curious about where it came from. I had an interesting experience as an early college graduate: I went trekking around Europe with a backpack and went into a town in Austria and saw a big sign on a store that said “Ortner Hardware.” And I thought, “ok,” you know, full of self-confidence, your basic American young person. I kind of barged in and said “I’d like to speak to Mr. or Mrs. Ortner.” And the clerk sort of looked at me and said “they don’t own this store anymore. They’re not here and they don’t own the store. But anyway—” he said, “—the Ortners are not Jewish.” I mean, he just sized me up. I was quite taken aback. And years later, the family—some of my cousins—started looking into the background of the Ortners, and I actually learned quite a lot about them, which I won’t go on at any length, but the one thing I can tell you is there are Jewish Ortners, Catholic Ortners, Protestant Ortners. There’s all kinds of Ortners, and we haven’t quite figured out where it started.

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Mark: I know that later in your career, your place of study—your childhood—became a focus of study for yourself and of research. Could you reflect a little bit on the culture of your childhood? Was it a political family? Was Jewish faith practice central? Who were the friends of your parents, with whom you mingled and socialized?

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Sherry: Not very orthodox, in terms of Jewish practice, but the family had a fairly strong Jewish identity. The neighborhood was a hundred percent Jewish, the neighborhood we moved to. Historically, it has turned out that there were neighborhoods like that in different parts of the US, that became these sort of Jewish enclaves. There’s one in Newton, Massachusetts, is another one. It’s a suburb. This one actually is in the city of Newark, but it’s kind of in a corner of the city. So the Jewish aspect was a kind of Jewish identity, a Jewish community, but not a (air quotes) “religious” aspect. What was the other part of the question?

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Mark: I suppose, whether it was a political context that you grew up in.

Sherry: No, not particularly. My father was an Eisenhower Republican, which, by now, would be a very sort of middle of the road, maybe even Democrat, kind of person, not a conservative. But he was a Republican. There was this slogan that the Republicans were good for business, and he was a businessman. And my mother was a Democrat, so they didn’t talk politics, and nobody was very active at all in any kind of political action. But I do remember coming home from school one day and finding my mother—we had one of the early televisions—finding my mother glued to the television watching the McCarthy hearings on television, and asking her what it was all about. She gave me some sort of vague answer, I only figured it out later on.

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Mark: Do you have any recollection of what your hobbies or interests were as a child and maybe what your disposition was as a child?

Sherry: Disposition, as in…

Mark: Were you a carefree, happy girl? Were you a brooding, struggling teenager?

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Sherry: Right. I think I was always a pretty cheerful person. Still am. I don’t remember any hobbies, really. Although if I look back, my father took pictures all the time. I still have all that stuff. This is a project in a closet right now, of doing something with all the photos. I have a hundred years of family photographs in a closet. And then I took it up. So I remember my first camera. I’ve taken pictures all my life too. I never called it a (air quotes) “hobby,” because I never thought of it as—it was just something I did. I never thought of it as something that had a lot of meaning, it was just part of who I was.

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Mark: Did you travel, as a child, with your family? Were family vacations local, at the Catskills and things, or did you go further afield?

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Sherry: Catskills, absolutely. Yeah, we took those kind of family vacations to the Catskills, in fact, specifically. We didn’t otherwise travel much. But my father was a huge traveler, and he—this is, I think, part of my background in it, as an anthropologist—I mean, he was always travelling around the world. He started out, as a boy scout, hitchhiking around America. And there’s pictures of him in his boy scout uniform with all the little badges and everything, because he said people would give you rides if they saw you were an upstanding young man. I think he started hitchhiking around the country when he was twelve, and he travelled his entire life, and that’s part of the photography too. But not so much, the photography was more like family, about family. But his travelling was very central to the life of the family. I still remember him coming home from trips and opening up bags and taking out all these treasures that he brought back for everybody. And everything was picked out—this was for my mother, and this was for me, and this was for my brother—and we’d all crowd around. So that was a big part of my background.

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Mark: You mentioned your brother and your parents. Were there other relevant and key family members around? Did you grow up in a more, sort of, joint, or multigenerational, family context, with grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins?

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Sherry: Because we moved to New Jersey—we moved to New Jersey because my father—the whole family was originally based in Brooklyn and my mother’s in Brooklyn, my father’s in—well pretty much everybody in Brooklyn and then later fanning out to Long Island, which is kind of a suburban area of New York City. But because my father was given a sales territory, which is how they did it in those days, in New Jersey, we moved to New Jersey. So this was actually, I think, very traumatic for my mother, in retrospect, moving away from her mother and her sisters and her family; she was very close with them. So no, we had no family around us in New Jersey, but every single Sunday we got in the car and we went to Brooklyn and we saw the grandparents. Every week, every Sunday. And then we came back, and my father in the car—my father would play radio programs in the car on the way back in the dark and we would hear The Shadow. I don’t know if you ever heard of The Shadow but it was a famous radio program. It was kind of like an invisible man and he had this deep laugh—“ho, ho, ho, The Shadow knows.”

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Mark: You mentioned, in passing, the Jewish school of which you have dark and more somber memories. But after that, did you have a happy school life and important teachers and books you remember or subjects that you particularly excelled in?

Sherry: You talking about pre-college?

Mark: Yes, pre-college.

Sherry: Elementary and high school?

Mark: Elementary and high school, indeed.

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Sherry: So I went off to the public school—the grammar school, elementary school—and it was fine. I don’t have any major memories of it. I was a smart kid; I was just smart. I could pass tests easily, and so on. I wasn’t very thoughtful, I think, but I could do it, you know? I wasn’t really an intellectual; I wasn’t a geek in high school. But I kind of had affinities and affiliations with the (air quotes) “smart kids” and the “honors classes” and stuff, but I didn’t hang out with them because I wasn’t into being brainy in some sense. So that’s kind of my memories. So in high school I always did well, because I could do the tests and everything. It wasn’t a very demanding educational system, so it was mostly tests. I mean we never wrote anything; I never did an essay. I was telling some friends recently that I had never written an essay in my life until I got to college. It was very hard, actually. So I wasn’t part of that crowd. But I wasn’t also big into kind of leadership and elective offices and running for president of the class and that kind of thing; I never did very much of that either. So I just kind of—it was kind of unremarkable, pretty much, until I got to college.

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Mark: I recall reading somewhere that when you graduated high school, in your yearbook, your name was spelt s-h-e-r-i. So was that I conscious to change at least the spelling, if not the pronunciation of your name in college? Can you tell us a bit about that?

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Sherry: I wanted to be cool. I thought it was cooler somehow. And even when I went to camp one summer, I tried to change it completely into Teri for a summer, but then everyone found out it really was Sherry, so it didn’t last very long. So I finally gave up.

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Mark: How did you choose where to go to college? Do you recall that?

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Sherry: So, yeah. It kind of connects to the point about not being very much part of the geeky, brainy gang in high school, and not being particularly aware of my—I mean, I was kind of aware that my grades were good. I wanted to do well. Then they had this system when you were in junior year in high school where you went to see the guidance counselor to talk about college. And I’ve written about the guidance counsellors, they were sort of the bad guys in many ways in the story, but in my case it worked out well. So I went in, and he said, “well, you know, have you started thinking about college?” And I said, “yes.” He said, “well what are you thinking about?” And I said, “well, I want to go to one of those big sort of rah-rah places with football teams and a campus and, you know, cheerleaders.” It’s college; that’s what it looked like in the movies, you know? And so he looked at my record and he said, to his credit, I thank him to this day, he said, “I think you can do better than that.” And I said, “like what?” And he said, “there are these—” and this is the phrase, he said, “there are these girls’ schools.” And I said, “well, oh, like what?” And he said, “well, you know, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe.” And I was like, “oh!” And something went off in my head, and somehow that was very appealing. I don’t know why, because I had never thought about it, and I had had this other image in my mind. And I said, “oh, you know, I think I’m—maybe I’m interested. Tell me more.” And he did, and I went home, and I said to my parents, I said “I think I want to go to one of these (air quotes) ‘girls’ schools.’” I think, in retrospect, you know, kind of reflecting back, because I had no exposure to that at all, there was two things. I must have heard about them, and I had, because I know part of what went off in my head was a kind of little “elite”—I mean, I knew somehow, that was an elite thing, and it was appealing, I confess. But also, I think I was really sick of boys in high school, you know? Really, the whole scene of dating and boys and, I don’t know, you know, the whole, kind of, girl-boy thing in high school. So, just the women’s college aspect appealed to me, of getting the boys out of the picture for a while, was appealing. And so I applied to all Seven Sisters schools, and I applied to Cornell as a backup. And I got in to Bryn Mawr and Vassar, and then Bryn Mawr actually courted me and called me up and kind of encouraged me to come. And I think, also in retrospect, Bryn Mawr and Vassar were the two of the Seven Sisters schools, at that time, that didn’t have a Jewish quota. The rest of them did. And I did campus interviews at most of them; I went around and visited—campus visits with interviews—and I actually felt unwelcome in some of them: Wellesley, Holyoke, not so much Radcliffe. But Wellesley and Holyoke, I mean, I felt like—I could feel it. Not that Bryn Mawr was particularly (air quotes) “Jewish” in any way, but they didn’t have a quota and it was known that they didn’t have a quota and they were open to Jewish students.

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Mark: What were your first impressions of Bryn Mawr when you actually unpacked your bags?

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Sherry: That’s a great question. I felt like I had walked into a different universe, actually. I mean, I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, Weequahic High School. It was just different. I thought, “oh, this is some other world of people,” you know. It wasn’t money, but it was class, you know. That’s where I first became aware of class, and not in a bad way, but just like, “oh, I see,” and, “I get it.” Even Jewish girls—pardon me using “girls,” because that was the ethnographically correct term for that time—were from a kind of level that was higher than growing up in Newark, New Jersey. So they were from New York City. They went to private schools; they went to Fieldstone, that kind of thing, and were more sophisticated—I don’t know if they were really higher (air quotes) “class,” but they were more sophisticated. Newark turned out to be, once I got away from it, turned out to be this kind of backwater, but I didn’t know it when I was growing up.

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Mark: That sense of other worlds and you as the kind of interloper is something, of course, that’s been a theme in your life and work. And thinking, then, as you go back to Newark, and to the other worlds of your classmates who came from very different socioeconomic conditions, did you already feel that you were in some way entering something that you didn’t have the social skills to navigate, or were you quite adaptive and able to work out what the rules of engagement were in college and what classes to take; how to make friends?

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Sherry: That’s a good question. I didn’t feel like I was a fish out of water. I didn’t feel like what I said earlier about Holyoke, or something: I didn’t belong. But on the other hand, I felt like I was just kind of swimming my way through it the whole time, both socially—it was fine, I mean I never had any problems, but I never, again, went for any kind of leadership. I never tried to play an important role. I struggled as a student because my training in high school was terrible, even though that was considered a (air quotes) “very good” high school, it was one of the best high schools in the area, the region, I was an utterly mediocre student at Bryn Mawr. I think I graduated in the dead center of my graduating class. I really loved it in some way, but I was not consciously thinking about was I adapting or was I fitting in. I was just kind of doing it in a kind of practical way.

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Mark: Do you recall when you first heard the word “anthropology” and thought “I’d like to know more about this?”

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Sherry: I do. I first saw the word anthropology in the Bryn Mawr catalogue that they sent me after I had been accepted. I was still home, hadn’t graduated from high school yet, but they sent me the catalogue. I was supposed to think about the courses I was going to take when I got there, and I saw anthropology, which I had never heard of. And I remember thinking it had to do with insects because I remembered the word “arthropod,” which is some kind of—I don’t know, it’s a spider, or it’s something. And I remember asking what it meant, looking it up or someone told me, and I thought that was interesting. But I didn’t actually sign up for it immediately. But I think, again, largely unconsciously, I was already inclined towards some kind of social science interest. So my freshman year at Bryn Mawr, I took Psych 101, and I think I thought I would probably be a Psych major. And I hated the course, it was all this cognitive psychology and experimental stuff and it was just the opposite of what I wanted. It wasn’t about people; it was about—I don’t know how you would describe it—it wasn’t what I thought about people. It was about these kind of disembodied brain functions, or something. There was a lot of rat experiments and—not me. So sophomore year, I took Anthro 101, and that was the beginning.

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Mark: Did you have formative teachers and mentors at Bryn Mawr who you now look back on and think they played important roles in getting you on track?

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Sherry: Well, I remember them all vividly and they did all play certain kinds of roles. It’s interesting about your questions because I don’t have any strong sense until eventually, I guess, graduate school, that I was (air quotes) “on track” for anything in particular. I didn’t know where my life was going at any point, but I was sort of taking it one step at a time. Things worked out okay. Again, my grades weren’t good but I didn’t think about that because I didn’t think what was the next step anyway and I didn’t know if it mattered that I didn’t have good grades. I mean they were not horrible, but they were mediocre. So, I had the chair of the department and my first teacher was Frederica de Laguna, who was a student of Boas. So I have one degree of separation from Boas in terms of my own training. She worked on the Northwest Coast here. You know who she is. And she made an impression on me, not because of the anthropology but because she was this, what I would think of now as a kind of feminist figure. I don’t think she had any feminist—maybe she did—but she didn’t talk about feminist politics. But she was this single woman academic from that generation where it was rare and women of that generation, if they had professions like that, they tended not to marry, which she didn’t. But her mother was a famous philosopher who also had been at Bryn Mawr and was there, retired but was there and on campus. So, Freddie, as she was called, sort of made an impact on me just by her person, by who she was. And then, I had a woman named Jane Goodall—no, Goodale, sorry. Goodall is the primatologist, right. So Jane Goodale, who worked in Australia, and who I always felt, didn’t like me, and was sort of rather cold. And then I had a man called Ed Harper, who had worked in India, and who was young, unlike the first two. Who was kind of this younger, hipper guy and who made a great kind of impression because he was just cool, you know?. He was the one—when as a senior, I applied to graduate schools. I applied to graduate schools because I didn’t know what else to do. And this was an era where there was a lot of money in graduate training.

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Mark: What year would this have been?

Sherry: ’62. So, I applied to a bunch of graduate programs in Anthropology, including Chicago, and I got in to all of them. And my academic record really did not have a lot to recommend it at that point. So that was kind of astonishing but I had no idea whether that was unusual or not, you know, I didn’t know what it was all about. But I went to see Ed Harper, and I said, “I got into all these programs and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which one to go to.” And he said, “well, did you get into Chicago?” And I said, “yes.” And he said, “well, you have to go to Chicago.” So I said, “fine,” so I went to Chicago. That’s the story.

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Mark: It’s striking this combination of just a sense of participating in education, you know, through your schooling and then into college, and swimming with the flow and not against the stream, not standing out. And then some of these key people, in fact, the guidance counsellor, problematic as that category may be in terms of allocating resources and streaming people, and this Ed Harper—both identifying opportunities for you that you might not have considered otherwise or not know how to choose. So you went, graduating from Bryn Mawr, to the University of Chicago. How different was that from a single sex, undergraduate, northeast coast college—a major research university? What was that transition like?

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Sherry: The transition from single sex back into a co-ed world didn’t seem noteworthy in any way at all. I should go back to one second on Bryn Mawr. I loved the single sex school. I loved having the guys outside of my classrooms. I only realized it when I got there, how much, as we say now, the male gaze was constraining to me, about my school work. Not that I did any better, actually I did worse. But still, I felt like I could think, I wasn’t being forced to play a certain kind of female role. So that four years of women’s college was fantastic for me, and I think is the basis of all my feminist politics now today, so that’s important. But then getting back to a co-educational world, as it were, didn’t seem particularly remarkable or different. I felt fine. It was hard; it was still hard. I mean, I was still struggling. I still didn’t feel like I understood how to think, how to write, how to—what was everybody trying to do? How did you write a paper? How did you come up with the concept or the point? It took me years, but I began to get it in graduate school, but even then it was a struggle. I said, years later, “I finally figured it out.” After I got my PhD, I felt like I began to learn how to formulate a point of view. I was back at Chicago for some occasion and I was talking to Paul Friedrich, who’s part of your part of the corner of anthropology. And I said to Paul Friedrich, you know, I said, “I really didn’t feel like I could think until after I got my PhD.” And he laughed, and he said, “oh really,” he said, “I couldn’t think until after I got tenure.” So that sort of stuck in my mind.

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Mark: What was the culture of the Chicago Department of Anthropology when you joined it? What did it feel like and who were the figures who were dominant at the time?

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Sherry: It was like a kind of superstar type of place. I mean, you knew you were at the center of the world and you knew that the faculty were, you know, extraordinary and you knew that your fellow students were probably, you know, all better than you. Again, there was that feeling of struggling, but also feeling like somehow or other it was going to work out okay.

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Mark: That can lead to very competitive environments between students and between faculty for resources or visibility. Did you feel that as well or was it actually more integrated and collaborative?

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Sherry: I think it was among the students. You know, there were the superstar students, who were kind of hand-picked by the faculty. And I began to actually feel—maybe this goes back to your question about leaving the all-women’s college world and reentering a kind of normally gender integrated world—I began to feel the sexism from my professors, which I didn’t have at Bryn Mawr, and I guess in high school never thought about or noticed or maybe wasn’t exactly there in the same way. So, I felt that. But on the other hand, I had a difficult first year because I was assigned to David Schneider as an advisor and we didn’t get along very well. But eventually, he took a sabbatical and he told his advisees to get other advisors. And I was thrilled, because by that time I had taken a course with Clifford Geertz and I really loved his work and he was also very kind and seemingly not sexist. I say “seemingly” not to say that something turned out later. Maybe the word is comparatively. Anyway, when Schneider told his advisees to get other advisors, I took him up on it immediately and I wrote to Geertz, who was in Morocco and I asked him if he would take me on and he said, “sure.” It turned out later that the correct answer was you were supposed to go back to David Schneider and say, “oh no, David please don’t cast me out,” you know, “I don’t want to leave you.” But I didn’t do that. So it worked out. Actually, it worked out very well. And that’s when I went over to Geertz. I think, again, I think my work wasn’t very good, but he was very generous. Schneider was very nit-picky and very difficult and wanted to correct every single thing you said. I felt almost competitive with his students. Whereas Geertz was much more nurturing, actually, as an advisor.

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Mark: You mentioned it was a department of very high-profile scholars—you’ve named a couple. Who are the others who made an impact or were being and discussed at the time in the Chicago Department of Anthropology in the ‘60s?

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Sherry: So, David Schneider and Clifford Geertz and a man named Lloyd Fallers who went by Tom, Tom Fallers, had all been hired as a clump from UC Berkeley and had been part of really the, kind of, upgrading of the Chicago reputation. It was a big coup. And Geertz was already seen as a rising star, hugely. He had a five year—I don’t know what it was called—rising superstar fellowship, do-whatever-you-want sort of thing. He and David Schneider were both products of the Harvard Social Relations Department, and Fallers—I can’t remember where Fallers came from. Anyway, so those three. Let’s see—Milton Singer in India, Nur Yulman in Sri Lanka, Melford Spiro from Southeast Asia, though he only stayed a few years. Paul Friedrich in Linguistic Anthropology. Who am I forgetting? My committee was Geertz and Yalman and—I can’t remember.

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Mark: You mentioned, in a way, applying for graduate school because you didn’t know what to do next. Did you apply with some intent already and did you have a sense of a part of the world that appealed to you and called to you?

(00:39:02)

Sherry: No. I think it was very naïve. I think if there was any intent, it was a kind of image, which goes back to the women’s college thing. It was Margaret Mead—it was like I was going to be the intrepid woman anthropologist, trekking off into the jungle or the Pacific island or whatever. It was like an image of myself rather than about the substance of anthropology. It’s kind of terrible to say; I’m not sure I want to leave this in. So, I put down on my application that I wanted to work in the Pacific, which I think was the Margaret Mead factor. I had written an honors thesis as an undergraduate about the Trust Territories, and the administration of the Trust Territories in Micronesia. And that was why I got assigned to David Schneider as an advisor. One of the ways in which you could leave an advisor was you had to pretty much leave the area, and that’s still true, I think, for graduate students. You say, “it’s not that I don’t like you David, it’s just that I want to really work in this other place,” which wasn’t true. So then I was actually somewhat at sea in terms of area. And I was toying for a while with Europe, and I was thinking about Greece; I was thinking about Ireland. I was interested in religion and politics. I was thinking about Germany and neo-Nazis, and kind of looking around, not sure what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. And then I met Bobby Paul, who I eventually married and who was my first husband. We were both interested in religion, so we started thinking together about where we might want to go to the field. I began winnowing down the religion interest. So then that was Buddhism. But then on the other hand I wanted to go someplace pretty remote; I still wanted to go to a remote place. So Bobby and I, to be together, were starting to, again, winnow things down. The first choice was Bhutan, but you couldn’t get in there at that time. So then the Sherpas in Nepal—you couldn’t get into Tibet. Tibet would have been the choice also. So the Sherpas were the, sort of, Tibetans that you could get to basically, in Nepal. So that was it.

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Mark: So Bobby was also in the same department?

Sherry: Yes.

Mark: And in the same program?

Sherry: Yes.

Mark: I assume that you met in Chicago with school.

Sherry: We did, as first year students, yeah.

Mark: I’d like to hear more about that, if it’s appropriate to ask. But also, how did you plan and coordinate research together and did you already envisage that you would both be studying the same community and then, I suppose, two PhDs would come out of that? Do you have any reflection and thoughts about that process and way of negotiating two careers in one field site?

(00:42:53)

Sherry: I think we actually applied jointly for the grant that we got for the field work and I think we just didn’t think a whole lot about—we had different projects. From the beginning, from the course we all took—there was a Psychological Anthropology, I think it was like a half a quarter in the core sequence with Spiro—or maybe it was a whole quarter, I can’t remember. Bobby was immediately captivated by psychological anthropology and that’s what he wanted to do, so he wrote a completely different proposal in terms of what he was going to do. And I was going to do this stuff about Shamanism in relationship to the Buddhism. And I think we didn’t really worry too much about the two—I mean it was all very kind of distant. Even listening to myself talk about my past I realize how much everything was kind of—I was taking things as they came, in a way. I never had a real long term strategy, somehow, or a long term plan about where things were going. It was like, “oh this seems to be interesting, I think I’ll do this. This is kind of working out in some nice way.” Or, somebody says to me, “well why don’t you go to a girls’ college,” or something. It’s interesting to think—the interview process is making me realize how much of it was kind of one thing at a time.

(00:44:41)

Mark: Also reflects, I suppose, the opportunities and the resources at the time. And that’s something that I think as you know, as well as I do, if not better, one has to think more strategically now when advising students given just the abundance of opportunities and the challenges to get there. But then, I suppose, imaging as you prepare, you’ve decided together, it’s going to be Sherpas and it’s going to be northeastern Nepal. How were you advised by your committee to prepare for that, whether it be in terms of language training or in terms of health, wellbeing, and psychological and methodological preparedness?

(00:45:18)

Sherry: I don’t remember a whole lot of preparation. I think we got some language tapes. They’re in Nepali, not Sherpa. There was nothing available for Sherpa, and I think we didn’t realize at first how relatively close Sherpa is to Tibetan, not immediately mutually intelligible, but close. So we got some language tapes in Nepali and began trying to teach ourselves. There was nothing—there was one little language handbook of phrases which was from the Empire, it was called “Introduction to Gorkhali.” They didn’t call it Nepali at that point. It was very laissez faire. I don’t feel like anybody prepared us in any way. And I think Bobby’s parents—I didn’t come from any kind of outdoorsy background, by the way. We never did any camping or trekking or hiking, my family. It’s not a Jewish thing, actually, at least in that part of the Jewish world. So I remember Bobby’s family, who were just a little more hip and savvy about these things saying, “maybe you guys should try to get in shape, physically. You know, it’s kind of tough.” And I’m like, “oh yeah, I’ll deal with it when I get there,” which was, I guess, my general philosophy of life. And it was just hell, actually, the trekking first, for me. I was totally not in shape, had never done it in my life. I was completely unprepared for that.

(00:47:02)

Mark: What year did you arrive in Kathmandu?

Sherry: ’66.

Mark: Overland, from India, or a flight in?

Sherry: How did we get in? There was some kind of flight. We flew in, yeah. We didn’t trek in, yeah.

(00:47:23)

Mark: Had you got funding from either Fulbright or some kind of program that would support the field work and also provide some structure, perhaps, in country?

(00:47:33)

Sherry: We got, together, one grant of $3500 for our entire field work in Nepal and we went off with the $3500. I think there was a little bit from Chicago, maybe topped up just a little bit, not much more than that. But it was, you know, it was a grant. It was the National Science Foundation; that was cool. There had been support through graduate school; they had a lot of money. Chicago Department had a NIMH training grant which included big four-year, five-year fellowships for many graduate students. I came without any funding, I didn’t apply for funding before I came to Chicago because I didn’t understand the system and I thought it was need based, and I didn’t think I would qualify, so I didn’t apply. And I got there the first year with my father footing the bill. My father sat me down one day and said, “this is the last year of family funding.” And I thought that was fine; totally appropriate. But, you know, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I think somebody—maybe, for some reason I think it was Milton Singer—somebody literally tapped me on the shoulder and said, “aren’t you going to apply for departmental funding?” And I said, “oh,” you know, “can I?” And they said, “yes.” So I did and then I got on the departmental NIMH fellowship for the rest of my years in Chicago. But then you had to get an outside grant for the fieldwork, and that was the NSF. So not a whole lot of prep. So the language tapes were sort of useless and we both decided we didn’t really want to learn Nepali because it would hold us back from learning Sherpa. So we were ready to just plunge in and learn Sherpa in the field, which is what we did. The trekking, I just had to get in shape, and I did. And the sort of psychological experience—fieldwork—I wasn’t very prepared for and I thought was actually very difficult. I thought that was the hardest thing I ever did, was my first fieldwork in terms of the human relations of fieldwork itself.

(00:50:15)

Mark: Imaging Kathmandu in the 1960s—the late 60s—it’s also a period of incredible kind of anthropological and cultural renaissance and study and scholarship. Did you meet other scholars who’d come from the States, Europe, or maybe Japan who were also engaged in ethnographic projects who became colleagues and later friends?

(00:50:44)

Sherry: I probably did in that year, but I don’t remember. I’m going to probably be embarrassed about this later on—somebody that I’m forgetting that I wish I had remembered. There wasn’t any major connection with other anthropologists. I’m just trying to think. The German group had been through in Solu before us. The group that included Mark Oppitz—I forget the head guy’s name—and they published a bunch of stuff, but they weren’t there anymore. And there had been some of these language people. These Christian language people had been there in that village that we worked in but they weren’t there anymore. But they had left, sort of, traces. I just don’t remember, in that fieldwork, having any really significant meetings with other anthropologists at the time or even other scholars in other fields. Probably we were a little bit marginal. People who came on Fulbrights were kind of organized, as it were. The Fulbright had an organization in Kathmandu. They had their own little thing. They had a commissary where they had access to the foods; they had medical access. They were kind of a club and we weren’t in it. So, we were kind of on the edges, I felt at the time, yeah.

(00:52:45)

Mark: You’ve already referred to the psychological challenges of that first fieldwork. Could you maybe reflect a bit more about it and also the fact that you were there with your then husband, and I suppose had that ability to speak English with one another in the evenings after a day of fieldwork? What was it like doing fieldwork and where were you actually living? What village were you in?

(00:53:08)

Sherry: We’re in a village called [redacted] which I disguised in the first monograph. I don’t know if I ever revealed it, so I’m not sure about this on the interview. I always felt like we stole it from Jim Fisher. So, Jim Fisher was a year or two behind me at Chicago and we knew him there, somewhat. And I remember, he gave a talk with slides about—he had been in the Peace Corps in Nepal, and he gave a talk with slides of—they were just gorgeous slides. I think this was one of the things that went into our decision making, was Jim Fisher’s slides. And he later became a good friend, actually, but I didn’t connect with him in that first year of fieldwork. Anyway, he showed a slide of [redacted] which is just a gorgeous village in the bottom of a beautiful valley. It’s like—I don’t want to do the Shangri La analogy, but it is very beautiful. And Jim said, “when I go back to Nepal, this is where I want to go.” But Bobby and I wound up going to that village and I always felt like we quote (air quotes) “stole it” from Jim, but he forgave us anyway. I think the difficulty of the fieldwork—probably we stayed too long the first time. We stayed for 10 months straight, without a break. I think it’s just the kind of day-to-day, having to establish yourself, your identity, your personhood, almost every day because you can’t take anything for granted. So, there’s just almost like—I remember, later, reading Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and about how most of life is routines, where you get a lot of stuff routinized in terms of everyday practices and then there’s some fraction of your life where you have to resolve new problems and deal with new questions and things. But I felt the ratio of that in the field was reversed. Most of your day was just trying to deal with things and you could only get a small fraction of your life kind of routinized so you don’t have to think about it. And I just found it just incredibly wearing. I said earlier I’m a really quite cheerful person normally. I became very grouchy in the field and I always felt bad about being grouchy. I feel like that’s not a nice way to be. I was just kind of in a bad mood most of the time. I just felt like it was so hard, day to day to day to day to day, and I do tell students to take more breaks. I think we should have taken more breaks and we didn’t because it was so far, you know. We did the whole trek, from Kathmandu, 10 days to get to [redacted], and so taking a break was just an enormous undertaking. So we didn’t do it because of the trek, and I think that was probably a mistake.

(00:56:58)

Mark: Did you work in and through the Sherpa language, or did you work with people who, either through Nepali or through English, could kind of serve as intermediaries and interpreters during your field work?

(00:57:10)

Sherry: So, both. We were trying to learn Sherpa the whole time. I was talking to someone last night at the dinner. I think I got to—I won’t speak for Bobby—but I think I got to about B+ in Sherpa. I never felt 100 percent fluent and I always had somebody around who could help. But I never wanted to rely on a totally translator-based work. I could get through just daily stuff without a lot of translation but for important interviews with important lamas or something I did have someone there. We took this enormous Uher tape recorder—this reel-to-reel thing, weighed 11 pounds. And it was such a pain in the neck that we, after like one attempt, never used it. So nothing was taped. Nothing was recorded, which was bad. I mean not bad, morally. There was just nothing to be done. But it did mean, in later field trips when I recorded stuff with lighter weight equipment, it was really great, not only because you had a record, but because you could go back over the recording and sit around with other people and say, “ok, well what do they mean by that?” Partly translation, but also partly just, kind of, interpretation. And people arguing about what did he mean and things, so it became more data. So it was wonderfully enriching to do that, but we didn’t have that option. And the other part of it was that everybody who worked with me wanted to learn English. So there was always the, kind of, power struggle in the house—power struggle I say as a joke—about whether we were going to talk English or Sherpa because they wanted to learn English as much as I wanted to learn Sherpa. So it was kind of negotiated, the use of English or Sherpa around the house, for example, was kind of negotiated. I was always trying to improve and I thought, especially around the household, were you could just make mistakes and it would be okay, and you could always ask somebody what they meant. That was the context in which I wanted to basically keep practicing, but that was the context in which the people who were working for us wanted to practice their English. For Sherpas who knew they were going to work for Westerners, I was like part of their economy. Already, part of their economy was working for Westerners. That was going to be their future, so there really was an investment for them in learning English as much as for me in learning Sherpa.

(01:00:26)

Mark: How did your research question, which would eventually become your dissertation and first book, take shape in the field and do you recall how your questions fitted with the questions the community themselves were asking? Did they understand what it was you were looking at?

(01:00:46)

Sherry: So I had gone off with this proposal to study the relationship between the Shamans and the Buddhist lamas and the relationship between those two parties in relation to the community. And then I got there and discovered that the whole Shamanism situation was almost gone. There was virtually nothing that one could actually see. One could talk to retired Shamans and ex-Shamans and former Shamans. So I did, by the way, I followed up. I tried to talk to anybody I could, you know. I tried to do the project and I interviewed every ex-Shaman that I could find and who would talk to me. And I interviewed people about how they felt—whenever I could—about how they felt about that. Especially at the beginning, I think I was trying to make the project happen. But it became clear that it was just not going to be a dissertation and I began sort of casting about for a different topic and began to focus on this whole hospitality issue which became the theme of my first book. Going back a step, Chicago had a proposal defense that was part of the training was that you had to defend your research proposal before you went to the field. That was actually the most rigorous point, in addition to the written exams, in the program, not your dissertation defense, but the proposal defense. That was where they would actually kick people out, and so there was always at least one person who got kicked out and terrified everybody else about the proposal defense. It was like the scary case. And I won’t mention names but we all knew somebody who got kicked out at the proposal defense. So, at my proposal defense, somebody, I think it was Barney—Barney Cohn was another name who was there at the time—Barney Cohn said, “so what will you do if you get there and there’s no Shamans?” And I was stumped—I mean I was terrified, I was just sweating in the proposal defense, I was so scared. And, of course, then I get there and there’s no Shamans. Well, Barney was in my head, you know? So I changed the topic to this hospitality topic. But then, when I finished my dissertation, maybe even after I finished my first book, I thought, “well you know, maybe I should think again about all that old Shamanism data.” You know, I had the stuff. I had these interviews, I had other things, interviews with these ex-Shamans. I found a guy in Khumbu who was still, when I was trekking up there and I spent time up there because my, Mingma, assistant was from Khumbu. A famous guy who had been interviewed by von Fürer-Haimendorf was still practicing occasionally. So I had all that material and I thought I would write it up. So then I wrote a paper about why did Shamanism decline, because that was the Barney Cohn question, and it was a very interesting question. I was always happy that I finally wrote that paper and did that.

(01:05:15)

Mark: I trust that you had access, at least, to some radio so you could hear the Nepali news in the mornings when you were in the village but did you also correspond with family, with friends, and your advisors by aerogramme during fieldwork or were you pretty isolated—you and your husband?

(01:05:33)

Sherry: We had no radio.

Mark: No radio.

Sherry: No radio. No news. We got Newsweek. There was no regular mail service but there were mail runners from Kathmandu maybe once a month, maybe once every two months in the rainy season. And so you’d get these old Newsweek magazines. Two month old Newsweeks was the main source of news about the West. About Nepal, we knew almost nothing about what was going on in the country. We were like in this little cocoon in Solu-Khumbu.

(01:06:16)

Mark: You returned to the United States a much changed, or changing United States, in, I think, 1968 from field work. Scholars, anthropologists particularly, have written and speak a lot about reverse culture shock. What were the processes like of untethering from a Sherpa village, first to Kathmandu and then to the States? What do you recall of that?

(01:06:42)

Sherry: I mean, culture shock is an understatement. It was stunning, because it wasn’t only just coming back, but as you said, it was like the world was turning upside-down. It was ’68. It was the counter-culture. It was the New Left. It was—I couldn’t understand the movies. I literally felt like I was in a foreign culture. I came back and everyone said, “oh, you have to see The Graduate” and I went to see The Graduate and I was mystified. I literally didn’t understand the movie. I didn’t understand what the point of the movie was. “Oh, you have to see Bonnie and Clyde.” I mean, I felt like I couldn’t understand my own culture. And people looked so weird. The clothing, you know, had changed and everything. Not that I hadn’t seen it, by the way, because Kathmandu was a hippie center in that time, but we were actually trying very hard to stay away from that and be the respectable anthropologists because the hippies were a very complicated presence in Kathmandu for the local people, and for the state, and for everybody. So it was important for us to be not hippies and not part of that. But also, they were almost as alien to us as they were to the Nepalis because it was a subculture. It was kind of a culty thing. So it was very strange coming home, very, very, very strange. And then we moved to New York, we didn’t go back and live in Chicago. No, there’s actually one more step before I get to that, which is: we came back in February of ’68. We went back through Chicago for a while and we were heading out to California where we were going to stay. Bobby’s parents were going away for the summer, going to the field in Guatemala, and they were letting us have the house for the summer. So we were heading out there to stay there. But we were in Chicago when I remember walking down the street and passing a laundromat where there was a television screen and people were gathered around in horror watching this television and it was Martin Luther King being shot. So that’s like February ’68. And then we moved out to California for the summer and I started, actually, working for the McCarthy campaign. And Bobby Kennedy came out to California and Bobby Kennedy got shot—I think it was in June. And then August was the Democratic Convention in Chicago—this wild Democratic Convention where there was a kind of, almost an uprising. And so besides all the crazy, sort of hippie stuff, and the clothing and the movies and all that stuff—the culture change—the politics felt like they were out of control in that time too. It was really quite a homecoming, actually.

(01:10:49)

Mark: How do you think that affected both your project but also the writing up process and trying to see yourself through and out of the program?

(01:11:00)

Sherry: I remember actually writing—we moved to New York. I can’t get all the chronology straight anymore, but we moved to New York to stay, to locate in New York, and were writing our dissertations in New York City. And I was writing my dissertation—we had just teensy tiny little apartment, so I was writing in the Butler Library at Columbia University. So, Butler Library is on this side of this big open plaza and Low Library’s on the other side. And there was political rallies. It was summer and I could hear it through—the windows were open—and I was writing my dissertation and I’m trying to block all this out and sitting there writing about Sherpa food practices and hospitality practices and stuff like that. At this point, one was committed to finishing this and getting on but the world was coming apart and it was an interesting time.

(01:12:26)

Mark: These days we spend a lot of time counselling our graduate students that there are career pathways with a PhD in Anthropology that don’t involve becoming a professor. But were you, as you were writing up, imagining a career that would take you deeper into the academy as a research scholar and teacher or were you already thinking of other ways that you could harness those skills you mentioned, political mobilization? What were your aspirations, I suppose, and thoughts at the time of what you would do beyond the PhD?

(01:12:58)

Sherry: I think at that time anyone who was in a PhD program assumed they were going to do an academic career. I think things have changed a lot for many, many good reasons, I think, but at that time that was the only expectation, it was the only reason you were putting yourself through all of that. And there was really a sharp gap between academic anthropologists, I think academics in general, and, you know, practitioners, people who went into the “real world” (air quotes) so called and did other, you know, non-academic things. I think the changes now, in many ways, are for the better. That people, even in graduate school—that we counsel people to think about a range of options, that they start thinking about a range of options even while they’re in graduate school, that when they get out there’s less prejudice about the non-academic anthropologists or other academically trained person. I think there’s still a certain kind of snobbery about it and I think that’s hard. But I know, Akhil Gupta, this is one of his top priorities as president of the AAA, as new president, is to sort of change that whole configuration and make anthropology a, kind of, much more wide open field which is only partly academic.

(01:14:46)

Mark: It’s not come up, and I don’t know but I would like to ask. Did you and your husband start a family on return to the States?

(01:14:54)

Sherry: This is interesting, because when I was interviewing for my New Jersey project, there was a big difference between men and women. Men almost never mentioned their families unless you ask them, whereas women almost always did. …. So we just reversed roles. So no, we did not. We actually broke up. Not during the dissertation writing, but when we were both on the job market, it was getting more and more difficult to imagine having these two careers. The whole idea of spousal hires, at that time, was non-existent. You know, I’m sure there were other kinds of factors but that was definitely one of them. So we split up and then eventually I married another anthropologist, Ray Kelly, who worked in New Guinea, and we have a daughter. And eventually we broke up. And now I’m married to an ethnomusicologist named Tim Taylor, and we don’t have children.

(01:16:28)

Mark: So the dissertation writing is wending its way towards conclusion, trying to insulate yourself from the outside world and the chaos that’s emerging. And you complete your dissertation and then you’re looking for a job. What was that process like then? I think very different to now. Did you field any invitations and offers? Could you choose where you would end up?

(01:16:55)

Sherry: Actually, this is one of the moments where I particularly felt the sexism issues in the system. First of all, Bobby and I were still together. We were in New York. He wanted to stay in New York because he had a kind of whole side career writing theater music and he wanted to be in New York to be still doing that. So we decided to stay in New York and I decided to defer to him and to his career for that time. And so he looked for jobs in the New York area and he got a job, and I took a one-year one-course adjuncty thing at Princeton. And that’s where things were starting to come apart. And then that year, I went on the market after he was set at CUNY—at Queens, actually. I went on the job market and I think I got a lot of response, I think because of the backing of Geertz and the Chicago PhD which really carried a lot of capital. And I went through just a series of really shocking job interview experiences in terms of gender stuff. It was just incredible. So at that time, Yale had no—many departments had no women at all. Many of the top departments had zero women. So Hal Scheffler was on the faculty at Yale and he was lobbying that they should try to start thinking about—thinking about!—hiring a female person. So, several of us, Karen Blu from Chicago and me both were invited to come and give talks at Yale. Both of us were subjected—well, I can’t remember Karen’s specifics—I felt like I was hazed when I was at my interview. In the end, they hired nobody that year. We had leaks from the faculty meeting at Yale that people were sort of pounding on the table and saying they weren’t going to have any little people in skirts running around and distracting the professors from their serious work and so forth. So they didn’t hire anybody. Eventually, years later, they hired some female person. I had an interview at Swarthmore and they spent almost the whole time asking about what was I going to do since I was married to this person in New York and were we going to move to Swarthmore, was I going to stay in New York and commute, and they didn’t really want people commuting, they wanted people who lived on campus. And I didn’t get that job. I had some feedback from their faculty meeting. Since there were insiders in both the Yale case and the Swarthmore case who were trying to lobby for hiring women—and I think Swarthmore may have had some women already—so there were people who were angry and upset about how it played out, but in any event. So I didn’t get that offer. I eventually, luckily, got—I shouldn’t be taking up so much time on this but it was actually (Mark: It’s important, actually.) pretty stressful. I was interviewed at Sarah Lawrence College. I got called in February or March saying, “thank you very much, we’ve hired somebody else.” So, I said, “ok.” But I had had a good interview somewhere—now I’m drawing a blank. I think it was UMass. UMass Amherst, that’s what it was. And it just seemed like it had gone very well and I had had a good interview in the department. They took me to meet the dean and I thought I was going to get that job. But I had nothing else, because Sarah Lawrence had told me that they had gotten somebody else. And came like May, June, I’m not getting the phone call from UMass. I’m sort of beginning to think, “well, wait a minute, I don’t have a job.” And I get a call from somebody at Sarah Lawrence. It’s like June. They said, “we’re very embarrassed. We know you got this call in February that we’d appointed somebody else. We’re very embarrassed by that and we’re sorry, stuff happened, but that didn’t work out and we’re wondering if you’re still available.” Normally I don’t think a lot before I talk very often, so I’m amazed that I was so judicious about it, but I said, “well, yes I am, but tell me more.” I don’t know why I said that, because I didn’t have a job. I just should have said, “yes! I’m here! Hire me!” And they said, “well, we’re offering you a two-year contract.” So I said, “ok.” It had been advertised as a three-year contract. So I said, “ok,” I said, “let me think about it.” Again, I’m amazed that I said that, because it made no sense whatsoever. And then, for some reason, I had a lunch date with Hilly Geertz, Geertz’ first ex-wife, Hildred Geertz. I was telling her about all this and she said, “well, why are they offering you a two-year contract?” I said, “well, I don’t know.” I said, “I guess there had been this other person they really wanted and I’m their second choice, and so they’re being more cautious.” She said, “well that’s not acceptable.” So I said, “ok.” Again, you know, I’m going to fight about this thing when I don’t have a job? So, she said, “you should call them up and ask them why they’re offering you this two-year contract.” So I did. So I called them up and I said, “well,” I said, “I’m very interested but why are you offering a two-year contract? It was advertised as a three-year—a regular, tenure-track position.” And then that person got very embarrassed again and said, “well, let me get back to you.” And then they called me back and they said, “ok, we’re offering you a three-year contract.” So, I said, “yes.” So that was my first job. So, I almost didn’t get it. And then years later I found out that not only was I the second choice, I was actually the third choice.

(01:24:51)

Mark: It is highly relevant, and you’ve spoken at length about it now, but it’s incredibly important, given, also, how your later work has come to be so formative in the emerging space of feminist anthropology. I’m wondering, you’ve mentioned now twice, instances both in the Chicago department of uncomfortable and inappropriate gender dynamics and then again during the hiring process. At what point did you start thinking, “maybe I should write about this?”

(01:25:18)

Sherry: It’s one more story about somebody else triggering me. So, the feminist movement out in the real world had started happening, kind of literally in the streets. There was this big march in Paris, I think, while I was in the field. It was in ’67 or something like that. And I remember being struck by that. But getting back to Chicago never touched anything about gender. Hadn’t taken anything, I mean, there was no faculty, there were no courses, there was no nothing. And I wasn’t doing anything with it, and not only because it wasn’t being offered but because, you know, I was sort of desperately trying to not be some female that was going to be dismissed. And if you were going to just going to do (air quotes) “women’s stuff”—I mean, the atmosphere about that as a subject was just bad. Then the women’s movement really started taking off. The key story here was Shelly Rosaldo, before the Toronto Meetings in 1972 maybe. So I finished my PhD in ’70 and I had this one year, and then I guess I had my first year at Sarah Lawrence, must have been—this one-course gig at Princeton and then I had the Sarah Lawrence job. I had gotten to know Shelly Rosaldo because Bobby Paul went to Harvard with the Rosaldos—went to graduate school with them at Harvard. No, sorry, he went to graduate school with me in Chicago, but they went to graduate school at Harvard and he did his undergraduate at Harvard. And Shelly called me up, and a bunch of other people, and said, “we have to do a panel on gender stuff and women—“ I think it was called at the time “—at the Toronto Meetings, and would you like to be part of this panel?” And I said, “I don’t know anything. I didn’t study it. I don’t have any data. I don’t have anything, you know? It’s important, I guess?” It was still something, I think, one avoided because one wasn’t going to be (air quotes) “taken seriously.” But Shelly was very gung-ho. And she and Louise Lamphere co-organized a panel which was the precursor of the book that they put out. And I said, “ok, well I’ll come up with something.” So, I wrote “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” for that panel. The rest is history, actually.

(01:28:55)

Mark: Who would have known that posing it as that question would lead to an ongoing discussion in our field about, you know, universal systemic imbalances? How was it received at that panel and at the conference?

(01:29:10)

Sherry: So I have no memory about reception about the panel. I remember—you know the meetings are such a kind of chaotic thing anyway. Who knows? I think there were a lot of people in the room but I can’t remember that either. I do remember the panel—the six women in somebody’s hotel room kind of hanging out and talking together and enjoying that conversation. But I don’t remember any reception of it. And then I published the first version of it in Feminist Studies which was being inaugurated as a new journal in New York City when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. So actually when it came out in Women, Culture, and Society, it had already been published in Feminist Studies in ’72, then it came out in ’74. So I don’t remember any reception. I’m trying to think. I honestly can’t think of when I realized—at some point I realized that it was having a lot of impact, but I can’t remember when or why or how it came to me, but it slowly began to dawn on me that it was getting a lot of attention. And this is before there was a negative or critical response. Just that somehow it was kind of like a hot paper. And I don’t know how I came to realize that but I did, at some point, realize that.

(01:30:50)

Mark: The three years at Sarah Lawrence—did you complete the three years and stay beyond that or did other opportunities emerge that then took you to other colleges, universities?

(01:30:59)

Sherry: I stayed six years. I did the whole assistant professor time and I was about to come up for tenure there. And there was a guy at Michigan named Vern Carroll who I had known slightly from Chicago; he was a few years ahead of me at Chicago. And then he was teaching at the University of Michigan. He asked if I wanted to be considered for a position at Michigan and I said—I wouldn’t have said yes necessarily because I didn’t like the Midwest particularly, but New York City—this is where the real world impinges—New York City was going bankrupt in the mid ‘70s. It almost collapsed, financially. It was in very bad shape. The crime rate was terrible. It was not a great—I love New York, but it was not a great place to live at that time. And my friends who were coming up for tenure were not getting tenure or were afraid they wouldn’t get tenure and so they were looking around. And so people were leaving New York and so on, so when Vern asked if I would be interested in being considered at Michigan, I said yes. So then they hired me with tenure, so I never actually had to go through a tenure review.

(01:32:39)

Mark: Did that also, I suppose, open up a door for you to supervise graduate students? Because Sarah Lawrence College is an undergraduate college. And did people start coming to work with you, whether it be on South Asian and Himalayan anthropology or also the emerging space of feminist anthropology?

(01:33:00)

Sherry: Well, the admissions process was very weird at Michigan at that time. So, people would put down a number of names on their application of faculty that they were interested in working with, but then as a faculty member, you didn’t get to pick. There was some kind of much more democratic ranking process that was done collectively and you just took people according to this ranking. And so it wasn’t as much of a patron-client system as it is now. And later, at Berkeley, I learned and then ever since, it’s been much more patron-clienty where students say, “I want to work with x,” and then x says, “I want to take that student” or not. But Michigan wasn’t so much like that, so I didn’t particularly feel that way, that the students were coming just to work with me there. Although, you know, I did produce quite a few PhD’s from Michigan. Yeah, I don’t know what the number is but a lot.

(01:34:14)

Mark: One of the things, I think, that’s inspiring to junior scholars and also some of our grad students is how your work has been both regionally very focused and made profound contributions to regional scholarship. It’s also very theoretically informed. It has kind of an afterlife and legs far beyond any part of the world. And then, also, you’ve turned your own ethnographic understandings, you know, to your own country, right? And I am thinking of the newer project is that right now, the film one. Also, we’re a discipline that likes to identify theories with people, and one that has stuck, in some way, to you has been that of practice theory. Perhaps, and maybe I’m explaining it poorly, but bringing together the Geertzian precision and focus for the detail of the moment with understanding the wider, sociocultural, political context in which individuals and communities live. How would you describe it and how would you situate it now in terms of bringing ethnography together with an understanding with the political climate?

(01:35:25)

Sherry: The political climate? Bringing ethnography together with politics in general or with the current political?

Mark: Well actually, I’m glad you asked. Maybe a little of both.

(01:35:38)

Sherry: Okay. So, I was heavily influenced by Geertz in graduate school and just by generally a commitment to an interpretive and humanistic anthropology. And, in fact, that boundary was very sharp at that time between the interpretive anthropology and the sort of so-called materialist and positivist anthropologies. Going back to that period when I was writing my dissertation and there was political demonstrations outside the window that I was trying not to listen to, I actually got really engaged with both feminism and Marxist theory, after graduate school. And so that kind of mixture—I never gave up my original commitment to a kind of humanistic and interpretive anthropology, but from very early on after my degree, I became much more politically engaged in both critical, sort of, Marxist theory and feminist theory. And so it politicized my work almost from the beginning. Sherpas Through Their Rituals was my, kind of, least political work, but after that, and even there, I’m beginning to ask, I think, some critical questions. But from then on, one way or another, those things have been all in this mix at the same time.

(01:37:38)

Mark: It all ties back to what you were saying earlier when you reflected on finding your voice and what Friedrich had said, that he didn’t really kind of know what he was thinking and what he believed in until after tenure. It’s a kind of growing crescendo of confidence and clarity about what it is that you’re doing.

(01:37:57)

Sherry: That, absolutely that. And in relation to the real world. (Mark: Yeah.) In relation to what’s going on out there. I think that’s partly a function—it depends where you’re located institutionally too. I always felt like I was located in places where—especially New York, California, but even Michigan, but Chicago—where the either real world was still always present, as opposed to people in remote colleges or universities where I visited. You go to give a talk and you can feel the sort of ways in which being in that remote place kind of disconnects people a little bit from things, from what’s going on.

(01:38:53)

Mark: And then in the early ‘90s you decided to look back at your own high school and started a series of interviews and discussions with former classmates and others. What motivated that project and, I suppose, what did you learn through it?

(01:39:12)

Sherry: I made this decision that it was time to start using my anthropology on the US, on contemporary issues. This was certainly related to my political—the kind of increasing mixing of political questions with the interpretive anthropological questions. And so, after my third book with the Sherpas I felt like—I mean I loved my research with the Sherpas, as I said last night, it was incredibly meaningful to me. It got easier, by the way, after the first fieldwork. (Mark: I should hope so.) But it got easier in part—I shouldn’t backtrack so much—but it got easier in part because I started asking questions that were more interesting to Sherpas than my first fieldwork. What I was asking the first time around just didn’t make a whole lot of sense to people. But I started asking about history and their own history and the religious history, and people where interested. As I was finishing the third book with the Sherpas, Life and Death on Mount Everest, I was thinking through that whole process that it was time for a change. I could envision one more book, which would be The Sherpas of Jackson Heights, which I think would be very interesting and I hope somebody does that, but I also felt increasingly that I didn’t think I had anything new to say anymore. I’d been doing this for a really long time and I thought it was time to do something else. Also, politically speaking, felt like I wanted to start engaging critically with the US. But then I didn’t actually have a project, it was just a kind of feeling that I wanted to do this. So I started casting around for what that first project would be, the first American project. And I was really interested in—this goes back to the Marxism—I was really interested in social class. And class is something that I think hasn’t been made a central concern in anthropology. It’s more in the domain of sociology because they’ve done more with the US and so on, and with the highly developed capitalist societies. So I felt like class was some area where anthropologists hadn’t been paying attention and maybe I could make a kind of contribution by sort of getting that out on the table. So the impetus was about class and then the question was like where was I going to study (air quotes) “class” in America? And I first began thinking of these communities that had been studied longitudinally, Yankee City, you know the Yankee City series? In Massachusetts and the Middletown series in Indiana and I thought about going back to one of those communities. And I looked into that, I thought pretty seriously about that. But then I decided that these kinds of, not rural exactly, but not major cities and not even closely related to major cities isn’t where America was happening anymore. I mean it was where America was happening in the early 20th century when those studies were done, but it wasn’t where America as a nation, a culture, a class system was happening anymore. So I didn’t want to go to Muncie, Indiana and I didn’t want to go to Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is where it was at at that time, but it wasn’t anymore. I kind of struggled a lot about where that project was going to happen. And then I got invited to a high school reunion. And I thought, “oh, hmm, Newark, New Jersey. Weequahic High School, why not.” But I had kind of fled, originally, from Newark, New Jersey. I mean, when I went to Bryn Mawr, I felt like I was escaping. But I thought, “ok, well. This has—maybe.” But I didn’t know if I could stand it, going back to a reunion. I had very complicated—I didn’t at the time, but after I left I had very complicated retrospective feelings about Newark and Weequahic and that whole thing. And I went to the reunion, had a good time, and thought the whole thing was much more interesting than I had imagined it would be. And I thought, “ok, well.” So, that became the project.

(01:44:29)

Mark: And it became, also, a project that tried to explore where ethnicity intersects with class, right? And what the constraining and determining factors are here. How was it received by your former schoolmates, you asking questions of them that would eventually become an important research project in which they would feature, their stories, in a way, would feature?

(01:44:53)

Sherry: All their names are changed, by the way. I only realized afterwards that the people who were successful were very annoyed at having their names changed, and the people who were not successful or didn’t feel successful were perfectly happy about having their names changed. That was a whole issue of what was I going to do and eventually I changed everybody’s names.

Mark: Philip Roth excluded.

Sherry: Except Philip Roth, yeah. I think they were all kind of bemused by the interviewing process and a little suspicious and a little skeptical. But then it turned out people really were happy talking for the most part. Once it opened up—and now you’re doing the same thing—once it opened up, those interviews, people would just get started and they really, I would say close to 100 percent, enjoyed the interview. Maybe that’s too high, but most people really enjoyed the interview. I don’t think they could picture the book at that time but then, you know, neither could I. When the book came out, I think everybody thumbed through it looking for their names and then couldn’t find it. And then they thumbed through it trying to figure out who were behind the pseudonyms. So they were sort of, maybe even bemused by the book, too. I think very few people read it. I do remember about, somewhere in the course of that, there was a book that came out called When They Read What We Write. Have you ever seen that? So, it’s a collection of essays about anthropologists whose work became—there was something problematic that happened in their field. Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the most famous example because she (Mark: I know her story, yes.) made people so angry, and they sort of kicked her out and so forth. But it’s like ten essays by—I’m amazed that it didn’t get more circulation. But it came out around the time I was writing New Jersey Dreaming and I was thinking, “oh God, when they read what I write.” And the book, there’s like 50 lawyers in that class. They’re all going to sue my ass! That was a part of the name changing. Besides people’s privacy and confidentiality and so forth, I didn’t want to get sued, you know. Nothing happened. I don’t think anybody really read the thing from cover to cover anyway.

(01:47:42)

Mark: I think we should start winding up, I’ve taken a lot of your time and you’ve been incredible generous with your insights and understandings. So, I’d like to just ask a couple of final questions and one is: given your commitments to bringing, you know, ethnography and anthropology, the tools of this trade, into alignment with the real world and with making our shared experience of the real world a better place and more equitable place, what excites you about where anthropology is now and where it’s going?

(01:48:13)

Sherry: Yeah, I mean, I’m very excited by the engaged turn and by the idea that it’s not a bad idea to engage our work with the real world. I think it’s just a fantastically promising direction. I don’t think, maybe, all of anthropology should go that way. I feel like that’s the trend now and that’s good. It’s probably going to raise questions. I’m sure it already does. Questions about objectivity, questions about truth, [unintelligible word] and so on and so forth. But that’s good; I think that’s fine. Those questions are fine. I think the trend is fine and the questions are fine. So, I’m quite happy to see that and my new project is very much going in that direction. The project with the Brave New Films. I wrote a little paper called “Practicing Engaged Anthropology” that came out, I don’t know, a year or two ago. Again, I think there will be challenges but I also think there’s no turning back, in a way. It’s going to be hard to undo that trend. I think there’s going to be other things that are going to come up, but I think that’s going to remain an important part of the field.

(01:49:50)

Mark: And what advice and counsel do you give to your graduate students or junior colleagues and, perhaps, would you offer to other junior scholars entering this field?

(01:50:01)

Sherry: Well, I’m very cautious about recommending the PhD at all to most undergraduates. They get interested in anthropology and I’m very, very cautious because of the job market. So, as much as I love anthropology, and I would sell it to anybody and I would be happy if the whole world became anthropologists, I really tell people to take it in steps. I mostly tell people to go for a master’s first and see how they feel about it, whereas once upon a time you couldn’t even get a master’s; it was just something on the way to a PhD. I mean you could get one, but it was like the terminal master’s—remember those—whereas now it’s a good idea. I tell them that they have to be very passionate if they want to go into it now because it’s so much more risky in terms of the job market. On the other hand, there’s more opportunities outside of academia, so, you know, there’s all these different possibilities. But I think once people get bitten by the anthropology bug, you know, they’re going to do something one way or the other—and they’ve got parents behind them saying, “anthropology? What are you going to do with it?” But you know that they’ll do something with it, whether they take an academic degree or not.

(01:51:33)

Mark: We’ve talked about a lot of different things, going back to, you know, your childhood and your career and the pathways you’ve taken. Is there anything that I have not asked that you would like to add?

(01:51:44)

Sherry: I don’t think so. I was looking at your questions last night—and don’t cut this out—and I was thinking, actually, it all seemed fairly, kind of, routine, in a way. But actually, this has been much more interesting and fun than I expected. I guess the only other thing I would mention is I feel like I’ve had a, kind of, amazing level of success, unexpectedly and almost accidentally and that there’s just a lot of luck involved as well, and maybe that’s a kind of crazy thing to say for a, kind of, sober academic. But I feel like opportunities, lucky times where I came up through the system, you know, a lot of money at Chicago, so they took people with kind of mediocre grades. Or, you know, these breaks that you noticed in the course of interview. I feel like there’ve been a series of kind of lucky breaks all along the way. And I just wanted to say that.

Mark: Well, you’ve also put them to good use. So thank you for your humility and also for all the work you’ve done and continue to do. Thank you Sherry.

Sherry: Thank you very much. Thank you.