Photo Credit: Steven Leavitt.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: ACCEPTANCE TALK
SPA Biennial Meeting, San Diego (Catamaran Hotel), April 9, 2005
Jean L. Briggs
Prologue:
Heartfelt thanks!
----------------------------------------------------------------
Talk:
I want to tell you a bit about how I reached this wonderful, unbelievable place in my life, the moral of my tale being that desirable End Points are not always reached in a straight line, progressing from one shining moment to another. I hope the tale may encourage some of you who are at the other end of your careers; and perhaps amuse you a little, too.
As I look back at the pattern that emerged from my meanderings, I see two Keys to my success. The first is having had ENORMOUS good fortune in Friends and Mentors, who always appeared at the Right Moment, and said or did the Right Thing. The second is being a Misfit. These two factors interacted very productively--indeed, I think the first is what made the second possible. That is, it was Friends and Mentors who prevented the Misfitting from becoming catastrophic; and when I became an anthropologist, they emboldened me to pursue my interests with a grand disregard for larger, more public Public Opinion.
Luck and Misfitting both began with my parentage and grandparentage--a curious, and sometimes tense, marriage--actually two marriages, one in each generation--between Churchmouse-Minister men: Swedenborgians from Boston; and women belonging to 19th-century Industrial-Baronial families from Philadelphia.
Both Mice and Barons had the values of Proper Bostonians. (If you want a vivid--and very funny--description of those values, read Cleveland Amory: The Proper Bostonians New York, 1947, reprinted by Parnassus Press 1984.) Proper Bostonians of those generations put electricity in the servants' quarters, not in their own. They walked 20 miles to deliver a message, rather than using the telephone; and ate cold oatmeal as a favorite dessert-- values that, even then, didn't fit well in the larger American world.
Luck and Misfitting continued in my generation. We lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on a poor Swedenborgian minister's salary and his wife's inheritance--decidedly improper behavior from a working-class father's point of view. I went to a debutante Country Day School, with girls who had decidedly un-Bostonian values, and was picked up every day by a father who took off his dog collar first, so that the other girls needn't know that he was a minister, unless I chose to tell them. I had a mother who climbed mountains, backpacked, camped, and carried bushel baskets of apples on her head; and a father who bore his wife's physical activities more or less patiently.
I have never understood why books describe Childhood as an idyllic time of life. I hated school, sports, playing outdoors with other children, music lessons, ballet lessons, and all the other lessons and activities that middle-class American children 70 years ago were supposed to benefit from--not to mention Sunday School and Church, where I refused to kneel. (I also refused to salute the flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance in First Grade.)
I was an Outsider as a child; an Observer; and an Analyst of tense domesticity--an Anthropologist before I knew the word for it. I sat indoors and read: Folktales of All Nations (947 pp on Bible-thin paper edited by F. H. Lee, Tudor Publishing Company, New York, copyright 1930 by Coward-McCann, new edition 1936) at age 7; followed by The Eskimo Twins (and other Little Twins of the world by Lucy Fitch Perkins, Houghton Mifflin Company 1914); followed by Rasmussen's Second Thule Expedition (Report of the II Thule Expedition for the exploration of Greenland: from Melville Bay to DeLong Fjord, 1916-1918, Meddelelser om Grønland vol. 65 1927)--voyages of exploration along the West Greenlandic coast, which caused me to fall in love with Inuit life. This was followed by explorations into the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran, which I much preferred to the Bible at age 13 or so.
I said I hated School; and I maintained that attitude, with few exceptions, all the way from age 2 (my mother sent me early, because she thought I was too shy and should learn to like people--it didn't work) to age 37, when I finally, thankfully, fledged. (Once I was foolish enough to tell Inutsiaq, my adoptive Inuit father, how many years I had attended school--wanting him to have some respect for his incompetent Euro-daughter. His response: "My goodness, qallunaat [Europeans] learn slowly!")
I hated Graduate School most particularly; and postponed it for a number of years. In my last year at Vassar College I had worked as a research assistant for Dorothy Lee: my first anthropological mentor and the best teacher I ever had. Dorothy Lee asked more profound questions than anyone I ever knew, and it didn't matter whether the answers she came to were right or wrong. We didn't have to agree with her answers. She taught me to question everything; more accurately, she gave the name of Anthropology to the practice (of questioning) that had plagued my mother ever since I learned to talk.
So I was Dorothy's research assistant; and when I graduated, she recommended me to Clyde Kluckhohn, a friend of hers, who ran the Russian Research Center at Harvard. I got a job there, translating and coding illiterate Ukrainian questionnaires for the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. (I had majored in Russian. Anthropology at Vassar being inextricably entangled with Sociology [a bore] and Economics [scary], Russian served as a Front for Anthropology.)
When that job ended, after three years, I got an exciting job, coding the names, addresses, and educations of American meteorologists; and was fired for mentioning that I thought of looking for another job. Then finally I found a job as Social Science Research Assistant and Librarian, in Ben Paul's Social Science Unit in the Harvard School of Public Health, housed in the attic of the laundry building of a Boston hospital, where they tried to teach Public Health workers who were going abroad, about Culture, in a course called HICC(U)P: Health in Cross-Cultural Perspective. They also did various kinds of health-related research; and it was in that Unit that I actually learned most of the academic social science I know--being a hands-on learner at heart.
But Ben Paul and his social-psychologist colleague, Sol Levine, my immediate boss, after a couple of years--perhaps because they were unable to tolerate my restless orneriness anymore; or perhaps because they were better able than I to see Dead Ends in my future--urged Graduate School.
One of my employers at the Russian Research Center, Alex Inkeles, had also suggested Graduate School, and had even offered retroactive credit for a course I had been auditing from him; but the question on the Radcliffe application form: 'What problem do you want to focus on in grad school?' gave me such asthma that I gave up the idea. But when Ben Paul suggested it, I agreed--as long as I could study part-time and keep my job full-time. Ben agreed.
But first I had to be convinced that I was intelligent. I thought I would test myself by reading Lévi-Strauss in French. I thought if I could get through Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté (France 1949, revised 1967) I could probably get through grad school. Fortunately, a scholar I had a very high regard for--and whom I had rescued one summer from being evicted from his favorite Maine island and mine--rescued me from Lévi-Strauss after I'd struggled through no more than one and a half chapters, by saying he thought I was as intelligent as most other grad students.
So I took the plunge--into the African Studies Program at Boston University, the only school in Boston that would accept part-time students--while holding tight to my Public Health umbilical.
I also held tight to the hand of my psychoanalyst, because for some years already I had been engaged in my first Fieldtrip: exploring my own inner world--an Adventure that very much helped to determine the kind of anthropologist I eventually became.
Nothing terrible happened at BU--it was a friendly place--but when I had M.A. in hand, Ben said: "Now it's time for a serious school, and I'll get you into Harvard."
He did. But only because the Social Relations Department was experimenting with ignoring the Graduate Record Exams that year. I had done all right (some percentile in the 90s) in the Verbal part, but because I never graduated from Fractions in school arithmetic, I gave up and made notes for a BU term paper during the Numerical part of the test, and the result was 35th percentile.
I was a disastrous student. I did have one advantage, being ten years older than other students, and having worked most of that time with Harvard faculty as employers: I knew those faculty members weren't all scary monsters. I focused my fear on my fellow grad students instead; students whom I later discovered to be extremely nice people--people among whom I now have very good colleagues and friends. At the time, though, it seemed to me that they all imagined (like me) that they had gotten into Harvard by mistake and were trying to prove that wasn't true. I avoided most of them; refused to compete for faculty attention; and gave faculty field projects a wide berth.
One of my Star Performances as a Harvard student was writing "A rose is a rose is a rose ..." in Talcott Parsons' exam booklet, and grinding it under my foot in front of him. That may have put a severe strain on the benignity of the Faculty--but the marvelous fact is: I wasn't immediately evicted! My Punishment was being required to take another course, in a Soc Rel subdivision other than Anthropology. And I chose for that, my first psychologically flavored course: Inkeles and Levinson: "The Authoritarian Personality."
This time I refused to give a seminar report, because Inkeles and Levinson at the start of the course had rashly said that reporting was to be voluntary. And since in those days I never opened my mouth in public if I could help it, I didn't volunteer. But they were one volunteer short of the number they needed, and I was the only one who hadn't volunteered. So they said:
"Don't you think it would be a Good Experience?"
"No," I said. "I don't think I really want that Experience."
"Don't you think it's time you developed in that direction?"
"No."
Well, they were stuck--so I won--and wrote a paper instead.
These were not the only incidents of this sort in the student career of JB. There was a small matter of Orals, for example. Jean Lave's mother ironed my dress on that occasion because Jean saw I was on the brink of disaster, and asked if there was anything she could do for me. I--at a loss to know how I could be helped, because the only materials I had found to study were three pages of notes scribbled on pink paper--said: "Iron my dress." I still have that dress. I keep it as a Souvenir.
Needless to say, the Orals gave me lots of practice in saying "I don't know." I said it in every imaginable way--including (to my Examiners): "What do you think?" This resulted in one of my very benign examiners--a Friend from the attic of the Laundry Building--telling my other Friends in the attic that he would never sit on the Orals Committee of a Friend again.
Nevertheless, I am pleased to report that there was a Happy Ending to this Lurid tale. The Last Judgment on Jean as a Student was delivered by Bea Whiting. One day, after I had my degree; had published Never in Anger (Harvard University Press 1970)--largely owing to Bea's intervention--; and was already teaching at Memorial University of Newfoundland, I was in Cambridge, visiting friends, and ran into Bea on the street. She invited me to supper, saying that other Soc Rel people would be there, too. The "other Soc Rel people" were faculty; and they got to discussing whether one could predict what sort of anthropologist a person would become, from his or her performance as a student. The other faculty said Yes, you could; "look at so-and-so," "and so-and-so" ..., naming one shining example after another. Bea, however, said: "No, you can't--look at her"--pointing to me.
But this judgment would have been very different, I'm sure--and I wouldn't be standing here tonight--if a Soc Rel student ahead of me in the program, a friend from the Laundry Building--hadn't told me I'd be missing the best part of my education if I didn't take a course with Cora DuBois.
This turned out to be True; but being Cora's student was a life of hairbreadth escapes and triumphant shivers--as my grandfather used to describe the life of a Hedgehog.
I decided to test my friend's proposition before committing myself, so I sat in on the first meeting of DuBois's course on India, perched in the back row. She outlined first what the course would cover, then what it would not cover; and she prefaced the list of omissions by saying: "I am not a universal genius." That was one of the most useful lessons I was ever taught: how to say 'I don't know', straightforwardly and with aplomb. I've passed it on to many students.
And I decided then and there that I wanted to study with her; so I went up after class and asked her to give me a reading course. She said:
"Can I buy you off with a bibliography?"
"No."
"Well, I'm very busy. You'll understand if I drop you."
The first week went well. I struggled, but managed to conquer the Herculean task she set me. But the second week I failed. The task that second week was to see if I could find Erikson's Stages of Development among the Navajo, a culture for whom the data on childrearing was very rich. I struggled again, but I didn't know what to look for. I don't remember when I realized that the problem was not mine: Erikson didn't operationalize any of his Stages beyond the first one of Trust/Distrust, so there was no telling what data were relevant. But I didn't dare tell Cora that I couldn't do the job she had set me, so some weeks passed, and the end of the semester was near when I finally called her up and told her of my discovery. She said simply: "Thank you for calling"--and hung up. End of course.
That was all I saw of Cora till the time came to choose a thesis supervisor. I wanted her as supervisor; but her field was India, and mine was the Arctic, so no doubt she was puzzled by my request. She asked: "Is it my Name you want to use?" "No." I can't remember what argument I gave her, but she agreed to supervise.
Then she made me cry by telling me I had "no right to go" to Back River, because it sounded to her as though the Utku lived so close to starvation that my presence would be a burden. We compromised. I said I'd go tentatively, and if she was right, I'd come back. She said she'd be glad to eat crow if she was wrong.
She did turn out to be wrong. And while I was in the field, she sent me an encouragement I've never forgotten--and again have passed on to many students. I had written her a long letter in which I told her that my chosen topic (the social life of shamans) had fallen through (because there were no shamans); that I was writing down Everything but wasn't learning Anything about Anything, and was totally confused. In the return mail, six months later, was a letter from Cora. She wrote: "The fact that you are confused shows that you are a Good Anthropologist. You can oversimplify when you come home--if necessary."
And when I came back, she had the most seminal influence of all on the course of my Future Life. I had given her a very standard, orthodox thesis outline on Social Control--a topic suggested by Ben Paul, who had heard my tales of being ostracized (when I was recovering from appendicitis at his house on my way home).
Cora called me to her house; sat me down in the garden with a stiff drink--which I later discovered was the Prelude to Severe Criticism--and said:
"Well, this looks very pedestrian." My heart sank.
"Can you write flowingly?" My heart rose.
"I'd like to try," I said.
"Well then, just tell five anecdotes and string them together somehow, and that will be your thesis. (Pause.) Of course, we'll have to pack the Committee."
She did pack the Committee; and those five anecdotes became Never in Anger.
As a thesis supervisor, Cora had no equal. She was conscientious and painstaking; she read every word and commented on everything. She taught me how to write.
Of course, her interventions weren't always positive. The most memorable of the discouraging ones happened when I was in the middle of stringing the five anecdotes together, and had lost my way. I told her my difficulties--probably extravagantly--and her response was: "Jean Briggs, YOU don't need a thesis advisor, you need a psychiatric social worker."
But she to
uched me very much, one day years later, when we were having lunch together. She suddenly said:
"I hurt your feelings terribly once."
I asked: "On the telephone?" (thinking of a couple of other occasions).
"No." She repeated her remark about the psychiatric social worker, and said: "You turned purple. I could have bitten my tongue out."
We were friends until she died.
I've left out many Helpers and many Bumbles. Both helpers and bumbles have followed me, lifelong. Misfitting has been even more productive in the Field; and Supporters have been just as indispensable.
I've always been grateful for my Good Luck in falling into Anthropology-- and Psychological Anthropology in particular. It's the best possible space I could have followed my nose into. It's my Life.
And when occasionally I forget that, and become viciously critical of somebody, I hear the voice of my 80+-year-old mother, who once said, when I criticized her: "Why don't you turn on the Anthropologist?"
