At the Foot of the Mountain

For half a century I’ve walked like some storied vizier among the people of the planet, notebook in hand as an anthropologist to share briefly the lives of tribes people, peasants, farmers, fishers, and workers only to return to the abstracted realm of the irreal in a university, always feeling that, as the son of a working man, my feet belong on the ground. This is the story of those years and some of the people who have shared them with me.My upbringing in a Christian Science family disposed me to the abstracted intellectualism congenial to a life in academia as well as the sense of alienation necessary to be the external observer that ethnographic fieldwork requires. My working class background put me in a similar borderline position in academia as my career grew. Throughout, the existentialism of Camus gave me ways to understand the people I was studying as well as my own life. A parallel private story sets the stage for the steady unraveling of a marriage that, while it appeared storybook and solid, was undermined from the beginning by family backgrounds that made it impossible for us to be fully honest.