Introduction
This is an account of some of the main intellectual influences on my life as an
anthropologist. It's testimony to the variety of people and the variety of agendas
that help provide any one of us with the intellectual dispositions and tools of our
trade.
When I was nine years old, I wrote in my diary that I wanted to be an
anthropologist when I grew up. I doubt that many nine year olds in 1960 aspired to
be anthropologists, since (despite Margaret Mead) it was then still a rather small
and esoteric field of study. My interest, however, had been piqued by two other
Verne Dusenber(r)ys—my grandfather (FF), Verne D. Dusenbery, a progressive
lawyer with archaeological interests, and my first cousin twice removed (FFFBS),
Verne Dusenberry (who, like me, had been named after my grandfather).
Cousin Verne taught in the English department at Montana State, but he spent
much time with the Rocky Boy Chippewa-Cree in northern Montana and eventually
earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from a Swedish university for his dissertation on
Cree religion. (Cousin Verne is the positively-portrayed, non-"objectivist"
anthropologist in Robert Pirsig's book, Lila.) During a summer that he taught in our
home town, Cousin Verne had encouraged my interest in American Indians through
his stories and the gifts made for me by his Cree friends. In third grade, I worked
for several months producing an American Indian scrapbook—my first
anthropological project—that, along with the diary, is among the prized keepsakes
of my youth.
Although I didn't keep an exclusive anthropological focus as I went through primary
and secondary schools in Oregon (not least because no one taught anything called
anthropology!), I can in retrospect see certain anthropological sensibilities at work.
In high school I was always interested in what would now be called "subaltern
studies" —that is, the accounts from below of those people left out of mainstream
histories. Thus, when asked to write research papers in American history, I would
write about the role of American Indians in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War
or the role of African Americans in WWII. Ruth Benedict—or was it Margaret Mead?
—observed that American anthropologists tend to be—or, at least, feel themselves
to be—marginals in their own culture. And I think I always had that sense of being
somewhat estranged from what then passed for mainstream American culture
(despite my privileged upbringing) and thus an interest in and empathy for others
living at the margins.
When I went off to college, at Stanford University, I had a vague idea that I might
be interested in majoring in English (which both of my parents taught) or in
Biology. I knew that I liked to read and write, and I liked evolutionary theory and
ecology. My "Introduction to Anthropology" course in freshman year at Stanford
had been a 500-600 person course co-taught by George and Louise Spindler (of
Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology fame). I still remember getting praised for
my final paper in the course, which required us to contrast three of the cultures we
had been studying. For the paper, I had imagined each of the three groups
commenting upon the others in what I imagined to be their own voice. It had been
a lot of fun. Still, I resisted as long as I could declaring a major, since I wanted to
take courses in all sorts of fields. In the end, I declared Anthropology ("an
intellectual poaching license," in Clyde Klukhohn's terms) as my major, but I also
continued to take courses in the Humanities Honors Program.
As an undergraduate Anthropology major at Stanford, I participated in what was
then a rather laissez-faire major. Aside from the Spindlers, my major intellectual
influences at Stanford were Shelley and Renato Rosaldo, who had just come from
graduate school at Harvard. Shelly's course in structuralism convinced me that I
might want to go on to do graduate work in anthropology. And Renato, who served
as the advisor to those of us doing honors projects, gave me a sense of both the
intellectual vibrancy and the political implications of the discipline.
My senior honors thesis was on the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization (3HO), one
of the new religious movements that had sprung on the scene in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Through my course work in the humanities, I had become interested
in 19th century utopian communities and utopian literature. Naturally, I was
intrigued by the similarities between the utopian impulses in 19th and 20th century
America, and I hoped that I might be able to do a senior project that would serve
both the Humanities Honors Program and the Anthropology Department. However,
when I proposed to do a fieldwork-based account of an existing community, I was
told by the Humanities folks that the proposal was "too sociological." Consequently,
my honors thesis ("Why would anybody join? A study of recruitment and the
Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization"), based on my three months of participant
observation in a 3HO ashram in Portland, Oregon, was written for Anthropology
alone.
By the time I graduated, I knew that I was interested in going on to graduate
school, but I wasn't sure where or when. I contemplated accepting a Peace Corps
assignment to Zaire, spending a free year at the Graduate Theological Union at
Berkeley, or entering the joint JD/PhD program at Northwestern, but in the end I
decided to go directly to graduate school in anthropology. In deciding between
offers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Chicago, I was
swayed by my Stanford mentors to put aside qualms about living in the Midwest for
the intellectual stimulation I was sure to find at Chicago.
And Chicago was intellectually stimulating. Clifford Geertz had already left, but
Chicago in the mid-1970s was still the center for symbolic anthropology. Our first
semester theory course was taught by Marshall Sahlins, who had recently come
from Michigan after his conversion to structuralism from neo-evolutionism. Lectures
were basically an early version of his masterful book, Culture and Practical Reason.
The two-semester kinship course was taught by David Schneider, whose American
Kinship: A Cultural Account had both challenged conventional wisdom about the
biological bases of kinship and helped make American culture a legitimate object of
anthropological investigation. And Milton Singer, who had once been a student of
Robert Redfield and W. Lloyd Warner, was then offering a stimulating workshop on
Amercan culture.
My undergraduate honors thesis had been fairly well received and I was
subsequently able to get funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities
Youthgrant to do follow-up research between my first and second year of graduate
school. This time, I traveled to visit 3HO ashrams throughout the western U.S. and
Canada. And using some of the insights from Sahlins, Schneider, Singer and other
meaning-centered anthropologists, I wrote a masters thesis ("Straight -> Freak ->
Yogi -> Sikh: A 'search for meaning' in contemporary American culture") that
focused on how 3HO ideology provided a collective, mythic life history that helped
3HO members make sense of their lives.
My first proposal for dissertation research was to follow upon David Schneider's
kinship work by doing "American Friendship: A Cultural Account." My argument was
that, like kinship, American friendship is a culturally-specific system of symbols and
meanings (drawing on American individualism and egalitarianism) that should
neither be presumed to be universal nor reduced to biological or psychological
explanation. I still think it would have been an interesting project (and there have
been subsequent anthropological studies of friendship), but I couldn't get Schneider
to agree, and that basically killed that project. (I think part of the objection was
that I needed to do some non-U.S. based fieldwork first to get a proper crosscultural perspective on U.S. culture.)
Instead, I went back to my work with 3HO. 3HO members had come to represent
themselves as orthodox Sikhs, and this had led to confrontations with Punjabi Sikh
immigrants over who were the better Sikhs -- the recent North American Sikh
converts of 3HO or the Indian immigrant Sikhs and their descendants. By proposing
to look at the cross-cultural misunderstandings involved, I got connected with the
South Asianists at Chicago. My dissertation research in Vancouver, British
Columbia, was still initially conceptualized in terms of North American issues of
immigration, ethnicity, and religious conversion. But when I got back from the field
and began writing up, I found myself drawn to McKim Marriott's South Asian
ethnosociological writings as a way of making sense of the interactions and mutual
misunderstandings between the Sikh converts and the Sikh immigrants. Marriott's
intellectual influence was central to my subsequent dissertation ("Sikh Persons and
Practices: A Comparative Ethnosociology") which contrasted the ethnosociological
premises of the converts and immigrants. (The other main intellectual influence on
the dissertation was the New Zealand-based historian, W.H. McLeod, the leading
figure in Sikh studies.)
Two other key intellectual influences from graduate school were George Stocking
and John Comaroff. Not only was my understanding of anthropology significantly
informed by Stocking's courses on the history of discipline, but I also relied on his
personal support in getting through the graduate program at Chicago. John and
Jean Comaroff arrived at the end of my time at Chicago, bringing with them
Manchester school sensitivities. John and I talked about my dissertation research.
And, although not much reflected in the dissertation, his insights for bringing the
political and economic into conjunction with the social and cultural have been
crucial to my subsequent work on Sikh diasporic experience in postcolonial
multicultural states.
This research trajectory, subsequent to the dissertation, has included research with
Sikhs in Southeast Asia in 1992-93 and in Australia in 1999 and 2001 and in India
in 2005-06 and over subsequent breaks. (See the section on Research Interests for
more details.)
Since leaving graduate school, my intellectual influences have been diffuse. My
work on the Sikh diaspora has led me into the literature on globalization and
transnationalism, multiculturalism and the politics of identity, ethnonationalism and
the postcolonial state. Here, the work of Arjun Appadurai has been especially
influential. Given our contemporary "Age of Revolution" (to use John Comaroff's
characterization), I find that a lot of our received understandings of the world are
up for grabs. That makes it both an unsettling and potentially exciting time to be
thinking about the human condition. Being an anthropologist who has been
directing an international studies (now, Global Studies) program, however, gives
me the license to read widely and co-opt other peoples' ideas when they seem
useful.
I guess I'm a big-picture kind of guy. But, in terms of what George Stocking refers
to as anthropology's "epistemic dualisms", I feel very much torn between my
interests in understanding the general (anthropos) and the particulars (ethnos) of
the human condition.
Finally, I've learned much anthropologically from my wife and colleague, Liz Coville
(who was forbearing enough to let me accompany her during her dissertation
fieldwork among the Toraja in Indonesia), and from my other departmental
colleagues and from the students in my courses, both at Hamline and elsewhere
(Carleton, Reed, Deep Springs, Lewis & Clark). Lifelong learning means that (I
hope) my intellectual autobiography will never be completed.
Research Interests
In 2005-2006, I spent the academic year in India as a Fulbright Senior Research
Scholar affiliated to the Punjab Centre for Migration Studies at Lyallpur Khalsa
College in Jalandhar, Punjab. I was there to conduct a collaborative research
project with the centre’s director, Dr. Darshan S. Tatla, a fellow scholar of the Sikh
diaspora, who had returned from the U.K. a few years earlier to start the Centre
and to reconnect with Punjab.
Darshan and I had been in correspondence as far back as the mid-1990s about the
possibility of collaborating on a project that would look at what was happening as a
result of the remittances being sent back to Punjab by Sikhs living in the diaspora.
In particular, we were interested in the philanthropic projects in Punjab being
funded by Sikhs living abroad. And this became the focus of our research – both
the motivation of diasporan Sikh philanthropists and the effects of diaspora
philanthropy on Punjab.
While we were conducting our research, the United States Education Foundation in
India (which administers CIEE Fulbright Awards) suggested that they would like to
co-sponsor, with the Punjab Centre for Migration Studies, a workshop around the
topic of our research. So, Darshan and I ended up putting together an international
workshop on Diasporan Sikh Philanthropy in Punjab. The workshop, held in March
2006 at Lyallpur Khalsa College, brought together scholars, philanthropists,
government officials, and journalists to discuss papers, hear philanthropist’s
reflections, and visit selected philanthropic projects in the area. The manuscript of
the revised workshop papers, Sikh Diaspora Philanthropy in Punjab: Global Giving
for Local Good, which includes our own research findings, was published in August
2009 by Oxford University Press.
While in India, Liz and I and our younger daughter, Lisa, maintained a flat in New
Delhi, while I divided my time between cosmopolitan New Delhi, where we lived in
upscale Defence Colony, and rural Punjab, where I lived in Darshan’s village and
visited philanthropic projects (schools, hospitals, village development projects, etc.)
throughout the state. I thus was able to experience the two faces of contemporary
India. During our ten months in India, we maintained a family blog, New Delhi
Notes, which captures some of our experiences and reactions to life in India circa
2005-2006.
As a follow up to that research project, Darshan and I (along with Mandeep Kaur
Tatla, who had helped us on the earlier research and had herself gone on to receive
a Ph.D. in sociology and social anthropology from Punjabi Univesity) have been
working on a life history of one of the Sikh diaspora philanthropists whose project
had featured in our book. This has involved talking with his family, friends, and
associates in both Punjab and British Columbia. A Punjabi version of Budh Singh
Dhahan’s life history is due out soon from Punjabi University Press in Patialia, with
an English version to follow.
In summer 2001, I enjoyed the warmest winter in northern New South Wales,
Australia, in many a decade. I was in the small coastal town of Woolgoolga, which
calls itself "the missing piece of paradise," helping a Sikh friend put the finishing
touches on a manuscript we had been putting together as a social history-cumethnography of the local Punjabi Sikh community.
The project was an interesting collaborative undertaking. I had met Rashmere
Bhatti in 1999 in the course of my sabbatical research project on Sikhs in the
context of Australian multiculturalism. Rashmere, as coordinator of the Woolgoolga
Neighbourhood Centre, was often called upon to speak about "her community"—
local Punjabis, primarily banana farmers, whose impressive Sikh temple towers
over the Pacific Coast Highway that runs from Sydney to Brisbane. In 1999,
Rashmere received funding from the Australian Centenary of Federation project to
produce a book, film, and web site on the community as a successful example of
Australian multiculturalism. In 2000, she asked me to assist her with the book.
In my introduction to an earlier volume that I had co-edited, The Sikh Diaspora:
Migration and the Experience Beyond Punjab, I had called for more
collaboration between scholars and members of local Sikh communities to tell the
stories of different Sikh communities around the globe. I therefore could hardly
have turned down her request. In fact, I felt that our collaboration was both an
important undertaking in its own right and a way to reciprocate for the access and
hospitality that Sikhs in Woolgoolga had shown me and other researchers.
During the next year, I helped recruit a variety of other scholars to contribute to
the book. In addition, via e-mail, I helped Rashmere as she conducted interviews
and collected additional material from Sikh and non-Sikh families in Woolgoolga. In
July-August 2001, I returned to Australia to help draft some of the remaining
chapters and to help edit the final manuscript. Our book, A Punjabi Sikh
Community in Australia: From Indian Sojourners to Australian Citizens,
published in December 2001, is a truly multi-vocal text that includes not only our
voices but also the voices of other researchers and local community members.
The process of collaboration with local Sikhs (in both Australia and India) has not
always easy because of the different ways we have been positioned with respect to
the stories we were telling, but it has been one of the most personally fulfilling
research and writing experiences that I have had as an anthropologist.
In 1992-93 I had set off to Southeast Asia, courtesy of a Fulbright Southeast Asian
Regional Research Award and a grant from the Social Science Research Council and
American Council of Learned Societies, to do research on Sikh experiences in
Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. This, too, was to have been a collaborative
research project, to be conducted with Kernail Singh Sandhu, director of the
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISSEAS) in Singapore.
Sadly, Professor Sandhu died of a heart attack before my arrival. And my own year
of research was cut in half by a major back injury suffered in the mountains of
Sumatra, subsequent back surgery in Singapore and again in the States, and a
period of recuperation. Nevertheless, I was able to do some research with the Sikh
communities in Medan, Jakarta, Singapore, Port Dickson, and Kuala Lumpur. (I
had become interested in learning more about the varied Sikh communities in
Southeast Asia as a result of my encounters with Southeast Asian Sikhs on my way
home from accompanying my wife, Liz, during her fieldwork in Indonesia in 198081.)
My involvement with Sikhs has thus included research stints in North America
(U.S., Canada), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia), Australia, and
India conducted over a period of four decades. The actual substantive topics that I
have engaged over this period have been varied (e.g., conversion, migration,
transnationalism, multiculturalism, philanthropy), but the ethnoreligious community
with whom I have worked has been consistent. Throughout the years, I have been
particularly interested in the ways of being and ways of belonging of Sikhs living in
various places and coming from different backgrounds.
And, all the while, I have been acutely aware of the challenges posed for me as a
non-Sikh anthropologist in representing Sikh experiences. During my sabbatical
year in India, I took the time to pull together a collection of my articles, most of
them published previously in wide variety of books and journals. That collection of
essays, Sikhs at Large: Religion, Culture, and Politics in Global Perspective, was
published by Oxford University Press in 2008.
Courses
In my teaching in anthropology at Hamline, I regularly teach the required course in
the history of anthropological theory, Anthropological Thought and Theory, and
contribute to the gateway course into the major, Issues in Anthropology. In
addition, I teach topical elective courses, Religion, Culture, and the State and
Transnational Migration and Diasporic Communities, cross-listed with other
departments and programs.
I also developed and piloted in 2000 a study abroad course, “Community and
Development in Bangladesh", offered through the HECUA consortium. The course,
which won an award from the Institute for Intercultural Education for Best Practices
in International Education, grew out of my South Asian interests and Hamline's
bilateral affiliation with Independent University, Bangladesh. The course is offered
every J-term, and I had the pleasure of co-directing it again in January 2009.
As Chair of the Global Studies Department and a faculty member with (and former
director of) the Certificate in International Journalism program, I have had teaching
and administrative responsibilities to those programs as well, including currently
co-teaching the global studies introductory course.
And I continue to welcome the opportunity to do collaborative research,
independent studies, and honors projects with students in sociocultural
anthropology as well as in global studies.