Chapter Seven—
Working in Other Fields

Dean MacCannell

No one knows yet who will inhabit this shell [of industrial capitalism] in the future: whether at the end of its prodigious development there will be new prophets or a vigorous renaissance of all thoughts and ideals or whether finally, if none of this occurs, mechanism will produce only petrification hidden under a kind of anxious importance. According to this hypothesis, the prediction will become a reality for the last men of this particular development of culture. Specialists without spirit, libertines without heart, this nothingness imagines itself to be elevated to a level of humanity never before attained.
—Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatz zur Wissenschaftlehre

It has been more than ten years since I left the sociology faculty at Temple University for a research and teaching appointment at the University of California, Davis, College of Agriculture. I should be counted among the lost generation of sociologists in the 1970s who work mainly outside of the discipline. Like the man without a country, I sometimes feel nostalgia for my old intellectual haunts. But there are other separations in my life deeper and more problematic than this one. Spatial and institutional fragmentation is a fact of modern existence. The only question is how we handle it. Do we yield to the demands of this last "development of culture" by narrowing our thoughts and feelings to fit in to the fragments that are called business, government, education, and the like? Or do we attempt, somehow, to change things, to create new arrangements that can be inhabited by whole human beings?

I was born in Olympia, Washington, in 1940, the son of Earle H. MacCannell and Helen Frances Meskimen MacCannell. My father and

mother were too young at the time of my birth (twenty-two and nineteen years old) to have begun their careers. They would both eventually finish college, attend graduate school, earn Ph.D. degrees, and become professors, my father going into sociology before me. But my birth and the birth of my brothers intervened, followed by World War II and a divorce, so that in the actual progression of events my father's first faculty appointment preceded mine by only ten years, and mine preceded my mother's by two.

Given the fact that my mother, my father, and my wife are all university professors, one might assume that I grew up in intellectual and bookish surroundings. Nothing would be further from the truth. I was born of two opposing American types and married yet another, and my entire life has been an exercise in synthesizing contradictions. My father's family is New England Yankee, MIT-educated, originally Boston-based professionals. My mother's family is militant working-class, expioneer, Oklahoma oil field boilermakers and roughnecks, Depression migrants from the dust bowl to the Pacific Northwest. My wife's family is urban (Chicago and New York) European ethnic—Jewish and Italian entrepreneurs and professionals. The only major American experiences not in my background, or that of my children, are farming and oppression based on skin color, two topics that, interestingly, are among my current research concerns.

My father was drafted into the infantry in the late stages of World War II and remained with the occupational forces in Italy after the war, staying there until 1949. I lived with my mother and two brothers in enlisted men's base housing at Fort Lewis, Washington. My brothers and I were sent for visits, often long ones, with my uncles, aunts, and grandparents. My summers were spent with my paternal great-grandmother, Emily Amelia Hughes MacCannell. She was thin, passionate, sharp-witted, sharp-tongued, and very old. She made a habit of saying that I was her favorite among all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, a stance that provoked other members of my father's family. Her favoritism did not lead her to spoil me. On the contrary, she corrected each of my errors of grammar and etiquette on the spot and insisted that I read aloud at least an hour every evening and maintain regular habits of eating, sleeping, and dressing. Except for an early edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin , which I still own, she left me nothing material, but she prepared my heart to give and take unqualified love from another person. The value of this gift is incalculable since the alternative is madness.

I also spent many days and weekends with my maternal grand-

mother, Frances Meskimen, who was the only member of my family on both sides to own an automobile during the war and the immediate postwar years. She was the driver. My grandma Fran was also the first woman welder to enter the ship-building industry in World War II. She is featured in a news documentary from that era that still plays occasionally as filler on late-night television. She provided inspiration for a popular song, "Rosie the Riveter," and later was the subject of an oral-history project in the Women's Studies Program at the University of Washington. She was left-handed, as I am, so it fell to her to teach me to write in cursive. She was also a published poet, and she gave me a manuscript memoir, written in a clear and humorous style, in 1982 not long before she died.

I do not recall ever thinking like a child. My thought processes, as far back as I can remember, were substantially the same as they are today. This is a condition I share with my wife, Juliet Flower MacCannell: we both feel about seventeen years old. I recall my grandfather, Ross Meskimen, a tough, left-leaning union man, giving me my first lesson in critical theory when I was nine. We were walking together in downtown Tacoma when the air raid alert sirens were tested, as they were then once a week at noon.

"What's that?" I shouted.

"It's the atomic attack siren test," he answered, or something to that effect. (I remember the word atomic and that he pronounced siren "sigh-reen .")

"Why do we need it now that the war is over?" I asked.

"So the people who make sirens will have a market for their product," was his instant reply. There is no question in my mind that this childhood incident influenced the way I approached the nuclear question in my article "Baltimore in the Morning After."

My uncle and cousins on my mother's side to this day direct the crews that lift the high-voltage cables onto the towers at the points where the electrical grid crosses the Great Divide. They repair the damage to sawmills that results when a twenty-foot blade leaves its shaft at high speed and cuts its way through the other machinery. My brother William is a pioneer homesteader and frontier newspaper editor in Alaska, where he went to work as a dynamiter. Brother John is an Air Force systems analyst and weatherman but also a gifted builder. Of all the nephews and grandchildren, my maternal relatives refused to teach me their skills because they insisted that I should never have to work with my hands. But through them I came to regard writing as a form of

handiwork, and I went with them to their jobs often enough as a child that, in spite of their efforts to shield me, I later discovered that I am a good pipe fitter and metal worker.

My mother's people did actively teach me never to cross a union picket line and, by example, instilled in me an attitude of fierce independence from authority. I do not believe that any of them ever stayed on a work site more than five minutes after forming the opinion that they were not receiving a fair wage, a fair hearing, or proper respect.

Growing up in this setting, I developed an attitude toward technology that remains with me even today: I feel I must know exactly how everything works. Probably no other quirk of my mind has led me to make so many mistakes. I have taken apart the carburetors of every automobile I have ever owned (including two exotic English sports cars) and have not, in every case, been able to fit them back together again. (I have only been a little luckier with Swiss watches, ignition systems, valve trains, hydraulic door openers, and submersible bilge pumps.) One night as a graduate student at Cornell I was working alone at two or three o'clock in the morning in the data processing lab when the equipment broke down in the middle of a calculation. I was impatient to see the results, so without hesitation I found tools and dismantled the old IBM 101 accounting machine that had failed. About an hour later, when dawn broke, I was surrounded by subassemblies, relays, nuts, wires, and machine screws. I had not found the problem, and in my exhaustion I had lost all sense of how to put the stuff back together beyond a crude, right-hemisphere gestalt not unlike science-fiction "machineyness." After agonizing over some moral and economic choices for a few minutes, I reassembled it as best I could and hung a sign on it saying OUT OF ORDER. It only took the repair person about an hour to fix it when the lab opened in the morning, but he complained more than once about that person who last had serviced the equipment.

Whereas I was able to absorb the values and competencies of my maternal relatives only partially, my mother positively rejected them, imagining academic life to be opposed to the life of a boilermaker, not an extension of it. When I was younger, I thought her position was in error; I still do, but I am softer in my criticism now. It could not have been easy for a little girl, who desired nothing more than to be feminine, to grow up in the Oklahoma oil fields in a family of men, with a mother who came home at night wearing filthy overalls and carrying a metal lunch box in one hand and her welding hood in the other.

Somehow, in this ragbag of defiant Americana, I learned to read

before I went to school and quickly developed advanced taste in reading. When I was eight or nine, I read All Quiet on the Western Front and, soon after, an English translation of Les Misérables . I do not recall who gave me these books or why. On finishing All Quiet , I resolved never to go to war and to resist and oppose it with all my might throughout my life. My ship-building grandmother tried to dissuade me from my radical stand, but Grandpa Ross and my paternal grandmother, Alice MacCannell, supported my position. My pacifist convictions stayed with me until Vietnam, when I decided that armed struggle can be justified if it is necessary to secure self-determination and throw off the yoke of oppression. Thus my work in the antiwar movement coincided precisely with my first acceptance of war. I never changed my mind about Les Misérables . The figure of Inspector Javert attempting to elevate his bureaucratic heartlessness even above the events of the French Revolution still worries and haunts me.

In 1949 my father returned from Italy and entered the University of Washington as an undergraduate. We moved from military base housing to public housing and subsisted without supplementary income on the living allotment provided to students by the GI bill—$120 a month. Our poverty, and the poverty of the other people living in the project, was awful, and I made a silent vow never to go to college, as I judged the cost in human suffering to be too great.

At the university my father proved to be a gifted mathematician, carrying a double major in mathematics-statistics and sociology through the master's degrees, eventually doing a demographically oriented Ph.D. in sociology under the direction of Calvin Schmid in 1958. We were so poor that a research assistantship in the population laboratory brought relief. My mother was able to enroll, taking her undergraduate degree in "integrated studies," with emphasis on English. We all worked at diverse part-time jobs. By the time I was fourteen I was doing the summer gardening and winter furnace stoking for a far-flung network of middle-class households in the north end of Seattle. I started out working by the hour until my client and I could determine how much a particular service ordinarily cost. Then I cut the cost by 10 percent and switched to a piece rate so that I could work twice as fast and almost double my earnings. I built a system of regular after-school appointments on weekly and monthly schedules and was soon earning more than fifty dollars a week, which was more than my father's assistantship paid. In 1952 I spent my first hundred dollars on an English lightweight bicycle with gears. I was one of only two kids in Seattle with such a machine for

about a year; the other was a Japanese paper boy named Art, known to me only because of his bike.

I vividly recall a conversation with my father from this period. We were discussing my social-studies class, in particular the unit on social conditions in urban slums. My father could tell from my comments that I was thinking of these slums as something quite remote, limited to East Coast cities, perhaps. "Step outside for a minute," he said, and I followed him. He gestured at our neighborhood. "You sounded as if you did not know about the slum. This is the slum."

By the time I was twelve I had been introduced to Stuart Dodd, R. E. L. Fairs, George Lundberg, Otto Larsen, Norman Hayner, and the other pillars of the old University of Washington sociology department. In early spring of 1951 or 1952 my family was invited to visit with Lundberg at his summer home on Whidby Island in Puget Sound. It was during this visit that I received my first concrete lesson in sociological concept formation. The house had been sealed up for the winter, and Lundberg asked me to help him pry off a storm shutter. As the shutter came free, we uncovered fifteen or twenty ladybugs, which scrambled together rather than running in all directions when they were disturbed. Lundberg commented, "Hmm, I did not know them to be a socially organized species." Of course, until then I had not thought of animals, insects, or humans as possessing social organization. But there was a clarity of connection of concept and observation in the event that fixed social organization in my mind from that moment forward. Already I was aware of Lundberg's reputation as a leading social scientist, for there was a paperback copy of his Can Science Save Us? on my father's bookshelf. In those days it was the only paperback he had, except for several by Margaret Mead. I thought that any professor whose words were believed to be so important as to have been made available to a mass audience must be a genius, a serious ideologue, or both. Hence I was well primed to learn a first sociological principle from him.

In the early 1950s the families of the graduate students and faculty in the sociology department got together once a year for fun at the Alpha Kappa Delta picnic. I remember especially well playing baseball with Clarence Schrag. He was an excellent hitter in spite of having a wooden hand carved in the shape of a real hand and covered with a skin-toned leather glove. Bobby Fairs told me that Schrag was the professor of crime and that his hand had been shot off in a prison break while he was doing research. I do not know if Fairs had his facts right, but it was the sort of thing that made sociology interesting. (I had occasion to think of

Schrag's hand twenty years later when I was doing research in Holmesberg Prison in Philadelphia.) Bobby Faris was one year ahead of me in the same junior high school. Someone must have told him that he should act friendly toward me because he sought me out and introduced himself to me in the most singular way on the playground at recess. He walked up, placed himself squarely in front of me at about five paces, and flatly announced, "My name is Robert E. Lee Faris the Third, my father is the chair of the finest sociology department in the world, and I am a genius." Oddly enough, this statement did have the effect of putting me at east with him, although it caused me, for a moment, to doubt my own father's good sense. When I reported this weird incident to my father, his response was, "It's all true." I was never close friends with the youngest Faris, but I would often accompany him home, or most of the way home, and warn him about traffic as he had the dangerous affectation of reading books while riding his bicycle. Some years later we were together again briefly at Cornell University as lecturers. His appointment was in mathematics, I believe. Just before he came to Cornell I met his famous father for coffee at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Montreal, at his father's request. The older Faris told me that I was a sensible person and that I should check on Bobby occasionally after he arrived. He briefly dated our (Juliet Flower's and my) dear friend Leslie Burlingame, who is now a professor of history at Franklin and Marshall College, but no romantic interest developed, and that was the last I heard of him.

I was always sexually precocious and lascivious, and from age fourteen on I regarded every day's passage until I "did it" as a horrendous waste. I was so enormously frustrated that when it finally did happen, at sixteen, I actually lost my virginity twice in quick succession. The first time I thought I did it, I narrowly missed. (It was in the dark on rugged terrain—how is a boy to know?) The girl, a year older but as inexperienced as I, never let on until, on the occasion of our "second" time, I blurted out, "Hey, it didn't really happen last time." "I know," she said. "You were so happy I didn't have the heart to tell you." I could not then, nor can I now, say which of the two times was better. My girlfriend had a clear opinion on the matter, however.

While I was in high school, I determined absolutely that I would not go to college and that I would make a career as a builder and driver of racing cars. As with all my desires, I committed myself totally and absolutely to this goal. I worked for several dealerships in and near Seattle that had active racing programs, at first without pay. I became a

good race strategist and was quick, especially in the rain, in small-displacement modified sports cars—Lotus 11, Porsche Spyder, Fiat Abarth Zagato, A. C. Bristol. On finishing high school I planned to go to Europe and apprentice myself to a major racing organization. Then, in 1957, my father took his first faculty position at San Diego State University (then only a college) and insisted that I join the family in southern California. The move threw me into a dangerous mental depression, from which I have the patient friendship of the great mountaineer Edward Douglas ("Bud") Bernard to thank for pulling me out. I barely finished high school and ran back to Seattle.

In late summer of 1958 a sociology conference was held in Seattle. My father came to the meetings and visited me at Scott Larson Motors, where I was working. He told me I should go to college. I agreed for a perverse reason. I had quite forgotten that I was in possession of a strong intellect, and I felt it would be easy for me to prove to him that I would fail. I tricked myself into thinking that if I made a good-faith effort in college, I could flunk out gracefully at the end of a semester, return to my racing, and not be bothered again after that. I figured the entire episode would be over in about six months and would cost next to nothing—tuition in the California State College system then was thirty-four dollars a semester, and books ran about twenty-five dollars, a small investment for a life of peace and prosperity in the automobile business.

Of course, that ill-conceived decision cost me a life of relative deprivation and turmoil, and the entire episode is not over yet. I earned high grades in college, much higher than in high school, and learned to enjoy taking mental risks based on intuition: for example, I predicted Fidel Castro's eventual victory on an essay exam in a political science course taught by a conservative professor. Two years later I transferred to Berkeley, and two years after that went on to graduate school at Cornell, supporting the effort with a patchwork of part-time jobs, fellowships, and assistantships. The part I loved most about my college coursework was the books I did not understand. I experienced a sensual thrill on first turning the pages of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts and my statistics textbook, knowing that I did not understand what they meant but was going to find out. I still feel the same excitement today when I find an especially dense passage by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Noam Chomsky, Jacques Derrida, René Thom, or Charles Peirce. (I also love to read authors like Darwin, Marcel Mauss, Georg Simmel, and Mikhail Bakhtin who can represent complex ideas in clear and simple-

seeming language and, in fact, base my own approach to writing more on this second principle than on "pleasure of the text.")

I studied anthropology instead of sociology at first only because I thought it unseemly to take courses with my father's departmental colleagues. When I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley (Bobby Faris's earlier assessment notwithstanding), I had a choice between what were then regarded as the finest sociology department and the finest anthropology department anywhere. I stayed with anthropology for the bachelor's degree for two reasons: First, it was richer than sociology because it focused on culture as well as social organization and was international in practice as well as theory, and second, it was technically more sociological than sociology—that is, it had not accepted psychological explanations of social phenomena to the extent that sociology had. Frank W. Young, who taught briefly at San Diego State before moving to the University of Pittsburgh and eventually to Cornell, made me read Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method, and I took them completely to heart as only a sophomore can. When I read, "EXPLAIN A SOCIAL FACT WITH ANOTHER SOCIAL FACT," I could actually feel an old worldview deflate and sense a new direction for thought and beliefs. After such a manifestation, I thought, it was only a matter of time before we would clean up the last vestiges of psychological mystification and associated political beliefs in bourgeois individualism. That was because I had not yet learned Freud's concept of resistance .

The undergraduate avant-garde on the West Coast in the years 1958–60 was in a full-throttle skid. We would crowd into old cars and speed up the coast or deep into Mexico on a whim. The beat movement was at its crest, and it empowered many of us who were poor but smart to move in wider circles and into positions of leadership among our peers, positions formerly occupied by culturally middle-class, Junior Achiever types. We held ourselves intellectually accountable for much more than was asked in the framework of institutionalized education. If Marx, Freud, and Sartre were not taught in the classrooms, that made Marx, Freud, and Sartre all the more important to us. We got our true education, we thought, out of the old Cody's Books when it was still located on the north side of the Berkeley campus and Fred Cody still ran the register, ordered the books, knew us all by name, and hired us to do inventory when we did not have enough to eat.

My good friend and roommate in San Diego, and later on in Berkeley, where we went together, was Ronnie Wilson, a perpetually "returning" student ten years my senior. Wilson had been a child-prodigy

classical pianist and was about to begin his professional career on the concert stage when he was drafted into the Korean War. He refused combat, so he was given the job of stringing communication wire to the front lines. I believe the experience of seeing men shot and flopping around in their death agony did something to this sensitive soul. In any event, he had an awful time concentrating on his studies and, of course, he refused absolutely to touch a piano. It was characteristic of the ironical quality of his life that he eventually played Carnegie Hall in New York, but as the drummer for the rock group Joy of Cooking.

When I left San Diego for Berkeley in the summer of 1960, I was not alone. An entire intelligentsia departed in a swarm that included Wilson, Tonia Aminoff, Linda Brown, David Crawford (brother of artist Richard Crawford), John Geyer (entering graduate school), Gilberto Leal, Gordon Madison (now an attorney in San Diego, I have been told), Gordon McLure, and others. Most of this group was unable to meet the rigorous Berkeley entrance requirements for transfer students. To the best of my knowledge, of those among us who were admitted, only Aminoff, Brown, and I completed Berkeley bachelor's degrees. In the summer of 1961 Tonia Aminoff and I were married at a judge's home in Oakland in defiance of understandable objections raised by her parents. But we were temperamentally incompatible, so we separated fourteen months later and divorced soon after that before leaving for different Eastern graduate schools.

At Berkeley I was friends with musician Peter Berg and Mike Rossman, an eventual free speech movement leader who was already showing promise as a fine writer and political analyst. Rossman and I talked a great deal about the coming revolution on campus and in the larger society, and out of sheer silliness we went bowling at least once a week. I earned my living then as manager of the new Berkeley Student Union building, and in that capacity I met Senator Barry Goldwater, Pete Seeger, Aldous Huxley, Sonny McGee, Dean Rusk, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, chair designer Charles Eames, and many other interesting people. I also was the first to authorize setting up tables in the student union for leftist student groups to distribute their information alongside the Marine Corps recruiting tables.

I arrived at Berkeley the week Alfred Kroeber died. The news came within hours after I first walked through the new Kroeber Hall thinking what an honor it was for a professor to have an office building named for him. Even though I loved to take the culture area courses in the Berkeley anthropology department, the curriculum was mainly stiff and

theoretical, so I supplemented it with coursework in physics and art. Many years later, in 1976, Nelson Graburn would invite me to come and give a colloquium before the Berkeley anthropology department, and I admit to entering Kroeber Hall on that second occasion with exactly the same feeling of anxious anticipation as on the first. I also sat in the introductory sociology course that was taught by Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer. There were about seven hundred students enrolled in the course, which met in the auditorium of Wheeler Hall. One day Goffman was lecturing on the essential asymmetry of face-to-face interaction, and he summed up by saying that there are no occasions in which the interactants have equal status within the framework of the interaction. I spontaneously called out from near the back of the hall, "What about an introductory handshake between status equals?" Goffman stepped from behind the lectern and peered through the gloom of the huge auditorium: "Who said that?" I raised my hand and half stood up: "I did." "You'd better see me after class," he snapped and went back to lecturing.

After class he asked me to walk with him in the direction of Sather Gate. As we walked along, we had an interesting argument to which I contributed not a word. Goffman said, "You're right." Then he paused and seemed to be thinking hard about something. "No," he countered, "you're wrong." Pause. "No, you're right." After several such reversals he gave me an intense look of self-satisfaction and even some disdain and declared finally, "No. You are wrong." Then he turned and walked away without another word. We met face-to-face again three years later on Christmas afternoon at his sabbatical residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He gave no indication then of recalling our first encounter.

I went to the Department of Rural Sociology at Cornell because it offered a strong applied and international program. Kennedy was president, and there were some indications in that brief moment between the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War that the United States might develop sensible relations with the Third World. I thought there would be a shift in sociological theory and practice that would lead to the development of a new kind of sociology, truly international in scope, providing approaches to the problems of poverty, exploitation, oppression, and false consciousness. I then thought that sociologists should be working in partnership with Third World nations, as well as with marginal peoples in our own society, to create a research and intellectual base for leadership that would be neutral toward both Western capitalism and Soviet Marxism. I was disgusted with the Soviet Union and the

United States for manipulating Third World peoples into positions of dependency and disadvantage, using force where there is resistance to intimidate the nonaligned—in the Dominican Republic, Bay of Pigs. I was disappointed in anthropology for its retreat from these problems, which developed in regions that included its traditional field sites. And I was equally disappointed in mainstream sociology departments for continuing to focus primarily on the Western urban-industrial proletariat, a class that was about to be superseded by an unprecedented increase in the level of exploitation of Third World labor. I could not understand how these social-science disciplines could fail to use the excellent tools they themselves had invented (especially demography and ethnography) to analyze the shifting base of their own domains.

As I applied to graduate school, I was concerned that the social and economic theories I had studied were not strong enough to explain what was happening in the world. I would eventually read with fascination Roland Barthes's description of the colonial African soldier saluting the French flag in "Myth Today" and see in these early structuralist texts the outlines of a new sociology. But structuralism had not yet developed "consciousness-for-itself," and though I was ready for it, I was also unaware of it. After Talcott Parsons tried it, I became convinced that no individual acting alone could complete the theoretical synthesis necessary to recenter sociology on the general conditions of social existence as they had evolved since 1867. But I thought that each student of society should attempt to initiate this recentering in our selection of research topics and approaches. For my part I wanted to find a program where I could study movements of national liberation, ethnic solidarity, rural poverty, and the adaptations of Western institutions as we attempt to extend our global dominance beyond our historical moment. I was not disappointed in my choice of rural sociology.

Cornell has a superior organization for its graduate education. As Ph.D. students we majored in one field and carried two minors, external to the major, which were potentially major fields in their own right. For example, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology might minor in history and economics. I majored in rural sociology and minored in research methods and anthropology. The comprehensive exams were given by a committee of the student's choosing composed of members of the graduate faculty from the major and minor fields. These exams were, by policy, not restricted to material covered in courses or reading lists. We had to go into the exams ready for anything the committee might ask us, so the preparation for the exam was an introduction to authentic scholarship.

Even though there were no requirements except passing the entrance, comprehensive, and thesis exams, all graduate students took certain courses as a matter of peer tradition. We all took Robin Williams's social-theory seminar this way. We read Parsons's The Social System aloud in class, line by line, with interpretations following every second or third sentence. Frank Young (my teacher at San Diego) gave the course on theories of development in University of Chicago style: What is the central thesis of this book? What is its theoretical orientation? In addition to doing coursework in my major and minor fields, I ranged widely, taking seminars in the history and philosophy of science, civil engineering, archeology, industrial and labor relations, and literary criticism. I made friends on the faculty and with other graduate students; many of them, including Henry Guerlac and Edward Morris, remained among my dearest friends for life.

Juliet Flower entered the graduate program in comparative literature at the beginning of my second year. We had many friends in common, including Barry Alpher, Donald Brown, Robert Maxwell, and Phillip Silverman in anthropology, Barbara Sirota in English, Alan Nagel in comparative literature, Leslie Burlingame in history, and Frances Dahlberg in sociology. I was powerfully attracted to Juliet, both physically and for her evident mental abilities and flawless character. We immediately began our collaboration, which continues to this day. I worked with her on a poem by Victor Hugo; she worked with me on the calculation of a tau rank-order correlation coefficient from Kendall's original paper. "If it is written even partially in words," she said, "we can understand it by reading." I was touched by such courage and innocence and proposed marriage. We were married in Lajas, Puerto Rico, on July 25, 1965, and from that moment I have loved her and our children as much as life itself.

I am not happy "making choices," a locution that is a code for fitting human life into bureaucratic and other institutional forms rather than vice versa. I thought there should never have to be a choice between, for example, science and humanism, Juliet's studies and my own, pure and applied sociology, or career and children. Instead of either/or , I always wanted both/and , not as a matter of indecision or greed but as a matter of commitment to wholeness and understanding. So after the original decision, the one all American males must make between sports and scholarship, I refused most other choices in my life, and I admit that this refusal has led today to some odd accommodations: airplane commuting, $300-a-month telephone bills, intimacy by appointment, too much high-speed

driving, a life my colleague Paul Craig has labeled a masterpiece of organization. But by refusing the either/or , I have been able to continue to have fun, sometimes in excess. I have not always been able to "stay in line," however, and I am afraid that I sometimes irritate those who do.

At about the midpoint of my graduate studies at Cornell there was a closed conference at Johns Hopkins University, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy." It was attended by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and many others. I do not think it possible to overestimate the importance of this meeting even, or especially, for those of us who were not invited. I was attracted to structuralism because it proffered a totalizing comprehension of social life that matched my own personal predispositions. The structural explication of binary oppositions, as best exemplified in Roman Jakobson's linguistics or Claude Lévi-Strauss's study of myth, potentially lifts sociology out of its complicitous relationship with conventional morality and established social forms. By transcending and describing the oppositions that give order and meaning to language and life, structuralism was more than a way of doing social science. The structural enterprise paralleled the urgent need to reconstruct the integrity of the human self from the fragments of modern experience, not by looking backward or by assertion, as was occurring in the realms of religion and politics, but by careful scholarship and analysis. I would eventually find in the semiotic idea of the sign an original synthesis of fact, idea , and interpretation , the element from which all of social life is constructed. This idea of the sign would resolve for me some of the antinomies of modern sociology: the division between macro and micro studies, qualitative and quantitative methods, theory and application. But by the time that happened, I had already left the field.

The idea for a book on studying tourism came to me about halfway through my graduate studies when I was in southwestern Puerto Rico doing research on farm structure in some poor villages. I could not help wondering, What is the main form of North-South interaction, and what is really happening here of potential long-range importance? My attention would vacillate between the impoverished farmers in my sample and the glittering high-rise resort hotels on the beaches. My intuition was strong that some of the secrets of global intercultural relations and change lay locked up in a hidden connection between peasant agriculture and modern mass tourism. When I returned to Cornell, I proposed a study of Third World tourism as a dissertation topic, but my commit-

tee rejected it as too cumbersome. So, following my usual perverse practice when confronted with denial, I came up with a second proposal, as unwieldy as the first, to do a comparative structural analysis of social conditions in forty-eight states. I completed the data gathering, analysis, and writing in less than a year and won the Dissertation Award of the American Rural Sociological Society. Juliet and Goffman were angry with me for compromising on the dissertation topic. I was corresponding with Goffman, and we met when we could. He told me over lunch in a café near the University of Pennsylvania, "Any idiot can do an empirical dissertation. Back at Chicago, if we had someone who could do an empirical dissertation in less than a year, we wouldn't let them do it. We made them do ethnography and left the empirical stuff to the people who were actually challenged by it." I did not share Goffman's opinion that ethnography always and inevitably requires more rigor than research involving tests of hypotheses, nor did I argue the point with him. I think he was secretly pleased that I could do regression analysis.

Soon after my dissertation defense Juliet and I left for Europe. I was as excited to see Paris as anyone since Walter Benjamin, and I felt immediately at home there. I wrote a postcard to my friends at Cornell: "It is a great place to live but I would not want to visit here." In the United States I had real difficulty explaining my interest in rural sociology, often encountering virulent anti-intellectual stereotyping unfortunately even among my most intellectual acquaintances. "Rural sociology—what do you do, count cows? Ha ha." Not so among the French. My first Parisian cab driver said, "Rural sociology—formidable . Today there is nothing more exciting or important than trying to understand the Third World." My sentiment exactly.

Juliet studied with Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure, and I attended Lévi-Strauss's class on myth at the College de France in the afternoons after my French lessons at the Alliance Française in the mornings. Lévi-Strauss's lectures often exceeded my limited grasp of the language, but my difficulties were small compared to those of the blue-clad scholars from the People's Republic of China who sat to my right in the same row. It was in these courses, from Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, that we heard of semiotics for the first time as a living science, that is, as something other than a curiosity of intellectual history that pops up every three hundred years. Ironically, it was the French philosopher Derrida who introduced us to the writings of the American philosopher Charles Peirce, initiating our semiotic studies in earnest.

We left France at the end of the winter quarter and studied briefly in Zurich, but we hastily returned to Paris for the occupation of the Sorbonne and the events of May 1968. I can still give precise instructions on how, in the heat of fighting, to transform a street barricade from a defensive position into a serious offensive weapon. Some bittersweet images from that revolutionary moment (like the wall graffiti, "my alienation stops where your alienation begins") remain fixed in mind. The faculty delighted the assembled revolutionary students when, after hours of planning for the occupation of virtually every major institution in Paris from the stock exchange to the opera, the professors stood up and wearily announced that they would occupy their own offices. When the French government "forces of order" finally got the upper hand in the fighting and began their cleanup, Juliet and I made the grand tour of student-worker revolutions in Berlin, Bologna, and Istanbul. We tried to get into Czechoslovakia and Greece, where the most interesting fights were taking place, but we were denied entry. We were, however, welcomed as nonaligned American student hitchhikers in Yugoslavia as well as in Bulgaria, where we were provided friendly transit through some rural areas by a twenty-vehicle convoy of the Soviet army.

I thoroughly enjoyed my rides with Bulgarian truck drivers, who were able to give clear explanations of the difference between Eastern European socialism and Western capitalism, at least from their perspective. Yes, they owned their own trucks and carried loads for hire, establishing their own rates and routes. Their trucks cost them about five years of wages at a regular, unskilled job, and they had to pay in cash. Usually they lived at home with their mothers for about seven years while saving most of their wages to buy a truck. In short, as near as I could figure it, the main difference between socialism and capitalism, from the standpoint of a Bulgarian truck driver, was that under socialism mothers were used as a substitute for bank credit. I told them that the same was true for the underclasses in the United States.

According to an agreement worked out in advance, we returned from Europe in the summer of 1968 to my first postdoctoral academic appointment. I was senior research associate at the Cornell Center for International Studies and lecturer in rural sociology at a salary of twelve thousand dollars a year. Under the direction of William Foote Whyte, William Friedland, Frank Young, and Douglas Ashford (in the government department) I started the Macrosocial Accounting Project at Cornell, a data bank and methodology for measuring social conditions at the community level in Third World countries.

In the spring of 1969 the black students at Cornell armed themselves and occupied the student union building, issuing a series of demands for the establishment of an Afro-American studies program. The administration yielded to many of the demands, but the faculty refused to ratify the agreement between the black students and the administration. Immediately, virtually the entire student body sided with the black students and occupied several key campus buildings, closed the university, and threatened to burn it down unless the original agreement was ratified by the faculty. Although I was nominally on the staff, my sentiments were on the side of the students, and Juliet and I were with about eight thousand infuriated demonstrators in the gymnasium at the moment of the deadline when Professor Robert Asher of the anthropology department entered the hall and asked for "a few more hours." He told us that he had been with the faculty and that they were meeting continuously and were about to come to a decision he thought would be agreeable to the black students and their supporters. I knew Asher because he had been on my graduate committee, but few others did. He did not introduce himself, and he spoke for only about one minute; but his sincerity was evident, and there is no doubt in my mind that in that minute he prevented the certain torching of Cornell University. I do not know if Asher was acting on behalf of his colleagues or on his own. Either way, it took enormous courage to do what he did.

I was still "under thirty" and very restless. Juliet was finishing her Ph.D. It was highly unlikely that we could both find appropriate positions at Cornell, and no one should have to commute to or from Ithaca, New York. We agreed that if Juliet could find a faculty position in Boston or Philadelphia, I would quit Cornell and follow, even without prospects. Our reasoning was that she could begin her career, and I could write The Tourist, and that I might pursue postdoctoral studies in Boston with Noam Chomsky or in Philadelphia, my first choice, with Erving Goffman. And that is just the way it worked out. Almost. Juliet was appointed assistant professor of French at Haverford College, on the Philadelphia main line. So at the end of one year I quit Cornell, and we moved.

From my twelfth year on, the month of August 1969 has been the only time I was ever unemployed. I have quit several times and desired nothing more than to be unemployed, but have never been so honored. It also happens that during the month of my unemployment, while doing nothing, I made about five thousand dollars, a sum that is difficult for me to duplicate even in today's inflated currency. On September

3 or 4, I walked into the Temple University sociology department asking to teach a section of the introductory course for pocket money; I was offered, on the spot, an assistant professorship. When in a somewhat bewildered state I accepted, I was told that the university owed me two months back pay since technically I was hired as of July 1. This windfall, combined with six weeks of severance pay from Cornell (one month earned vacation plus two weeks of unused sick leave), made a goodly sum. Experience has convinced me that the reason I have little money is because I work so hard, and if I was only smart enough to stop working again, I would surely be rich. The richest people I have met do not work, and the poorest landless agricultural laborers are the hardest workers I know.

At Temple I eventually took over the required courses in graduate theory (classical and modern) from Roscoe Hinkle, who was about to return to Ohio State University. I taught these courses using close-reading methods I learned in literature seminars at Cornell. The students read theoretical texts by Durkheim, Simmel, Marx, Mead, and so on, usually four a semester, as well as selected secondary comments, reviews, and extended analyses of the original texts. Their assignment for each of the original thinkers was to show exactly how a particular secondary comment (of their own choosing) was in error in its evaluation or appraisal of the original text, using that text as evidence. The assignment worked at several levels, from simple misreadings and errors in accounting for facts to total failure on the part of the critic to understand the original theory. The students in all cases used this assignment to find the limits of their own critical abilities, learned basic theory seemingly by accident, covered much of the secondary literature, and developed considerable self-confidence in the process. The seminar often had more than fifty graduate students in it, drawn from all the social-science disciplines and professional schools on campus. Several students began or finished their Ph.D. work with me at Temple and went on to become professors: Grace Chao Ayang, Edward Armstrong, Janet Connolly, Glenn Jacobs, Patrick Nolan, and Deborah Schiffrin. In the early 1970s I taught a seminar in ethnomethodology and semiotics, the first such course given anywhere, I believe.

On arrival in Philadelphia I took Goffman's seminar in social organization at Penn, as planned, sitting in the course with my friend Robert Maxwell, also a postdoctoral student. In addition, I was hired by Paul Hare to work as senior research associate in the Haverford College Center for Peace Research, where I helped write training manuals for

demonstration marshalls and wrote my monograph A Dramaturgical Analysis of 146 Protest Demonstrations . All this may sound like a fast and smooth beginning, but it was not. I was very fond of several of my junior colleagues at Temple, including Mark Hutter, Margaret Zahn, Patrick Luck, Richard Juliani, and Kenneth Reichstein, but I noticed right away that it was the less likable ones who were being advanced in the department. Where did I fit into this system, I wondered. Then, as soon as Juliet's departmental chairman at Haverford heard that I was to be employed, he fired her, effective at the end of her first year, commenting to me, "That is simply too much money for a young couple to have," and "I hear there may be something part-time for her at Beaver College." My reaction was irrational from an economic standpoint, but it satisfied my passions: I resigned my Temple appointment, also effective at the end of the first year. I still had not been able to begin writing The Tourist, and I had not yet developed a taste for dealing with the bureaucrats, weightless liberals, and small-time real-estate speculators who also happen to be faculty members and administrators in American universities.

Looking forward to freedom from institutional twaddle, we decided it was a great time to have a baby. So we finished what we thought was our first and last year as professors, methodically saving one of our paychecks each month, bought tickets on the SS France and moved to Paris. The war in Vietnam seemed as though it would never end, and we wanted our baby to have an option for non–United States citizenship. We were also concerned that we were among the "unindicted coconspirators" in the Harrisburg trial of the Berrigan brothers. The United States government had indicted the Berrigans and several other friends of ours for having "conspired to kidnap Henry Kissinger." Paris was the only place, we thought, to be unemployed and pregnant, inclined toward rural sociology and semiotics, and possibly fugitives.

Everything worked out as we had planned, except the unemployed part. Our son Daniel got his French citizenship in the American Hospital in Paris. I finished the first draft of The Tourist and gave speeches on guerrilla strategy at antiwar teach-ins. But immediately on my arrival I was contacted by the American College to teach their sociology courses. Their regular professor had suddenly fallen ill. I accepted.

When the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail and failed to stop the southward flow of supplies, I knew the war would soon end. I also knew that the United States government would take revenge on the universities by initiating an academic repres-

sion that would last at least a decade or until the coalition that had formed between intellectuals, Western social scientists, Third World peoples, and marginal domestic groups was broken. I felt directly and personally threatened and wanted desperately to return to the United States. I wanted a position in a strong, research-oriented agricultural university where I might monitor, up close, efforts to destroy recently hard-won knowledge about social and cultural development. I was even able to imagine in advance the precise form that the repression would take, namely, the redefinition of development in entirely business, economic, and technical terms, leaving out any serious consideration of culture or social consciousness except as constraints to be overcome. But at that moment there were no such academic positions to be found, certainly not for the generation of 1968. In fact, there were no jobs, period.

Then with uncannily accurate timing came a letter from Jack V. Buerkle, chairman of the sociology department at Temple. The letter explained that he and the dean had eventually decided to refuse to accept my resignation, that they had extended to me a one-year leave of absence without pay, and that they were expecting me to return and resume teaching the theory courses in September. There is something structurally peculiar about universities that makes traditional lines of authority something of a joke, and people who seek power within universities are often either deluded careerists or really serious political conservatives. But it has been my good fortune to serve under several department chairpersons and academic administrators who are also excellent and insightful, albeit low-key, human beings. Olaf Larsen at Cornell, Jack Buerkle at Temple, and Orville Thompson at Davis are among the best. I was, and am, genuinely grateful for Buerkle's help at that crucial moment. We returned to Philadelphia as requested.

The next four years were characterized by the usual academic combination of institutional success and personal poverty. I sent out my first papers for publication on my own: an empirical analysis of the causes of poverty (based on my dissertation) and a semiotically informed ethnographic report on an aspect of face-to-face interaction. Economic Development and Cultural Change sent back the usual petty and indecisive quasi-acceptance, but Thomas A. Sebeok, editor in chief of Semiotica, was unequivocal in his positive response. He made me want to publish and had an important effect on the form and direction of my writing that extends to this day. With fine teaching evaluations and acceptances coming in from American Journal of Sociology, Human Organization,

and elsewhere, the annual renewal notes on my assistant professor's contract by the senior faculty were always unanimous. At the same time we were so poor that we could not afford to buy blankets for our bed or stay in hotels at professional meetings. My field notes were stacked in cardboard boxes around our apartment. We survived by my moonlighting at Rutgers against the expressed will of my dean at Temple and by contract research at Holmesburg Prison. The Law Enforcement Assistance Agency wanted to know why the inmates had stabbed the warden and assistant warden to death with sharpened screwdrivers. The inmates readily admitted their crime and said it was for political reasons and to dramatize their situation. Marge Zahn, Bob Kleiner, and I convinced the LEAA that an ethnographic report on living conditions might provide a more detailed understanding of the problem. So for a year, once or twice a week, I went unprotected into the prison population, including murderers and rapists, to feed my family. My situation was precisely that of all of the guards and most of the professional criminals in lockup: We all faced down each other to get a living. Actually, I was safer on my own than if I had enjoyed the protection of the guard. The custodial staff hated my presence, so I had to depend entirely on my friends among the inmates, which is the first thing both prisoners and ethnographers must learn in order to have a chance at survival.

In the course of my life I have driven across the United States from coast to coast a total of fourteen times, often taking about a month to make the trip, staying on back roads. Once, though, I drove from San Francisco to Ithaca, New York, in three days, unassisted. Most of those trips were made during the summers in the gas crisis years, 1971 to 1975. As soon as school was out in the spring, we would load our car full of books, field data, and notes, drive to Juliet's family home in the San Francisco Bay area, stay for the summer, and drive back to Philadelphia at the end of August, sometimes stopping at the national sociology meetings on the way. I began making observations for my current project on "American Mythologies" during those annual migrations. I am just now old enough to know what a slow worker I really am, that a project usually takes me about ten years from start to finish.

I did most of my writing in those years in Juliet's parents' garage on a table between the washing machine and the ironing board. Juliet's mother, Patricia Flower, was an extraordinary human being with acute insight into character, a gift she freely shared, getting herself into trouble with those among us nicely socialized to overlook all the little positive and negative details of thought and behavior. But I always looked

forward to my conversations with her, and I miss them now. She was my best friend. The two traits I admire most are not often found together in the same person: critical insight that cuts to the heart, and love and acceptance of everything that is human. Patricia Flower had both those qualities in as great a measure as I have witnessed in anyone, although Goffman was a close second.

I pretend to no expertise when it comes to raising children. I fashioned a few crude principles at the beginning, focusing mainly on language, and held to them. We read to our children for at least an hour every night starting from when they were only a few months old. (And they still read, beg to read, for at least an hour every night, usually much longer.) I also made it my unwavering practice to discuss and explain everything with them from the moment of their birth, exactly as if they were an adult companion, even though that practice occasionally drew concerned stares from strangers in public places. And from the first utterance, we never let a mispronunciation or grammatical error go uncorrected. Interestingly, language is not something a very young child takes personally, and this model of precision and early adult competency extended itself easily and naturally into every other area of my children's lives (except, of course, sports). Today, at ages eleven and fourteen, Jason and Daniel are my traveling companions of first choice and my favorite conversation partners, as well as critical colleagues and the best audience around for a bawdy joke (and the best tellers). They have honored me with unforced respect, which far exceeds reasonable expectation, and from the moment of their conception have given me nothing but the greatest pleasure.

In 1973 and 1974 Goffman was sending my completed manuscript of The Tourist around to his contacts to help me find a publisher. I believe his effort was genuine, but he simply had no luck. Or, his contacts were enjoying rejecting my manuscript, something they might have wanted to do to Goffman himself but were afraid. After a year he gave it back to me, saying he was sorry but I was on my own. I got contract offers, including substantial cash advances, by return mail from both Schocken Books and the Johns Hopkins University Press. The Tourist remains in print to this day, selling as well now as in its first year, but only recently have sociologists begun to read it. In the first few years it seems to have been read mainly by architects, artists, and anthropologists, and it made many new friends for me in those fields. I was especially lucky to have met the great critic of modern architecture, Donald Appleyard, through The Tourist and to have many interesting and thor-

oughly enjoyable conversations with him before his untimely death in the early 1980s.

In the mid-1970s sociology seemed to be falling apart, mentally and physically. The University of Pennsylvania turned off the electricity at the Center for Urban Ethnography. I worried that if Goffman, William Labov, and Del Hymes could not keep their workshop open, who could? My closest ally among the senior faculty at Temple, Bruce Mayhew, resigned. One night Paul Hare dropped by. Recently divorced, he had a French friend with him and was as bright-eyed as a kid. He told me he was leaving for South Africa to head the sociology department at a university there. He took from his jacket pocket an associate professor's contract and a one-way ticket to Johannesburg, which he said were mine. All I had to do was sign them. I said something impolite like "You fucking maniac—what do I want to go to South Africa for?" Hare was dignified. "Because the war is over here. Because we need you. Because South Africa is where the next great revolution in human relations is going to take place. Because it is your chance to help make history." I did not even glance at Juliet as I handed Paul back his offer. My second son, Jason, was soon to be born, and I made one of those "choices." As it happened, that was my last chance to have a career in sociology.

For several years my friend Isao Fujimoto and a few others had been struggling with some success on the West Coast to bring human values into agricultural research at the University of California, Davis, and to establish a focus on food as well as commodities, on workers as well as machines, and on the needs of family farmers and rural ethnic groups as well as major agribusiness corporations. One day in 1974 Fujimoto called me up. "Could you come out and lend a hand?" I have always regarded Isao Fujimoto as one of America's living national treasures. "Certainly," I said. When I arrived, I found the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences under Orville Thompson to be a structuralist's dream. It had a distinguished design group (now a separate department), a museum of Third World art, and subprograms in Asian American and Native American studies, as well as the community development group, of which Fujimoto and I were part.

Davis would eventually turn out to be an ideal setting for Juliet and me to write The Time of the Sign, a series of critical and theoretical essays designed for the social sciences and the humanities but without any specific disciplinary framework. Applied behavioral sciences was explicitly interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, in its original concep-

tion, and none of the discipline-based humanities or social-science departments had sufficient force or desire to co-opt our little semiotic revolution. We wanted to show that minds can exist outside of institutional categories and that many important questions in the social sciences and the humanities are not being asked from within the disciplines. In fact, a new life and career sprung forth from The Time of the Sign, as well as a new network of friends, including Thomas and Jean Sebeok, John Deely and Brooke Williams, Paul Bouissac, Paolo Fabbri, Umberto Eco, Jonathan Culler and Cynthia Chase, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhaus, Louis Marin, Tony Wilden, Julia Palacios and Daniel Pedrero, Susan Buck Morss, and many others. In 1985 I was elected United States representative to the International Semiotic Studies Association. Juliet was called into a tenure position in comparative literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches contemporary critical theory, something that was simply not possible at Davis. (Her thousand-mile-a-week commute actually brought enormous relief from the almost complete failure of her Davis colleagues to understand her work.) We are co-executive editors of the American Journal of Semiotics . Separated geographically we continue to collaborate. Ironically, after a ten-year hiatus, The Time of the Sign has begun to establish a link back to sociology, making new friends for us in that field, including Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Alain Cohen, Fred Davis, and Harold Garfinkel. (Of course, there were some friends in sociology who remained constant throughout, notably Erving Goffman and Bennett Berger.)

During most of this decade of intense semiotic activity that has carried us to many interesting parts of the world, I have served as chairman of graduate studies in community development at Davis. In this capacity I have honestly tried to create some new institutional arrangements for whole human beings. In its original conception, at Davis, community development meant research on material conditions and class relations, work, industry and agriculture, and the effect of all of these on community life. It meant communication and understanding (and failures of understanding) between ethnic groups at the community level. It meant understanding language, art, architecture, music, games, ceremony, and ritual, all that makes community life interesting, even possible. Finally, it meant advanced critical evaluation of larger social issues, nuclear technology and politics, gender relations, the environment, poverty, and inequality. In short, the program was originally designed around the production of knowledge that empowers people to create their own collective des-

tiny. After we were able to recruit Marc Pilisuk from Berkeley, we had some of the best faculty available for these purposes.

I wrote Lévi-Strauss about the promise of the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences at Davis shortly after my arrival in 1976. He wrote back saying that he was fascinated and he would certainly visit if he ever left France. Much to my surprise, he actually did visit in the winter of 1985 to receive an important honor from the university. We had a beer in the Davis faculty club. I told him about the design group, the museum, Indian art, studies of the structure of agriculture, ethnic groups, critical theory, and semiotics. What about them? The original pieces continue to exist, I explained, but, after the fashion of all institutional "progress," not together, not as a structural totality. Lévi-Strauss raised one eyebrow and looked down at the table.