Chapter Eighteen—
From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo

Pierre L. van den Berghe

This essay is an attempt at intellectual autobiography. Why did I become an academic and a social scientist? How has my thinking evolved, and in response to which events? How have my politics influenced my scholarship? In sociological jargon, the dependent variable is myself as a thinking animal; the independent variables can perhaps be broken down into two sets: general conditions of the social milieu and my place in it, and specific influences of individuals. I will interweave these two themes into a loose chronological account.

A confession of class origins is probably the first order of business in a sociological autobiography. They range, in my case, from rich peasants to the nobility, if I trace back four or more generations, but my grandparents and parents had comfortably settled into what might be called the intellectual and professional bourgeoisie. On my father's side all the males for three generations were physicians. My paternal grandfather was a general practitioner in the large provincial city of Ghent, Belgium, and married the rather homely daughter of a Flemish country doctor. He inherited his practice from his father, and thanks to the considerable amount of wealth brought by my grandmother's dowry and inheritance (she came from a rather rustic but rich peasant family with sizable land holdings), he enjoyed the comfortable life of a provincial bourgeois. After World War I the two horses, the carriages, and the coachmen were replaced by a custom-made Panhard automobile, but the live-in cook and maid, who had been with them for half a century,

were permanent fixtures of the family scene, a provincial version of "Upstairs, Downstairs."

Staunchly conservative in politics, conventional in religion, puritanical in sex, and austere in life-style (except for culinary indulgence), my grandparents, Roman Catholics, were a living refutation of the Protestant ethic. From my paternal grandmother, a rather uncultured but strong-willed and highly intelligent woman, I learned the virtues of amoral familism. Fiercely defensive of her brood and her assets, she idolized my father in smotheringly Jewish mother–style, and she spoiled me shamelessly. From my grandfather I learned the meaning of fanatical zeal. He was a homeopath, and his medical sectarianism dominated his existence much more than his religion, which was a matter of social convention rather than conviction. The outside world to him was a vast conspiracy of allopaths against homeopathic physicians and pharmacists.

My father rebelled against his social milieu. He studied medicine to appease my grandfather but quickly turned to medical research (in tropical parasitology), moved to Brussels to escape the stifling adulation of his mother, and became a cosmopolite. He married a Frenchwoman, a somewhat eccentric choice from the perspective of his parents; went to the United States on a postdoctoral fellowship; did research in the then Belgian Congo (where I was born on January 30, 1933, the day the little Austrian lance corporal became Reich chancellor, an early lesson about the difference between correlation and causality); taught tropical medicine at Antwerp; founded and directed a research institute in the Congo; and retired as a gentleman farmer in Kenya. He was an egotistical and unstable person of many talents and great personal charm. I idolized him during my childhood, hated him during my adolescence, and ignored him in adulthood. His influence on me was considerable: I found his elitism, his contempt of authority and convention, his religious agnosticism, and his amiable cynicism engaging, although I resented his chaotic, undisciplined, self-indulgent life as a philandering husband and episodic father. My parents were divorced, after twenty years of marriage and five or six years of stormy conflict, when I was eighteen, my brother thirteen, and my sister six.

The maternal side of my family was anchored in Paris, where my grandfather, Maurice Caullery, an eminent biologist, taught at the Sorbonne and was president of the French Academy of Sciences as well as a fellow of the British Royal Society. He married a woman of striking

beauty, great aristocratic pedigree, and artistic temperament but moderate intelligence. A more mismatched couple is difficult to conceive: she, the tall, slender, artistically sensitive, flighty, elegant socialite; he, the short, ill-dressed, curt, reclusive, absent-minded professor. They seemed to play in a respectable, high-society version of The Blue Angel . Henpecked at home, my grandfather withdrew into his scientific shell, taking refuge in his study, where a cloud of acrid smoke from Gauloise cigarettes kept my grandmother at bay. My grandmother exposed me to a strong dose of social snobbery and introduced me to a gallery of her colorful ancestors, including a cavalry general who took part in Napoleon III's Mexican misadventure in support of Maximilian, a bohemian painter who supported the 1871 Paris Commune (and was thus the red sheep in the family), and a pride of nine brothers who cracked the whip over their slaves in Haiti and were all killed the same day in the revolution of 1791.

My maternal grandfather, whom I am told I resemble in character, was a major influence. A stern, emotionally reticent and distant figure, he inspired instant respect in his intimates and sheer terror in his students. Impatient of anything but excellence, he exacted optimal performance (as, for instance, when he taught me to read Greek, expecting me by the end of summer vacation to translate Xenophon on sight). He punished shortcomings by disdainful withdrawal of interest in one's fate. All four of his children (my mother, her brother, and her two sisters) suffered from living in the shadow of his imposing intellect; but, perhaps sensing our affinities, he was fond of me in his gruff way, and I worshipped him. I particularly enjoyed his biting anticlericalism, a wonderful counterpoint to my Jesuit education, and his intellectual disdain for the merely rich and powerful. Few of his contemporaries found grace in his eyes. Most, including the leading political figures of the day, elicited his peremptory judgment, "C'est un imbécile ." The epitome of the rationalist, and a positivist in the grand nineteenth-century style, my grandfather initiated me into biology and taught me what science was all about. That this austere, shabby, physically unprepossessing, soft-spoken, unsociable, taciturn figure could so dominate his world by sheer strength of intellect was an early lesson in the superiority of mind over matter.

My mother (who is still alive) combined the physical beauty and artistic sensibilities of my grandmother and many of the moral qualities of my grandfather; I owe her much in the field of art appreciation (especially painting). What she also taught me was internal discipline.

My whole family expected me to excel, especially in school. But it was my mother who, by monitoring my homework, scrutinizing my report cards, supervising my reading, and taking me to museums actually saw to it that I did. My father and maternal grandfather, each in his own way, provided models; my mother gave me the drive.

In that endeavor she was firmly supported by the Jesuit fathers, who inflicted on me seven years of grueling intellectual discipline. Of my Jesuit secondary education I can only say that I hated almost every minute of it and that I shall be eternally grateful for the experience. Jesuits are famous for producing well-trained intellectual mavericks. The contradiction of the Jesuit system is that its casuistry encourages critical, disciplined thinking but that its theology expects blind faith. Like many, I took in the training and rejected its moral and religious content. By age twelve I was an atheist and a communist, having stumbled onto a secular theology similar in its dialectic to that of the good fathers. Two of my teachers were particularly influential, one a jovial, rotund bon vivant and superb pedagogue, Father Bribosia; the other a dry, austere martinet, but with a razor-sharp mind and a superlative maître à penser , Father De Wolf (I never knew their first names).

Three formative experiences in my upbringing remain to be mentioned because collectively they greatly influenced my choice of academic specialty. They are the so-called language problem of Belgium, World War II and life under Nazi occupation, and my colonial experience in the Congo. The Belgian language problem was my first exposure to ethnicity as well as class conflict; the two are intertwined in Belgium and were even more so in my youth than they are now. Inevitably French was our exclusive home language, first, because my mother was Parisian and did not speak a word of Dutch, and second, because my father, although raised in a Flemish city and entirely of Flemish descent, belonged to a bourgeois family that had become gallicized in the nineteenth century. Increasingly since the early nineteenth century the bourgeoisie of Flanders came to use French as a prestige language (much as the Russian aristocracy had before the Bolshevik revolution) and thus created a language barrier between itself and the lower classes. Language use thus became a marker of class snobbery and a continual source of conflict and humiliation. I learned early that language was not only a means of communication but also an idiom of exclusion and domination.

In Brussels that fact was not so obvious since French dominated the public life of the capital. Even there, however, there were French- and

Dutch-medium schools, which roughly corresponded to bourgeois and working-class schools. Even within the French-medium schools (which, naturally, I attended), it was clear that the best pupils also spoke the best French and the worst Dutch, so much so that having low marks in the compulsory Dutch course was a badge of high class status.

In a Flemish city like Ghent the invidiousness of language use was even more glaring. There every bourgeois household exhibited linguistic schizophrenia: French was spoken in the living room, Flemish in the kitchen—a vertical microcosm of the country at large. My grandparents, for example, were bilingual but never spoke Flemish with each other, with any member of the family, or with their class equals. Flemish was the language they spoke to menials—servants, tenant farmers, tradesmen, craftsmen, the vast assemblage they collectively called "les gens du peuple ." Since I belonged to the privileged group, I readily adopted the linguistic snobbery of the francophone, all the more so as these attitudes were strongly reinforced by those on the maternal side of my family, who indeed looked down on all Belgians as denizens of a petit pays , not of a grande nation . Flemish was considered an earthy, peasant dialect, well suited to the telling of scatological jokes (my grandmother's favorites, much as she was shocked by sexual jokes); but culture could only be carried through the vehicle of French.

World War II was perhaps my first lesson in cultural relativism. The ethnic table was turned on me. I was seven years old when "our war" first started, that is, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Low Countries and France on May 10, 1940. For me, the war began as a lark. Woken at 6 A.M. by the bombs of the Luftwaffe over Brussels, our family piled into our 1938 Chevrolet and headed south. We stopped at my grandparents' in Paris, then near Bordeaux, and finally had to turn back at the Spanish border, which we were unable to cross. The exodus, as we called it, meant school vacation two months ahead of schedule and a lot of excitement and adventure, like sleeping in barn lofts and playing paratrooper in vineyards.

Soon, however, our return to Brussels made it clear that we were a conquered people. That meant little to eat; a curfew; censored school books; newspapers full of lies; no gasoline (we kept our car hidden in our garage for fear it would be requisitioned); slow travel in overcrowded trains; an occasional bombing; and the presence of foreign troops, even in our homes. (We were forced to billet German officers, but I was strictly forbidden by my parents to fraternize with the enemy, despite an occasional tantalizing offer of chocolate from a homesick

young father.) We were told that Paris, far from being the heart of Western civilization, was the rotten core of a decadent society, and that the Flemish, though one notch below the Herrenvolk, were far closer to the Aryan ideal than the effete Walloons or French.

We had several brushes with real physical danger, as when we sheltered a Hungarian Jewish colleague of my father; when my maternal grandfather was arrested and detained as a hostage, subject to execution in reprisal against resistance killings of Germans (the price of prominence); and when my father discovered that his laboratory in Antwerp had been converted by his assistant into an underground arsenal. The assistant, one of those psychopaths turned into heroes by the war, particularly relished telling me stories of his favorite wartime assignment—slitting the throats of prostitutes suspected of being Gestapo informers. I am sure that but for an accident of birth he would have worked just as enthusiastically for the other side.

Although my family was solidly anti-German and freely exchanged the latest anti-Nazi jokes, heroism was not in the family style. In fact it was regarded with some suspicion and distaste. The nearest thing to a hero my family produced was a third cousin who later volunteered in the Belgian paratrooper battalion during the Korean War and returned much decorated for bravery. He became a plantation overseer in the Congo, where he was tried for shooting workers in the legs with a .22-caliber rifle to encourage productivity; he briefly followed his true vocation when he rose to be chief of police for Moise Tshombe during the Katanga secession episode, meeting an untimely and undoubtedly disagreeable death at the hands of his Congolese captors. My almost exact contemporary, he was always presented to me as a negative role model, "un gosse qui a mal tourné parce que sa mère ne s'est pas assez occupée de lui" ("a kid who turned out badly because his mother neglected him").

That story brings me to my colonial experience in the then Belgian Congo. Although I was born there, I was brought to Europe as a ten-month-old infant, and I only returned in 1948, at age fifteen, to spend my last two years of high school. It is difficult to convey the excitement of an African adventure for an adolescent. Undoubtedly those two years were among the most formative of my life and played a determining role in my vocation as a social scientist. I was privileged, through my father's institute (IRSAC, Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale), to see anthropologists like Jacques Maquet at work among the Tuzi of Rwanda, to follow ethologists on the tracks of mountain

gorillas on the shores of Lake Kivu, to visit national parks a quarter century before the onslaught of mass tourism, to experience human cultural diversity in its most contrasting forms, and, especially, to be a participant observer in a colonial system of naked domination and exploitation, which was already doomed but did not yet know it. In 1950, just ten years before Zaire's independence, colonialism still seemed an unshakable system destined to last at least another century. The lessons of India, Indonesia, and Indochina had not even begun to sink in.

As I am trying to recapture my reactions to colonialism, I realize that colonial Congolese society was a considerable intellectual stimulant. Unlike many colonials, I was not taken in by the paternalistic ideology of the mission civilisatrice, nor did I share racial stereotypes of black inferiority. In the intellectual climate of IRSAC liberalism and cultural relativism were de rigueur and criticism of the colonial regime was a constant theme of conversation. That the regime rested on naked coercion was also glaringly obvious (this undoubtedly reinforced my anarchistic conviction that all governments were coercive). Blacks never seemed dumb or lazy to me. Indeed I was quick to observe how cunning they were in using the tactics of the weak (which were also the tactics I was using against teachers and other "hostile" adults and which I was later to use to good effect while a private in the army): passive resistance, evasion, sabotage, deception, malingering, deliberate misunderstandings, and the like. Colonialism (slavery, imprisonment, the military, and other social systems where the ideological veneer is thin) vividly exposes social structure and is thus an excellent training ground for social scientists. Tyrannical societies often produce first-class social scientists and social novelists: South Africa, Poland, and Russia come to mind.

At the same time as the sinews of Congolese society lay bare to my view, I was leading a comfortable and very pleasant existence based on unearned privilege. I would be less than candid if I said that it bothered me (as it would a decade later when I spent two years doing research on race relations in South Africa). If anything, I found racial prejudice an amusing form of mental aberration. I still remember how my brother came home from school one day having to copy a hundred times, as punishment for slackness, "If I have white skin, I must work, otherwise I am a white nigger." This motto reflected the mentality of the Catholic clergy, supposedly one of the liberal sectors of colonial opinion. (Naturally we attended a European school. There was a storm of protest when the Jesuits belatedly decided to start admitting "mulattoes" who had been legally recognized by their white fathers.)

After I finished high school in the Congo, my father thought it would be a good idea to send me to the United States for university studies, and he picked Stanford University. He also took the opportunity to dump my mother and sister in California in anticipation of divorce. Stanford in the early 1950s was not a major university; "the farm," as it was affectionately (not derisively) called, deserved its nickname. It was a dude ranch for the anti-intellectual brats of the West Coast plutocracy. After a Jesuit education Stanford was an academically undemanding Garden of Eden. I happily went horseback riding, swimming, and girl chasing (a result of my first unhindered access to the opposite sex after years in all-male schools) and breezed through a bachelor's degree in political science in two years, graduating in 1952.

For lack of better things to do, and to postpone my being drafted into the United States Army, I stayed at Stanford another year, receiving a master's degree in sociology. By that time I had decided that I wanted to become a social scientist. Political science (my first choice because I briefly thought of a diplomatic career) bored me, and I most enjoyed my sociology and anthropology courses, especially those of Richard La Piere and George Spindler. The joint Department of Sociology and Anthropology was minuscule (six or seven faculty members) and did not offer a serious graduate program, so my master's degree was another intellectual promenade, pleasant but unchallenging.

During my Stanford years, I spent a summer, in 1951, studying in Mexico City—the start of a lifelong love affair with Mexico. It was my first exposure to Latin America, and I immediately took to it as I never could to the United States. Mexico had the same wide open spaces that I had learned to appreciate in North America, but it also had a historical depth, cultural richness, and human density that I so badly missed in the United States. Most refreshingly, it seemed free of racial prejudices, which I found so suffocating in the United States. To be sure, Mexico was highly class-stratified, but in a way so similar to that which I had experienced in Europe that I felt culturally very much at home. In any case, I learned Spanish and equipped myself for later fieldwork in Latin America (Chiapas, Mexico, 1959; Guatemala, 1966; Peru, 1972–73).

With a worthless M.A. in my pocket and the United States and Belgian armies breathing down my neck (I was still a Belgian national, but as a permanent resident in the United States, Uncle Sam also considered me a prime candidate), I took a chance on starting a Ph.D. program at Harvard University. My luck soon ran out, but my one-year stint at Harvard was a revelation: I had my first exposure to a real university

just as I was beginning to doubt any existed in the United States. In fact, with the arrogant self-confidence of youth, I did not bother to apply to another graduate school besides Harvard.

Harvard was great. I discovered on arrival that the guru of structural functionalism was away that year, but Gordon Allport, George Homans, Clyde Kluckhohn, Barrington Moore, Frederick Mosteller, Pitirim Sorokin, and Samuel Stouffer handsomely made up for Talcott Parsons's absence. I arrived during the formative period of the Department of Social Relations, or Soc Rel (and I was to finish my degree during its heyday in 1960). The holy trinity of Allport, Kluckhohn, and Parsons seemed to present a breathtaking synthesis of the social world, having grandly asserted the unity of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. La Piere had turned me against Freud and Durkheim (a lasting influence, I might add), and he had convinced me that social structures were nothing but people acting. I now found Homans reinforcing those views. As for the distinction between sociology and anthropology, it had never made sense to me. It seemed that the skin color of those studied did not justify the disciplinary boundary. Happily, I found everyone at Harvard in agreement on this point.

Although the holy trinity constituted the ruling triumvirate at Soc Rel, I was perhaps most attracted by the terrible three (my term): Homans, Moore, and Sorokin. Cranky, sarcastic, and arrogant, they terrorized most students, which left an empty niche to be filled. I found all three relatively approachable (after the initial protective rebuff) precisely because so few students dared come near them. Homans and Moore were both on my Ph.D. general examination committee, and most of my peers thought I was courting disaster. Indeed I was. Moore behaved true to form. He asked me in the oral exam to contrast industrial and preindustrial societies. I fell into the trap of answering in Parsonian platitudes unlikely to endear me to either Moore or Homans: on the spur of the moment the "pattern variables" seemed a convenient coat hanger for that kind of question. After an interminable five minutes or so, Moore interrupted with a devastating question: "But Mr. van den Berghe, what have you told me that I could not have found out by reading the New York Times? " It was Homans who came to my rescue. In his stentorian voice he interjected, "But Barrington, you haven't asked anything which could not be answered in those terms."

But I am running ahead of the story; Uncle Sam caught up with me long before I could take my generals. I was drafted in September 1954, after the Korean armistice but before the official end of hostilities, and

spent two years in the Army Medical Corps, rising to the lofty rank of private first class. The move from a graduate dormitory at Harvard to a basic-training barrack at Fort Ord, California, was probably the most traumatic in my life. Yet it too was intellectually formative. Military life gave me a firsthand understanding of total institutions and, by extension, colonial systems, slavery, concentration camps, and other situations that were to exert a lifelong fascination on me.

I did not rebel against the military; I withdrew in amused cynicism, ridiculing and sabotaging the system and exercising my creativity by surreptitiously shirking my responsibilities without attracting punishment. I pursued my education by reading a substantial pocketbook library in latrines during extended coffee breaks and other disappearing acts. I successfully reduced an executive officer's authority by threatening to prefer charges of incompetence against him. (He had been responsible for burning six men on maneuvers, mistaking white phosphorus grenades for smoke grenades. They both came in olive-drab canisters, and he had not bothered to read the label.)

Above all, I became a barracks lawyer, mastering the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which I had discovered to be an intimidating weapon against illiterate noncommissioned officers and semiliterate officers. My worst punishment was one week's confinement to barracks, which I spent mostly listening to Mozart and Beethoven in the music room of the military hospital (the existence of which was only known to a half-dozen aficionados).

Luckily, after basic training among the rattlesnakes of California and Texas I was sent to defend the American empire on the Rhine. That assignment gave me the opportunity to renew contact with both the Belgian and the French sides of my family, and it was in Germany that I met my future wife, Irmgard Niehuis, in the dental chair of a military hospital where she was a dental assistant. To my father-in-law, a senior civil servant in Bad Kreuznach, I owe a keen appreciation of Rhine, Mosel, and Nahe wines; his job as head of the land-surveying office in the region gave him unmatched access to, and expertise in, the best vineyards. After a long military inquisition during which my fiancée was asked (supposedly for my protection) whether she had ever had venereal diseases or intended to emigrate to the United States to engage in prostitution, we were married by a Southern Baptist military chaplain in January 1956. That was also the period when I acquired United States citizenship, more as a matter of convenience than of conviction. My wife's nationality and her religion (Protestant) were matters of concern

to some members of my family, but their misgivings were quickly allayed on acquaintance. Our differences in religious background were resolved through mutual agnosticism and indifference to religious matters, and we raised three sons, Eric (born in 1961), Oliver (born in 1962), and Marc (born in 1975) in a secular home, drawing eclectically from several religious traditions without affiliating with any. Nonetheless, my wife is not above reproaching me for my Jesuitical turn of mind whenever she loses an argument.

Released at last from the talons of the bald eagle, my wife and I spent an extraordinarily stimulating year in Paris (1956–57) courtesy of the GI bill. Our monthly stipend of $135 only sustained a Spartan standard of living, but the reduced-rate student restaurants, theaters, and concerts and the tuition-free university allowed a rich cultural and intellectual diet on a modest budget. That was the year I decided I would make Africa my main area of research, and Paris was a superb training ground. Georges Balandier, Paul Mercier, and Germaine Dieterlen were my main teachers in the African area. Roger Bastide initiated me to the African diaspora in Brazil; Claude Lévi-Strauss kindled my interest in the arcane field of kinship analysis; I listened to Raymond Aron talk about Weber, and Georges Gurvitch about Durkheim. Among my contemporaries and fellow students in and around the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études, in the cavernous old Sorbonne building, were Claude Meillassoux and Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

The great political issues of the day were the war in Algeria and the Suez intervention, prompting routinized shouting matches around Saturday noon in the main courtyard of the Sorbonne. Rival student groups shouted at each other, "Algérie française " and "Le fascisme ne passera pas ." Dark blue trucks loaded with gardes mobiles stood by just outside but seldom had to intervene. It was then that I first became aware of the imminence and irreversibility of political change on the African continent and decided that I wanted to go back there soon. Both my political sympathies and my contacts were overwhelmingly with the left, at least on the issues of decolonization, but I also discovered in Paris that the right was not necessarily stupid (an impression readily gained from Republican politics in the United States).

The Parisian interlude was followed by reentry into the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where I got my Ph.D. in January 1960. During those two and a half years I associated most closely with Gordon Allport and Talcott Parsons, who cochaired my dissertation committee. I was writing on South African race relations, and Allport was just

back from South Africa with his student Thomas Pettigrew. He was thus a natural choice to chair my committee, and I have the fondest memory of his warm, avuncular interest in my budding career. He took great pains to expurgate my English prose of which es, and along with Bill Gum (at John Wiley, Basic Books, and later Elsevier) was the best editor I ever had.

My relationship with Parsons was more ambivalent. It was close, since I was both his research assistant and teaching assistant for two years, and he was quite pleasant with me, but I never felt at ease with his thinking. In fact the choice of South Africa as my dissertation topic quickly turned into a refutation of Parsonian consensus assumptions about the basis of social order. When I confronted him with the issue, his response was characteristically mild but unsatisfying. He suggested that either consensus was there but I had not looked for it deeply enough below all the surface noise, or perhaps South Africa was not really a society after all. It took me some five or six years to shed the Parsonian influence altogether. Eventually I came to resent the time spent trying to understand him when I belatedly discovered that the emperor had no clothes. But of course graduate students, even cheeky ones like me, dare not come to such conclusions.

In the summer of 1959 I got my feet wet doing anthropological fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, collaborating with Benjamin (Nick) Colby, the start of a long-standing friendship and a clear ethnographic vocation. Colby and I were in the first generation of students in the ongoing Harvard Chiapas Project directed by Evon Vogt, who was most helpful to me in the field. I also had the opportunity to establish contact with the Mexican school of anthropology, especially Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Julio de la Fuente, and Alfonso Villa Rojas, and amicably to cross pens with my former Paris classmate Rodolfo Stavenhagen. At that time I looked at Chiapas as a training ground for the fieldwork I was planning in South Africa, but in the end I was to devote practically half of my research activities to Latin America.

A Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship made it possible for my wife and me to go to South Africa in February 1960, and the next twenty-two months left an indelible imprint both intellectually and politically. My stay there coincided with the meteoric collapse of European colonialism in most of the rest of the continent and with an abortive revolution (Sharpeville and its aftermath) in South Africa itself: I had picked the right time to return to Africa. I also met more people of extraordinary stature and courage in South Africa than in any other

period of my life, notably Albert Luthuli, Alan Paton, and among my university colleagues Leo and Hilda Kuper and Fatima Meer. I forged lasting friendships through my work in South Africa, especially with the Kupers and Hamish Dickie-Clark (then my colleagues at the University of Natal in Durban), Edna Bonacich (then Edna Miller, my first research assistant), and later Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley (then a student of mine).

As a lecturer in the department headed by Leo Kuper at the University of Natal, I was both in one of the three main fermenting vats of South African social science and in the maelstrom of South African antiapartheid politics. I have related elsewhere my experiences there (in Ethics, Politics and Social Research , ed. Gideon Sjoberg [Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1967]) and need not repeat myself. If my South African stay left one indelible imprint, it is the firm conviction that any attention paid to race, whatever the stated intention, is noxious. This conviction later formed the basis of my vocal opposition to policies of race-based affirmative action in the United States and got me into considerable hot water. In South Africa, it was always touch and go whether I could finish my research before being expelled, but I finally left of my own accord in December 1961. Another event of my Durban stay was the birth of our eldest son, Eric, the first second-generation African in the family.

On the way back from South Africa we stopped over in Europe for six months, mostly in Paris. I renewed my 1956–57 contacts and taught at the Sorbonne. Our second son, Oliver, was born in Germany in 1962. The war in Algeria was now noisily winding down, and Paris was, as always, an exciting political and intellectual arena. Our stay was punctuated by OAS (Organisation de l'Armee Secrète, the underground of the right-wing French settlers in Algeria) plastic bombs, one within a hundred meters of my grandparents' flat.

The following three years marked our return to the United States and the start of my regular teaching career, first as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University (for a miserly annual salary of $7,200), then for two years at the State University of New York, Buffalo. At Wesleyan we found the combination of provincialism, mediocrity, and pretentiousness hard to take. Between the rowdiness of the fraternities, the chronic inebriation of the senior faculty, and the stench of the nearby rubber tire plant, we fled to Buffalo within a few months of arrival. Buffalo was not much of an improvement. The climate was rotten, the city grimy, and the university a shambles, but at least the salary was decent (twelve

thousand dollars in 1963 went a long way). The State University of New York was then making its big push toward academic respectability, so the money spigots flowed generously. But the buildings of the old private university were bursting at the seams, the library kept books in crates for lack of shelf space, and the lectures were barely audible over the constant cacophony of the expanding university: bulldozers, pneumatic drills, and hammers successfully competed with professors. Politically those two years had their moments of excitement: the Kennedy assassination, the incipient protest against the Vietnam War, and, locally, opposition to a New York State loyalty oath.

When the University of Washington made me an offer in 1965, accepting was one of the easiest decisions of my life. Seattle, even on a drizzly winter day, as when I first saw it, beat Buffalo at its best, not to mention the blizzard I had just left. The university was distinguished in the life sciences and respectable in other fields; the sociology department was solid in a rather naively positivist, outhouse-empiricist way, but there was hope for it; the city, a bit like San Francisco but twenty years behind it, was trembling on the threshold of urbanity; the hinterland was gorgeous. That Seattle's attractive location would in later years cost me many thousands of dollars in rejected offers was far from my thoughts. Little did I know that at age thirty-two I had reached the apex of my purchasing power with a 1965 salary of fifteen thousand dollars!

No sooner had I arrived than the old guard of the department discovered in me more of a maverick and less of a positivist than they had bargained for. They tried to block my promotion to full professor two years later by claiming, with considerable justification, that I rejected the pretensions of sociology to being scientific and that I was really an anthropologist in sociological disguise. I counterattacked in the College Council, arguing that I was being subjected to a heresy trial, and won an unprecedented reversal of a departmental denial of promotion. From the late 1960s on, the department became more intellectually diverse and sophisticated, reaching its apogee in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s a succession of devastating budget cuts sent it, and indeed the entire university, into a tailspin, from which we are only now beginning to recover.

My tenure in Seattle was interrupted by several lengthy absences on overseas research. In 1966 I went to Guatemala to resume my collaboration with Nick Colby and to work among the Ixil, who have since been massacred in the thousands by the government and relocated in Vietnam-

style "strategic hamlets." In 1967–68 the Rockefeller Foundation sent me to Kenya for a year to establish a sociology department at the University of Nairobi, and in 1968–69 I went to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria to develop a graduate program. Those were also the years when I had the satisfaction of seeing my sister Gwendoline turn into a professional anthropologist, first studying as an undergraduate at Berkeley and then continuing on to the Sorbonne for her doctorate.

Our second two-year stay in Africa was filled with excitement and proved a tremendous experience for our boys. Kenya, though officially at peace (except for frontier skirmishes with Somalis in the north), was in fact politically almost as oppressive as South Africa. Endowed with the kind of government Stanislav Andreski aptly called a kleptocracy, Kenya was a hotbed of conflicts, and the university was infested with police informers. I clashed with the principal and the authorities on several issues involving academic freedom and the intimidation of students, thereby making myself persona non grata with another African government. Nonetheless, extensive travel in Uganda (before it was gutted by Idi Amin), Tanzania, and Kenya, through the world's greatest game reserves and most spectacular scenery, made us forget the tensions of Nairobi.

Between Nairobi and Ibadan my wife and I took an extended anthropological excursion through Ethiopia (during the waning days of the Conquering Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie), India, Iran, and Lebanon. At least three of these societies have changed beyond recognition since, and hardly for the better. Ethiopia, even before the great famine of the 1970s and the ravages of war in the Ogaden and Erythrea, already qualified as one of the poorest, most depleted, most overpopulated countries in Africa, but its destitution barely affected its beauty. India, unlike Africa, exposed us to the problem, not of underdevelopment, but of overdevelopment: an overcrowded subcontinent whose resources had been depleted by five millennia of overexploitation under an advanced agrarian civilization. Nowhere else is the contrast between the splendor of the past and the squalor of the present so evident. Of all the African countries, Egypt and Ethiopia probably come the closest, but the sheer size and density of the Indian population magnify its problems and supply an even more nightmarish vision of the future of humanity.

Iran seemed oppressive enough in 1968, but, obviously, it had not yet reached bottom. As for Lebanon, it then seemed the model of consociational democracy; it was hailed as the Switzerland of the Middle East, the paradise of mercantile capitalism, the temple of religious toler-

ance! We had a most delightful week in Beirut, Baalbek, Tyre, and Sidon, another vacation taken just in time.

Our impending stay in Nigeria left us full of apprehension. It turned out that our fears were greatly exaggerated. Despite a raging civil war estimated to have killed between five hundred thousand and one million people, the Ibadan campus was an oasis of peace and intellectual freedom. I felt much more at ease in Yoruba culture than I had in East Africa. Nigerians were refreshingly free of racial consciousness and inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the outside world. There was almost no sign that they had ever been colonized, except for the social snobbery of the Western-educated elite. Most engaging, perhaps, was the sophistication of Nigerian political intrigues and the disarming charm and candor with which nepotism, favoritism, clientelism, and corruption suffused the social fabric. The whole society was a tissue of nepotism and amoral familism, stripped of hypocrisy and moralism, its structures laid bare by the transparency of its superstructures. In retrospect it was my Nigerian experience that later predisposed me to apply the sociobiological paradigm to human behavior. I always recall with amusement the clinching argument of Nigerians seeking to convince one of their truthfulness: "Why should I tell a lie?" by which they mean that in this particular instance they have no interest in deceiving.

The return to the United States brought, as usual, culture shock. Most disturbing was what I saw as a reversal of the integrationist strategies of the civil-rights movement and a revival of racial thinking and categorization first brought about by the black-power movement and further abetted by the institutional responses of affirmative action, quota systems, racial double standards, racial busing, and other forms of race-based, race-conscious discrimination. I opposed similar moves in the American Sociological Association and felt obliged to resign from some of its committees for the same reasons.

It was only a matter of time before the issue came to a head on my own campus. Double racial standards of admission at the University of Washington necessarily raised the problem of double standards of evaluation of students in classes. I refused to take a racial census of my classes, as the Black Studies Program demanded of me, and I refused to yield to intimidation on the issue of double standards of evaluation. The crisis was further complicated when I caught five black students in a crude attempt at tampering with a grade sheet. Groups of shouting, abusive students confronted me inside and outside my office, uttering verbal threats. A chorus of minority organizations, led by the vice presi-

dent for minority affairs (a retired army colonel without academic credentials hired to keep black students under control), demanded that I be sacked as a racist. For a fortnight I made both local newspapers and at least one of the three television news programs almost daily. With the outstanding exception of my department chairman, Frank Miyamoto, who courageously came to my defense, the university administration, with characteristic cowardice and expediency, played possum. When I tried to elicit from the provost a statement of university policy on the fundamental issues of principle I was raising, he lamely replied that the vice president of minority affairs and I were each entitled to our private views as to whether racial discrimination should be entrenched in academic life.

A field trip to Peru (1972–73) under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health soon delivered me from all that nonsense. The exhilaration of eighteen months in one of the world's most spectacular areas (the Andes and the jungles of southern Peru and Bolivia) and most fascinating situations of ethnic relations was a welcome change from the dissipation of intellectual energy in sterile political fights. I am frequently asked why I never did research in the United States. I suppose it is because I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

For all its beauty and fascination, I did not take to Peru as I did to Mexico. I met stimulating colleagues like José Matos Mar, Fernando Fuenzalida, and Jorge Flores Ochoa, and I made friends like Ben Orlove, but I found Andean culture to be dour, hostile, and seemingly devoid of joie de vivre. The music is hauntingly melodic but melancholy; even during fiestas people are unsmiling; their sense of humor seems limited to the misfortune of others; sexuality is repressed, and women under their bulging multiple dresses exude the pungent sensuality of giant peripatetic onions; even drunkenness seems to bring out depression rather than release inhibitions. As Alfred Métraux had warned me ten years earlier, "Les Andes sont sinistres ." I attributed his statement to his own melancholy temperament (he took his own life soon afterward), but my experience confirmed his judgment. In Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro and even more so in Bahia, I encountered exuberant joy, sensuality, and hedonism in a harmonious cultural blend of Latin Eu-

rope and West Africa. Lusotropicalism in all its flamboyant glory was a far cry from the tristes tropiques of the sertao described by Lévi-Strauss.

My return to Seattle marked rapid growth in a new interest, which had long been dormant but now would not leave me in peace. It simply had to be pursued. I am referring, of course, to what is now called sociobiology . There are few topics on which social scientists exhibit such a devastating blend of abysmal ignorance and unshakable irrationality. Not surprisingly, my alleged conversion had been variously seen as a profound departure from my previous work, a belated showing of my true reactionary colors, an act of treachery, or a case of creeping senility. Having experienced most of my colleagues' imperviousness to rational discourse on this score, I have few illusions that anything I say here will disabuse them. But the quixotic strain in my temperament impels me to try anyway.

For several years I had been reading extensively in ethology, especially primate and human ethology, and though I sensed much of interest there, I was also unsatisfied. Much of the work in human ethology was trivial: the underlying evolutionary thinking was sloppily group-selectionist; there seemed to be no overarching theoretical framework to a largely descriptive natural history; and cross-species comparisons were mainly piecemeal and at the level of loose analogies. At the same time it was becoming increasingly clear to me that the social-science orthodoxy of the past half century was now bankrupt and obsolete. The dogma that Homo sapiens was so unique an animal as to bear no comparison with other species; the continuous exclusion of human behavior from the process of evolution by natural selection; the treatment of human culture and social structure as phenomena entirely sui generis; causality defined in terms of an opposition of nature versus nurture, heredity versus the environment—all these notions seemed overdue for the intellectual junk heap. Too much evidence simply did not fit.

However, several approaches in the social sciences that had always made sense to me and that, together, exhausted social-science claims to at least quasi-scientific status all seemed to converge on a few simple assumptions about human behavior. Behaviorism, game theory, classical economics, Marxism, exchange theory, and rational-choice theory all appeared to be based on simple utilitarian, materialistic premises that humans were maximizers acting in seeming rationality in the pursuit of self-interest. These social-science models are in fact quite close to those used by population ecologists and other evolutionary biologists, and tantalizing vistas for the reincorporation of the social sciences into

the mainstream of neo-Darwinian synthesis opened up. Indeed many of the glaring limitations in these fields seemed to disappear when problems were rethought in evolutionary terms. The charge of ahistoricism justifiably leveled at much would-be theoretical social science would lose its validity if the linkage with biology could be made. For example, classical behaviorism dealt with the ontogeny of behavior; it could only gain by linking up with the phylogenetic approach of ethology.

Edward Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis suddenly seemed to point the way, not only to a brand of theoretical biology that revolutionized Lorenzian ethology, but also to a synthesis much more germane to a number of existing social-science traditions. I soon discovered that the pieces of the puzzle, which Wilson had conveniently assembled, had all been around for over a decade, in the works of Ernst Mayr, George Williams, William Hamilton, John Maynard-Smith, Richard Alexander, and others. Wilson was not so much the innovator as the synthesizer.

Why people keep wondering at how much I changed puzzles me; I see my interest in sociobiology as flowing logically from my lifelong insistence on the comparative approach. Much as I could never envisage a sociology that did not take in the entire range of human experience (and thus the field customarily reserved for anthropology), I now could not see why we should suspend our comparative perspective at the boundaries of our species. How can we define the parameters of human nature except by comparison with the nonhuman? Certainly we are unique, but we are not unique in being unique. Every species is unique and evolved its uniqueness in adaptation to its environment. Culture is the uniquely human way of adapting, but culture, too, evolved biologically. Culture does have some emergent properties, but it cannot be dissociated from biological evolution and continues to be intricately and integrally connected with it. The feedback loops are multiple and reciprocal. To determine the causal pathways and specify the proximate mechanisms that link genes, mind, and culture (to paraphrase Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson) is the great intellectual challenge of late twentieth-century social science. The human mind is not a tabula rasa; it channels cultural development in recognizably human ways.

In 1976–77, I took the first sabbatical of my career, largely to retool as a sociobiologist studying humans. My previous junkets had found outside sponsors, but the halcyon days of academe were over. I collaborated with David Barash at the University of Washington, and met Richard Alexander, Richard Dawkins, William Hamilton, John Maynard-Smith,

Robert Trivers, Edward Wilson—indeed most of the leading lights in the field. I also took a fascinating trip to Israel, invited by the University of Haifa. There I renewed my friendship with Sammy Smooha, who proved a marvelous guide to an incredibly complex society, and met Joseph Shepher, who introduced me to his kibbutz and rekindled my long-standing interest in human incest avoidance.

Apart from my academic interest in race relations, Israel could not leave me unmoved. Old Jerusalem, that great rendezvous of monotheism, is perhaps the most gripping and haunting piece of real estate on earth, even for an agnostic like me. In 1976 there seemed to be a glimmer of hope that some solution to the regional conflict might be found, but rampant Israeli imperialism under Begin and the rape of Lebanon destroyed any prospects of peace. If the ultimate justification for the State of Israel is the Nazi Holocaust, as the Yad Vashem Memorial suggests, I always wondered why Israel was created at the expense of the Arabs. Would it not have made more sense to establish it in, say, East Prussia?

Meanwhile, back in Seattle another bit of excitement was awaiting me. In April 1978 I achieved instant world notoriety as the sociologist who spent one hundred thousand dollars to find his way to a brothel. Senator William Proxmire had awarded NIMH and me his monthly Golden Fleece Award, for extravagant government spending, allegedly for having wasted my Peruvian research money (ninety-seven thousand dollars of it) on interviewing twenty-one prostitutes in a Cuzco brothel. The story was of course a natural for the media, which got into the act with great alacrity, from the Washington Post, Le Monde, the London Sunday Times, and the Wall Street Journal to the National Enquirer, Playboy, Penthouse, and "The Dick Cavett Show." Friends started mailing me newspaper clippings from London, Paris, Djakarta, and Nairobi.

The sober truth of the matter was that my student and assistant, George Primov, had, with my knowledge and consent, independently conducted a little study of a brothel, on his own time, at the cost of perhaps fifty dollars of grant resources. The research was perfectly legitimate and related to the main project (ethnic and class relations in Cuzco). I felt I owed no one any apologies, and I counterattacked, calling Proxmire a clownish reincarnation of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In fact I felt flattered by the award. If an anti-intellectual politico like Proxmire found my research a waste of money, his attack must be a vindication of its merit. I soon discovered that I was indeed in distinguished company, including, amusingly, Edward O. Wilson. It also

turned out that my colleagues Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz were the first runners-up for the award, for the study published as American Couples .

The last few years have been a bit of an anticlimax, fortunately punctuated by several pleasant trips to Mexico, the Caribbean, Morocco, India, and Europe, a Fulbright lecture tour of Australia in 1982, visiting professorships in Strasbourg in 1983, Tübingen (1986), and Tel Aviv (1988), and a 1984–85 fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

My unease with United States society has mounted, and the last few years of Reaganism (that coalition of millionaires, gun nuts, Bible Belt fundamentalists, and political idiots who vote against their interests) have only reinforced my distaste for the cult of mediocrity that suffuses American society, including, sadly, its system of education. The entire American educational system has been buffeted by successive waves of anti-intellectualism of the right and the left and has consequently spawned the first generation of functional illiterates ever produced by an advanced industrial society. The teaching profession, itself a bastion of mediocrity, has been in the forefront of this assault against intellectual quality and discipline.

The university has not been spared. In contrast to the British model of the university as an independent community of scholars ruled by a collective of professors and engaged in the diffusion and extension of knowledge, the American university is subservient to capitalist donors, football-crazed alumni, backwoods state legislators, Bible-brandishing synods, and missile-wielding warlords and run by supine, opportunistic administrators. Professors are tolerated court jesters, irrelevant eccentrics paid to keep the youth amused and off the streets and labor markets for a few years.

My intellectual elitism and political anarchism have won me few friends and allies on campus, and my peripheralness to sociology has scared away most graduate students. Not that I mind being an isolate, and my experience with the dozen students who have stuck with me to the doctorate has been most rewarding and broadening: they have ranged from historical macrosociologists to structural anthropologists and human sociobiologists. Most of my intellectual associates over the last ten years have come from outside of sociology—primarily anthropology but also psychology, zoology, history, and other fields.

In fact I have largely given up on sociology as a viable discipline. Fixated on methodology (and a very limiting brand of methodology at

that), sociologists are increasingly bereft of substantive knowledge and have failed to produce a truly significant idea in the last fifty years. The golden age of sociology was during the first three decades of the century. Hiding its intellectual bankruptcy behind a shaky numerical façade, sociology has managed to get the worst of both C. P. Snow's two cultures: it is too philistine to qualify as a humanity and too antireductionist to become a science. Thus it richly deserves the low esteem in which it is held.

Indeed sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century. It lost its panhuman vision when it let anthropology preempt three-fourths of the world. It lost its historical vision when it turned its back on both evolutionism and "mere" historicism and became bad ethnography of contemporary industrial societies. It lost any chance of becoming a science when it rejected the relevance of biology and started treating human behavior as disembodied social structures and values. It retained the outward mark of a scientific discipline: quantification, or, better, as Sorokin put it, "quantophrenia." As with all disciplines in the process of becoming sterile scholastic traditions, sociology becomes increasingly ingrown. Henri Poincaré was indeed prophetic when, in 1909, he declared sociology the discipline most concerned with methodology and most bereft of substance.