A Partici'patory Conversation wi'th Gxerald Berrenian
(Edited ancl Expancled)
Gerald Berremaln, with Mark Pedelty, Interlocutor
A Suggestion from Tom Rosin: "I do hope that some of Gerry's humorous
responses in answering questions at the end of that long day of presentations will be
included in the festschrift. I believe this material was all taped at the time. How
could there be a Gerry Berreman, without his sparkling humor?"
Beffeman, when asked about publishing this, replied: "To the extent that the
humor was 'sparkling,' I think you probably had to be there!"
Mark Pedelty (Interlocutor): I remember, as a new graduate student and
young activist, going to Gerry's office with considerable angst, to ask: "What's it all
about? Why be an anthropologist?" Deborah Pruitt says she had asked the same thing
but got a different answer. He probably always gave a different answer, because he's
an excellent teacher and mentor who treats students as individuals and establishes
human relationships with them. So, he listened patiently-I got the impression he had
heard it all before. The answer he gave me was, "It beats working for a living." And,
having worked for a living as a driver for Super Shuttle, I have learned as an
anthropologist that he was right-it does beat working for a living. I know that Geffy
has worked hard as anthropologist, as teacher, but he has infused that work with a
sense of effortless joy and human'ity that is so different from the humorlessness that
often passes for commitment. He has provided an excellent role model of how to
keep that humanity, that commitment, that fire, going. With that I will open the floor
for the "'participatory conversation."
Question: Why the conference title, "Behind Manly Masks?"
Gerald Berrean:     I was totally surprised when I leamzed that the
Conference was to be given that title; I didn't even expect that it would have a title.
It's the title of a very short monograph I wrote shortly after doing my dissertation
research. It was my part of a pact among six or eight grad students at Cornell to each
write a paper a chapter for a book on what we should have been taught about field
research before undertaking it, but weren't. The book never materialized.
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Why that title? I've always thought it"'s a mistake to write an article and then
try to think up a title for it. Much better is to think of an interesting title; then think up
an article to go under it. Titles with rhymes and alliteration are excellent bases for
articles-so are puns; ask Alan Dundes. For example: In the Himalayan village
where I did my dissertation research I knew Hindu priests and shamans. I liked their
designations, so I wrote an article to justify the title Brahmins and Shamans. Ten
years later I had to spend a year in India doing a study in the old baza of Dehra Dun
city, in order to get an article I could title Bazaar Behavior. A title that still awaits a
book, forty years after my last research in the Aleutians, is the candid ethnography,
Aleutians without Illusions. Another, inspired by Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in
Samoa, was to have been Attaining Adolescence in the Aleutians.
Question: So, what about "Behind Many Masks?"
Gerald Berreman: Oh yes, sorry, good question. Actually, "Behind Many
Masks" doesn't fit very well into the pattern I've just been talking about, so this is a
transition rather than an explication.
The first thing you have to know is that the subtitle- of "Behind Many Masks"
is "Ethnography and Impression Management in a Himalayan Hill Village." Here-
as everywhere-context is everything. I was inspired early on by Erving Goffman's
now classic book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  "Impression
management" was a key concept in Goffman's sociology, and became central to my
monograph, which was an account of the facts and foibles of my field work
experience. "Behind Many Masks" seemed to me an apt metaphor for the impression
management it entailed-and it had a nice alliterative ring to it.
Speaking of Goffman brings to mind an anecdote appropriate to this audience.
He was an exemplar of what came to be kniown as the "West Coast School of
Sociology," which grew out 'of George Herbert Mead's work, Herbert Blumer's
symbolic interactionisnm, Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology, Harry Stack
Sullivan, and related philosophical traditions of hermeneutic social science, etc. And
here comes the anecdote: Eric Wolf used to tell the story of his undergraduate days at
City College, New York where he felt intimidated by professors" erudition and fellow
students' knowledge. In lectures he kept hearing mention of "hermeneutic," which
seemed to be familiar to everyone but him. So he tried looking in biographies of
famous people-looking for Herman Nudik. Erc thought he must be some nice
Jewish boy who had become famous. And that reminds me that in high school I
thought Ibid must be a widely cited Latin reference work.
But back to the question, why "Behind Many Masks?" When I first arrived
here there was a grad student named Theron Nunez. (Some will remember him. He
was mainly George Foster's student, except that he had a great sense of humor.)
Theron was intrigued by the title "Behind Many Masksg," and often ribbed me about it.
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Beffeman
327
Beffeman and Pedelty
After he had left to teach at University of Florida we occasionally exchanged letters
(no e-mail then) in which we vied with one another by inventing similar titles for
hypothetical anthropological projects.
Some were very s'imple, like "The Professor's Lament: 'Behind Many Tasks"'
and, on the then rapid "Global Expansion of Fast Food Outlets: 'Behind Many Macs"'
or, since McDonald' s had copyrighted "Mac," the generic, "Behind Many Snacks." A
local California project was to be "A Study of the Christian Brothers Vintners in the
Napa Valley: 'Behind Many Casks."'   "'A Comparative Study of Outhouse
Architecture" would obviously be "Behind Many Shacks." The titles we invented
ranged from the mundane to the ridiculous, as you can see, but three bordered on the
sublime: "Mapping the Distribution of Bordellos in Istanbul" was to be titled "Behind
Many Mosques." Another with merit was "An Ethnography of Sheep Herding in the
Pyrenees: "Behind Many Basques."' And, to my mind the topper: "Missionary
Projects among Tribals in the Tropics: "Mask Many Behinds."'
Does that answer your question??
Question: How did you get into anthropology?
Gerald Berreman: Maybe better; how did anthropology get into me?
When I was a freshman at the University of Oregon, my brother Dwight
advised me never to take a fresha course-!"invariably a waste of time," he warned.
Thinking I might want to be a psychologist or, God forbid, a psychiatrist, I went to
enroll in a sophomore psychology course. But they said "no way-you have to start
with the freshman course." So I went to anthropology. They said "yes, yes by all
means, take an anthro. course, take the second year course, any course!" So I did.
(They were apparently hard up for enrollment.)
T'he course I took was a year-long cultural anthropology course taught by
Homer Barnett. (I still had to pay my dues by taking the freshman course in my
sophomore year-a quarter each on cultural, archaeological, and physical
anthropology.) Barnett had been a student of Kroeber's at Berkeley, and had special
interests in culture change, psychological anthropology, the Pacific, and applied
anthropology. I have never encountered the equal of that course. His lectures weren't
funny, he wasn't very approachable, and I found out only later that he didn't think
much of the culture concept-except as a useful teaching device-but it was just a
great course. One quarter was on ethnography (focussed on the Pacific), one on
theory (focused on cultural dynamics), and one on topics (focused on religion and
economy). I looked forward to each of his lectures, read all the assignments, was
enthusiastic about the papers-I liked everything in the course. Maybe I was na'ive,
either that or cynicism-challenged. After that course I had no doubt that anthropology
would be my major.
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There were very few anthro. majors, and only four professors: Barnett;
Luther Cressman (archaeologist and Margaret Mead's first husband); Theodore Stern
(Linguist and ethnographer of Burmese hill tribes and Klamath Indians); and William
Laughlin (fresh out of Harvard as its first Ph.D. in modern physical anthropology-
i.e. genetics, etc.). When, after a post-graduate year at Oregon for an M.A., and two
years in the Air Force, I turned up at Cornell for my Ph.D., I was told I had taken
more anthropology than they had to offer so I could take what I wanted. And I did.
Among others, I took the anthropological theory seminar (equivalent to our 240),
given by the entire anthropology staff of five (it was a joint department with
sociology), and through which the department head routinely slept.,
Returning to undergraduate days at the University of Oregon: Among the
anthro. majors were Steve Talbot, who did his Ph.D. here at Berkeley (and has taught
at U.C. Davis, Oregon State, Delta College, and elsewhere), and Philip Newman, who
got his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and is recently retired from UCLA.
Both are my lifelong friends. In fact, Phil is sitting right over there. (Raise your hand
Phil!) Steve and Phil and I were among about eight others on a 1949 summiier's
salvage archaeology dig on the Columbia River, sponsored by the Smithsonian
Institution, which paid us a princely dollar an hour. Undeterred, most of us became
anthropologists, in practice if not in name. Among those you may know are my
fellow UC emeriti Fred Dunn, epidemiologist at UCSF, and Octavio Romano of our
School of Public Health. The latter, by the way, deserves recognition as a key figure
in the history of the Kroeber Anthropological Society. As a grad student in the late
'50s, enroute to his Ph.D., he revived the then moribund KAS Papers and imitiated the
KAS Annual Meetings. (What ever became of those meetings?)
To my mind, Octavio Romano holds another claim to fame in his grad school
years. He had been offended when George Foster gave the pseudonymous name
"Romano" to a character in an a;ticle on Mexican villagers published in the American
Anthropologist. So, in an article in a following issue of the same j'ournal, Romano
gave the name "Foster" to a gullible, perhaps arrogant, North American rancher who
fell for a humiliating practical joke perpetrated by his Mexican employees. They
convinced "Fostee" that his bunions could be cured by filling his boots with stewed
tomatoes and wearing them that way for a week. He followed that prescription, to
everyone's scarcely concealed amusement as he sloshed uncomfortably around the
ranch. At least that's my memory of the event-you could look the articles up.
Two years after our summ- er on the Columbia River, in the summer following
my senior year and Phil's junior year, he and I were recruited to a six person Aleutian
expedition led by William Laughlin. That experience resulted in my M.A. thesis
(which was an ethnography of Nikolski village on Umnak Island), and Phil's research
report on Aleut material culture there. Both of us also helped excavate the site that
was Laughlin's main project. The two summiier field experiences confirmed my
commitment to anthropology.
Beffeman and Pedelty  A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Beffeman  329
Hang on, this story is just beginning! The appeal anthropology holds for me
has roots even deeper than those I have described so far.
But first, an aside-another aside actually, an aside about asides: There
used to be an elderly professor at UC Santa Cruz named Page Smith, who wrote an
occasional column for the San Francisco Chronicle. I don't know whether he was in
the Philosophy or Psychology department-maybe both. He often wrote on aging,
and in one of his pieces he said that one thing that happens as you grow old is that
everything begins to remind you of something else. That's what's going on here.
Now to the real beginning:
I got an early start in anthropology by participating in an ethnographic project
during the summer of 1934 when I was 20. .. no, actually when I was four.
Our family spent that summuer on the small Grand Ronde Indian reservation in
Oregon"'s Coast Mountains, while my father did ethno-historical research. I have few
memories of that summner, among them: an old man with long braids sitting silently
on a bench under a tree near the general store; the sixteen-year-old twin girls who
baby sat my brother and me while our mother was otherwise occupied. My most
vivid memory-aside from the nauseating smell of the hop yards where many of the
women worked-is accompanying my mother when she joined them in picking hops
on a nearby farmn for a few dollars a day. I amused myself by collecting the yellow
ladybug-type insects that infested the hop vines. The Indian women would save a few
for me, which I kept in a glass milk bottle . .. where most of them died a horrible
death.
A year later 1935  I decided to broaden my anthropological traiig by
accompanying my parents on an archaeological expedition to the southern Oregon
Coast. My father had earlier maae a survey of shell mounds and other occupation
sites along the Oregon coast, locating about 40 that seemed archaeologically worth
investigating. He then selected one, the Lone Ranch site, to excavate. For many years
now the site has been designated a Scenic Wayside on Highway 101, about fifteen
miles north of the California state linGe-fve miles north of Brookigs.
We camped there for the summer. My brother and I collected then plentiful
"arrow heads," scrapers, and stone fishing sinkers on the nearby sand dunes-artifacts
remaining from habitation sites that had eroded away-and generally had a carefree
time. I remember little of the excavation beyond the excitement that ranch hands
displayed when they saw a skeleton in situ, and, later a rusted-out six-shooter that had
been uncovered. Mostly, I remember being told to keep out of the way.
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Back to my story: between summers during the Depression, my dad taught
grade school and high school in lumber company towns, niaking $500 a year while
simultaneously pursuing an M.A., as best he could, in anthropology at the University
of Oregon. There he one day saw ads on a bulletin board announcing two TA-ships,
one at Stanford, in anthropology, and one at Cal, in sociology, each paying about $850
a year. He applied for both. Homer Barnett got the one at Cal (which my dad would
have preferred) and my dad got the one at Stanford, which didn't have anthropology,
but beggars couldn't be choosers, so he took it. To finance the move, they sold our
cow and my mother took my brother and me to eastern Washington where she picked
apples while my dad went to Palo Alto to enroll in his new position and flnd us a
place to live. It turned out that Stanford had only one sociologist, and he was usually
at his cabin up at Tahoe, but it had a major psychology department, so my dad took a
lot of their senminars and ended up with a Ph.D. in sociology, with a social
psychological bent. My mother, with an M.A. from Washinlgton State, enrolled in
Stanford's Ph.D. program, where, as a T.A., she shared an office with Sherna
Vinograd, who (Berkeley connection coming up!) was destined to be the mother of
Telegraph Avenue street poet and "Bubble Lady" Julia Vinograd (who, I rnight add,
has an M.A. from University of Iowa's famed creative writing program). So, my
brother and I were grad students' kids, while most of our peers in the Stanford public
elementary school were professors' and coaches' kids.
These rarely evoked memories remind me (cf. Page Smith) of another
anecdote I can't resist rendering to this academic audience. In grade school a friend,
upon being told that my father was a sociologist, asked, logically enough, "what's
that?" After I had given my version of an answer, he responded, "I get it, he's sort of
a non-religious preacher." My father loved that defiIiition thought it hilariously
apt and often quoted it in classroom lectures.
My dad's thesis for his Uniiversity of Oregon M.A. in Anthropology was titled
Tribal Distribution in Oregon, and was published in the series, Memoirs of the AAA
(1937). His report on the excavation at Lone Ranch became a short mo nograph,
Chetco Archaeology, in the AAA' s General Series in Anthropology ( 1944).
I mention these two publications because they entail another Berkeley
connection, and an implicit comm entary on academic mentorship, or its absence. My
father has said that, as a mere grad student, it would never have occurred to him to try
to publish either of them. His adviser at Oregon, Luther Cressman, had simply
accepted them virtually without comment. But Alfred Kroeber, who was at Berkeley,
saw them, liked them, and arranged their publication.
I first met Kroeber at a reception following a lecture he gave at Cornell in
1956, when I was a graduate student. His response when I was introduced to him was
to ask whether I was related to Joel Berreman, what was he doing now, why hadn't he
stayed in anthropology, and "please give him my regards." Kroeber, who was then
Berreman and Pedelty
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Berreman
331
around 80, clearly had an impressive memory and concern for those he had
mentored--even if briefly and at a distance. When I met him four years later at the
malbox in Kroeber Hall, he asked me the very same questions. Well, his memory
wasn't perfect, but then, as Joe E. Brown says at the end of the filmn, Some Like it Hot,
nobody's perfect.
Let"'s see-where was I?     Yes .  nostalgia ...how I became an
anthropologist. Should I tell you about when I was a Boy Scout? You laugh, but why
not? . .. OK, this is actually relevant! When I was a 13-year-old Boy Scout, I was the
Den Chief for a group of six or eight Cub Scouts, one of whom was Roger Keesing,
age nine. His mother was Den Mother for the group, which met weekly at their house.
His father was Felix Keesing, Stanford's first anthropologist and probably the premier
anthropologist of the Pacific in h'is generation. He had no official role in the Cub Den,
but he did teach us Maori songs and ritual dances to perforn at Cub Pack meetings!
When I arrived back in Berkeley sixteen years later, Felix was a regular member of
the short-lived Bay Area Anthropological Association until, one morning following its
annual dinner meeting featuring copious quantities of wine and food, he dropped dead
on a tennis court. Roger was then about to finish a Ph.D. in anthropology at
Harvard--or perhaps had recently done so.
Now, if you don't know who Roger was, it only goes to show how transitory
fame is. He became a well-known anthropologist and southwest Pacific specialist in
his own right. At one point he turned our department down to join the faculty at UC
Santa Cruz., which was then scheduled to be the UC Center for Pacific Studies. Not
long thereafter, when that Center didn't materialize, he left for Australian National
University., where he made his career for many years, before moving to Canada and
ultimately dropping dead on a dance floor during an anthropological conference in
Toronto, at 58the same age, almost to the day., as his father had met his fate . .. but
that's a different story. Sic transit gloria.
So, the Keesings were another early and continuing anthropological contact of
mine, though so far as I can tell, they had little if any impact on my career. I describe
it here because, despite its nminmal relevance, I think it"s interesting history.
Wait., here's another Keesing footnote. Bear with me I`m on a roll. In
grade school (1940), Roger and his elder brother John (about 7 and 9) approached me
(1 1) on the Stanford elementary school ground and asked: "are you for Roosevelt or
Wilkie?"' (Don't tell me you don't know who Wilkie was!) "Roosevelt," I replied.
"Good," said John, "that makes three of us; everybody else here's a Republican!""
T'hat must have 'impressed me, because it's the only non-Cub memory I have of them
from that era.
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332
Question: You have been an activist as well as a scholar of inequality,
especially in India. Will you reflect on where things are going in that area? Are you
pessimistic or optimistic?
Gerald Berreman: Anyone who has taken a course with me probably knows
that I often quote Antonio Gramsci to the effect that pessimism and optimism are not
mutually exclusive. Specifically, he contrasted "pessimism of the intellect" and
"6optimism of the will [or spirit]." Actually., I don't know where he wrote it-I've
never seen it-but I'm confident he wrote it! Someone,, likely Bob Murphy, told me
he did. I once mentioned this to my friend,, Leon Wofsy (bacteriologist/immunologist
and political activist professor who was here earlier today), and he told me he knew
exactly where it's written-but he has never turned up with it. The same with Henry
Rosenfeld (American anthropologist., classmate of Eric Wolf, long-time courageous
opposition activist in Israel,, who has worked for many years with Palestinians in
Nazareth). He told me he'd send me the reference . .. never did. Even so,, I remain
confident that he did say it. It"s probably somewhere deep in Gramsci's Prison
Notebooks. I've seen pages where the general idea comes up, but no quotable
passage. So, I often quote him-but not in print!
How did Gramsci-or more accurately., given my lack of a quote-how do I
describe these concepts, you may ask. It's like this-, "pessimism of the intellect"" is the
pessimism that comes with understanding the ominous nature of how things work and
where things are going in the world. That is., in the words of C. Wright Mills,, being'i
possession of an "adequate definition of reality."' "Optimism of the will [or spirit]"9 is
the belief,, fueled by hope,, that things just might turn out better than your intellect tells
you they will. That is,, you see what"s happening, hope something else will happen.,
have at least a glimmer of belief that it could happen.) and therefore try to make it
happen.
I1 have occasionally cited, as a non-political example, the case from my
college days of a news report of a woman who fell off a cruise liner somewhere
between San Francisco and Hawaii. Hours later, when her absence was noticed,, the
captain retraced his route on that vast,, trackless ocean and finally., there she was, dog-
paddling around. When asked why,, it being such a hopeless situation,, she answered,
in effect', "'Sure,, but why not? I had nothing to lose and I thought I might be found.""
And she was. That's optimism of the will in the face of pessimism of the intellect.
The captain evidently shared that optimism--or maybe feared a lawsuit if he didn't
give it a try.
And I think that's about the chance we have that things will get better in
toda'y's world! I do hold hope; otherwise I couldn't have persevered in my teaching,
my research, my activism. That's me: intellectual pessimism, and a will to optimism;
tentative optimism, but optimism nonetheless.
Berreman and Pedelty
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Berreman
333
What will happen in India, you ask? I have no idea. I'm definitely
pessimistic, given the current political climate in India and South Asia as a whole.
But I also think things may get better . .. not that it's in any way evident! We in the
U.S. are certainly not in any position to lecture India--or any other country--on this
topic, given the political climate here.
With regard to my activism, I think that if I've had any signifilcant impact it
has been mostly through my students, by teaching them to be socially responsible,
outspoken, skeptical of conventional wisdom-basically, to practice what C. Wright
Mills called "the politics of truth." As he wrote, "in a world of widely disseminated
nonsense any statement of fact is a political act." I have encouraged them to cultivate
what he described as "the sociological imagination'"-the "quality of mind" that
recognizes the relationship between private troubles and social problems, between
individual experience and its social context. I have tried to teach students to apply
that critical, skeptical imagination as they view what passes for "news" on television
and in the press, and as they listen to words of "authority" and power. Only in that
way, I tell them, can they achieve an adequate definiition of reality. Postmodernism
notwithstanding, I do think there is reality in the world and that it can be discerned.
One relatively early example of my activist predilections: When I was in the
Air Force (1953-55), I was assigned to a small social science research unit (Human
Resources Research Institute, later dubbed Officer Education Research Laboratory) at
Maxwell Air Force Base, home of the Air University, in then totally segregated
Montgomery, Alabama-totally, that is, except for the recently and putatively
desegregated military. I was introduced to my duties by a militant young Black
officer, Alfonso Pinkney, who had already been in the unit for a year and was, like
me, a Lieutenant with a social science M.A., his in sociology from N.Y.U. We soon
became friends and, having little to do in our official duties, and being appalled by the
social envirorument in Alaba,ma, we undertook a variety of investigations of
discrimination against Blacks on the base. We regularly prepared "Research Reports"
detailing our findings and mailed them off to President Eisenhower. Just as regularly
we received curt letters of acknowledgement from a Major Green in Washington,
D.C.-we never did know what color he was! After a few months we got no more
responses. Then, our commnanding offilcer, one Colonel Barlow, (who had a Ph.D. in
Social Psychology from Michigan State) called me in and sternly announced that he
had been instructed to tell us this had to stop. No more research; no more reports.
Thinking that the Colonel-cum-social psychologist must be experiencing role conflict,
I asked, "Are you telling me I can't do it?" After a nervous pause, he blurted, "I'm
telling you that I've told you, you can't do it!" Pinkney wasn't called in I guess I
was supposed to relay the message--but but he was harassed in more direct and
damaging ways.
We had also become involved in the defense of a Black Master Sergeant, who
had been court martialed on charges of embezzlement prefeffed by his commuanding
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officer, a White Captain. The Sergeant was eventually exonerated after I had solicited
the services of a prominent and courageous anti-racist southern White lawyer, Clifford
Durr, who defended him pro bono. Through careful pre-trial questioning of the
defense witnesses, Durr had ascertained that the Captain had framed the Sergeant and
was himself the embezzler. The Captain was then court martialed, convicted, and
sentenced to I I years at hard labor in Fort Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Talk
about poetic justice!
Meanwhile, long before the captain's trial, and clearly as a result of these and
other incidents of racial conflict and discrimination, Pinkney had been punitively
transferred to the Air Force hospital at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, as a
psychologically disturbed "racial agitator." I won't take the time to tell you about his
subsequent transfer and his passive resistance in his new post, during which he
worked on a book-length expose' of the Air Force. I will tell you that he eventually,
and to his amazement, received a telephone call in his quarters from a secretary who
announced that he was to leave. When he asked, "You mean I'm discharged?" The
answer was., "Just go!"' Taking no chances, he packed his bag., picked up his
manuscript and went. Where he went was to his beloved Greenwich Village. There
he relaxed in familiar haunts with old friends and completed his expose. Then one
day, carrying his manuscript, he took a walk along the East River, sat on a bench,gave
it a final look-over, and threw it in the river. He then retired to the bucolic environs of
Ithaca, N.Y., enrolled in Cornell's Ph.D. program in Sociology, and ultimately
became a well-known, much-published, and now Emeritus, Professor at Hunter
College, and frequent Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He never heard
from the Air Force again.
Having had experience of the racism of civilian (as well as military)
Montgomery via both White and Black friends, I had become intensely concerned
with issues of racism and social inequality in general. I had also followed India's
Independence movement, the role and non-violent methods of Mahatma Gandhi., and
the struggles of untouchables and other minorities for emancipation. I had read the
work of sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, whose message was that Blacks in America
resent and resist their status because the U.S. is avowedly egalitarian, while Blacks are
exploited and excluded--in short, denied the rights, privileges, 'and protections
supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. As a Black American, Cox knew well
whereof he wrote. He went on, however, to compare the plight of Blacks with that of
India's untouchables. He wrote that untouchables accept their status because Indian
society is traditionally and pervasively inegalitarian. Untouchables accept their status,
he said, because it is enshrined in the scriptures. So, they wait patiently and willingly
for their reward in theilr next incarnation. He had no first hand knowledgye of India. so
far as I know. The nearest he came was to read the descriptions and explanations of
India's literate elite-the high, powerful, and privileged castes, and their friends.
Beffeman and Pedelty
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Beffeman
33
I thought that he must surely be wrong. Based on what I had experienced
with Blacks in Alabama, and what I had read of the circumstances of Untouchables in
India, I did not believe that any people would endorse, and cooperate in, their own
oppression. I wanted to see for myself.
So, I got a dissertation grant and went to India and lived in a village much of
the time for a year. I got to know a number of Untouchables well and many more
casually, as well as far more people of the middle and high castes. And, lo and
behold, I found exactly what I expected to find. Untouchables' responses to their
status were down-the-line similar to those of Blacks in the U.S. Responses of higher
castes were down-the-line similar to those of racist Whites in the U.S.
I had gone to India quite sure of what I would find, and I did!
I know what you may be thinking, but the fact is I had evidence-data rather
than simply ideology or conjecture. In those days Anthropology was built on
evidence: on field research, on participant observation, on empathy. Postmodernism
was not even on the horizon.
I like to think I have made a contribution, however small, to the understanding
of caste oppression in India and birth-ascribed inequalities and iniquities everywher'e.
I believe that such understanding has the potential for contributing to their mitigation
and perhaps, eventually, elimination. I must say, though, that while there did follow a
turnabout in interpretations of caste and its consequences among foreign Indianists
and at least some Indian scholars not by any means as a result of my work alone-~
there has been a subsequent reversion on the part -of many to a view of caste as having
been overemphasized. According to this revisionist view, the caste system as we
know it was largely a product of the colonial administration and in any case has been
largely eliminated. These cannot be scholars who have first-hand experience of the
rural 75% of India's population.' That view is of a piece with the view that social and
economic inequality are in general necessary, inevitable, benign, and even desirable in
any society. This is clearly part of the move in India and worldwide, to the political,
economic, ideological, and moral right. Power, privilege, greed, and brutality are
formidable adversaries. The struggle for equality anld justice never ends.
I have described just now some of the early, formative events in my
socialization to activism. Now I want to simply list examples of the main sorts of
activism in which I have participated, together with many other faculty members and
students at Berkeley and elsewhere, from the 1960s to the present. In some cases I
will briefly indicate the role I played!l
* Cuban Missile Crisis: member of conumittee organized in opposition to U.S.
policy.
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No. 89/90
* American Federation of Teachers (AFL-CIO):- faculty union organizing
committee and member.
*  Civil Rights: Bay Area and campus activities against racism.
*  Free Speech Movement: faculty activist.
*Anti-Vietnam War activism: organized first U.C. anti-war teach-in; member
of Faculty Peace Committee steering committee & sometime chair; active
throughout.
*  Anti-apartheid and divestment from S. Africa: activism until it ended.
*  Association for Asian Studies: anti-military complicity and funding activist.
*  U.C. Berkeley's Himalayan Border Countries Research Project: -Opposed
military funding. Succeeded, with help of Senator Fulbright and Government
of India, in termination of the project.
*  American Anthropological Association, Committee on Ethics: Key role in
drafting Principles of Professional Responsibility (i.e., code of ethics), and,
with Eric Wolf and others, exposed some anthropologists' complicity in the
war in Southeast Asia.
*  American Anthropological Association: Nominated as the "Anti-war"
candidate for AAA P'resident, 1970 (over opposition of then AAA P'resident
George Foster-an inveterate adversary of the Committee on Ethics in that
era who convinced two of the other three candidates to withdraw (in
violation of AAA rules) to avoid a split in the "responsible" vote and a
"radical take-over" (i.e., reducing the election to a contest between myself and
the much senior, more prominent and conservative A. F. C. Wallace  who
who won by a margin of two to one). But the nomination and the substantial
vote it achieved constituted a moral victory in that it afforded the "radical"
minority a degree of legitimacy that others had been loath to grant it! 2
*U.C. Academic Senate Ad Hoc Committee on ROTC: Member of this diverse
committee which unanimously concluded that ROTC lacked both intellectual
content and legitimacy as a university department, and therefore had no place
on this campus. (Note: While in the Air Force, a major project to which I was
assigned was an evaluation of the Air Force ROTC program. In that role,
among other things I interviewed ROTC "faculty" and students at University
of Washington, Auburn University, and Tuskegee Institute, and participated
in a study of ROTC summner programs.)
Berreman and Pedelty
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Berreman
37
* U.C. Academic Senate Conumittee on Academic Freedom: Member active in
defense of academic freedom on many specific issues.
* International Commission on the Tasaday Controversy (Philippine
Anthropological Society) 1986: Member of the comission and a continuing
voice in the succssful five-year effort to demonstrate that the allegedly
uniquely "primitive" Tasaday "tribe" comprised a crude (but heavily funded)
politically motivated hoax.3
*  AAA Committee on Ethics member (1969-71) and AAA Executive Board
member (1971-74): Active opposition to military advisory roles and similar
complicity by anthropologists, through both of these AAA offices throughout
these years.
* Anti-Iraq War: activism throughout that war' s duration.
*Peace and Conflict Studies program, U.C. Berkeley: Active in the struggle
for a department or program on the U.C. Berkeley campus (ultimately
achieved an Undergaduate Group Major, with one Lecturer faculty member
and a number of faculty members in various departments teaching courses
therein).
*  Department of Ethnic Studies: Active in the long fight for establishment and
retention of this department, and service on (and sometime chair of) its
"6oversight conunittee," preceding its eventual independent departmental
status.
*  American  Cultures Requirement: Active in implementation   of this
requirement, which assures that every undergraduate will take at least one
course in their Berkeley career which exposes them to a variety of American
ethnic groups and cultures other than their own.
All of the above entailed confrontation with powerful forces in opposition on
the campus, in the university, in the relevant professional associations, and/or
throughout the society or internationally. Most of the efforts described have met with
at least a degree of success, and many of the successes have come to be taken virtually
for granted.
Question: Would you reflect on your career in terms of your fieldwork
experience?
Gerald Berreman: OK, reflections on fieldwork: Fieldwork has meant a
great deal to me. It is certainly the most rewarding part of being an anthropologist. I
have learned more from it than I could have in any other way not just facts and
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experiences, but understanding of people and the worlds they live in. I, and'I am sure
many others, have been rewarded immeasurably by the fact that our research has been
"long-term" and "multi-sited," long before those terms became fashionable. Such
research has provided me with lifelong friends: Aleuts, Himalayan villagers, urbanites
of Dehra Dun (the Indian city I lived in -and studied), urbanites of Kathmandu (and
villagers who were their relatives), academic colleagues and students in those cities
and elsewhere in those countries, and colleagues and students in many other countries
I have visited as researcher, professor, or lecturer. I would not trade my ethnographic
fieldwork experiences for any other experience.
Some thoughts specific to my fieldwork: When I had arrived in India and was
searching near the foot of the Himalayas for villages suitable for my dissertation
research plan to compare culture change in two villages, one near to and the other
relatively isolated from Dehra Dun, I encountered a teashop keeper who took an
interest in what I wanted to do. He said, "There's nothing very interesting here. It's
just like the rest of north India. You ought to visit some mountain villages. Those
people are Hindus, but their way of life is different from ours." Intrigued, I followed
his suggestion. When I saw the beauty of the envirorument and discovered the
uniqueness of the people and their villages, I knew that was where I wanted to work.
Having heard from classmates of the nigors of fieldwork in the dusty plains of north
India, I thought it almost a cop-out to work in a place so attractive. Wasn't misery in
the field part of the initiation ritual for an anthropologist? But my decision was made.
I took up residence in Sirkanda village which, together with its region, became my
long-time research site. I have never regretted it. (Not that the Himalayan physical
and social environments don't have rigors of their own, I hasten to say!)
I return frequently-most recently, together with my wife and colleague
Keiko Yamanaka, six months ago. The return is always rewarding. It's the special
reward that long-term ethnographic research holds for the anthropologist: to
experience the life histories of one's friends and inforimants, and the cultural,
economic, political, and material changes that any people, any community, any
enviromment undergoes over time. In another dimension, it is both rewarding and
enlightening to recognize, understand, and empathize with people who are
superf'lcially very different from those with whom one is already familiar, yet prove
always to be fundamentally very similar to those one has known elsewhere and under
other circumstances. In short, in fieldwork, one experiences common humanity and
unique individuality-the same range that one finds in one's home community,
among one's relatives, in one's academic department!
Long-term research also guarantees that one will experience acutely and
poignantly the facts of aging and mortality. I have been naively surprised that
children I knew now have children-or grandchildren. A generation is emerging that
recognizes me, if at all, only as part of local folklore. Always, I suppose, such
expectable changes are mutually surprising-to both anthropologist and those who are
Berreman and Pedelty
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Berreman
339
informants and friends. Dismay is likely to be concealed through humor. At a recent
reunion in my Himalayan field site, my blacksmith friend shouted in greeting that I
must have soap in my hair, and I responded by asking when he had become a "four-
eyes." Among my age-mates and older, of course, the numbers grow fewer. I am
saddened at each return to discover the loss of friends. But my life has been
immneasurably enriched by having known them.
Changes in the material environment and technology are of course
conspicuous and to be expected, but these too may come as a shock: a road is
approaching Sirkanda, some houses have electricity, a few have television. More
children, including, impressively, many more girls than before, are in school; some
have gone on to high school, several have become teachers, and others have migrated
to cities. Development schemes are intruding in ways that are often damaging and
resented-massive limestone and timber extraction, dam building, tourism intrusion-~
the list goes on.
In short, fieldwork has enriched me and, indirectly my students, in ways and
to an extent that I could not have anticipated.
Question: What's next for you?
Gerald BejrjeMan: I have no very concrete plans. I look forward to visiting
places and peoples that I know about, but have not known experientially. I will
definitely continue to revisit those I have known, in South Asia, the Pacific, the
Aleutians, Scandinavia, and elsehwere. I don't intend to embark on major new
research, but I will enjoy-in fact already have enjoyed-accompanying Keiko on her
research trips to Brazil, Europe, and most of the countries of East and Southeast Asia.
As I contemplate the experience of retirement, the hopes and expectations that
come immediately to mind tend toward escapes. Among these is the escape from
uniinteresting changes (and don't misunderstand me, many of the changes are
interesting) that are occunring in the definiition and practice of anthropology. That is, I
look forward to escaping responsibility for keeping up with those that depart from
what attracted me to the discipline and sustained me in it. But that is no doubt to be
expected in the evolution of the discipline, and mine must be the experience, more or
less, of every generation.
More pragmatic is the relief I expect to experience at avoiding the direction of
change I see in the university, in the academic profession, and in the daily practices
and experiences of being a professor here. I'm  *th-inkn of the growing impersonality,
the rampant bureaucratization, the vast increase in the number of administrators and
their Bush-like arrogance of power, together with the drastic diminution of the role of
faculty in university governance. The role of the Academic Senate epitomizes this:
"lip service, yes; self governance, no" seems to be the admini'strative motto.
340                      Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers  No. 89/90
On a less profound note, I will be happy not to endlessly prepare lectures,
attend department meetings, file bio-bibliographical reports, respond to every
bureaucratic demand the admfini'stration can think up, invent letters of
recommendation (and I do mean invent!). How I have dreaded letters of
recommendation; how relieved I will be to escape them. Let me elaborate:
You know, students say: "I need 6 letters of recommendation. Just run them
off on your computer from the last one you wrote." But guess what? One is for a job
at Harvard, another at Laney College; one is for a grant to do research in London and
another in Timbuktu, one is to work for an NGO and another for the CIA. Every
student ha's to be touted a paragon. You have to mark the reference formi with "top
2%,)" "5%,"" or, in the case of the total dunce,, "toplO%," if they're ever to get a job.
Or how about, "best in 10 years,," "5 years,,"' heck,, why not just a binary choice,, ""best
ever"9 or " worst ever?"" I've advocated an adjective wheel for use in the qualitative
statement-something like those verb wheels you get to help you through French
class. Maybe make one where you'd just spin the wheel and insert the adjective that
turns up-like Wheel of Fortune. Stanley Brandes., gentle soul,, confilded to me a few
years ago that he hated recommendation writing more than any other professorial task.
I said,, "I'm so glad to hear that,, I thought I was the only one!" That's probably true
for most of us.
Comment from the audience: I have news for you. Retirement is no
escape. Letters of recommendation never go away!
Gerald Berreman: Yes,, I suspected as much. Gramsci to the rescue! That"s
the optimism of my will kicking in, as I confront the pessimism of my intellect. I
know intellectually that the chances that,, post-retirement., recommendations will no
longer be requested are vanishingly small, but I cling to that thin thread of hope.
On that hopeful note,, I see that I have run out of time actually,, substantially
over-run out of time. Thank you all for being here, for staying to the end,, which has
doubtless seemed to continuously recede toward infinity. I am truly overwhelmed by
this whole event. I would say I'm "speechless,," if that weren't so obviously not the
case!
Pedelty: We want to thank all of those who planned and executed this event,,
notably Katie MacKinnon and Kevin Bartoy of the Kroeber Anthropological Society,
and Keiko Yamanaka., of the Department of Ethnic Studies., as well,, of course,, as all
of the presenters and session chairs and those graduate students who helped in other
capacities. Above all, we are grateful to all of you who have attended this wonderful
event, some of whom have come from afar. Let's acknowledge those who have come
the greatest distances. The one who has come the farthest is Rosiah Omar, Professor
and Dean at the University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur. Probably next is Terry
Berreman and Pedelty
A Participatory Conversation with Gerald Berreman
341
Haynes from Fairbanks, where he is in the Division of Subsistence of the Alaska
Department of Fish and Game. Any others contenders?
From the audience: How about Rhode Island?
Gerald Berreman: No, Lucile [Newman], Rhode Island doesn't qualify-
it's too small!
Pedelty: With that, our time is up and we will close this conference and retire
to the Atrium in 2251 College, the building that houses the Archaeologists, where a
reception with food and drink awaits us all.
As those who were in attendance at the conference will recognize, this list has been inserted
after the oral "conversation" occurred, have a number of other items and anecdotes in this text.
They are included here as a result of subsequent requests, suggestions, and inspirations.
2 For accounts of the saga of that election and its context see my chapter, "Ethics versus
'Realism' in Anthropology Redux," in C. Fluehr-Lobban's edited Ethics and the Profession of
Anthropology: Di'alog for Ethically ConsciousPractice. (2nd editioin, Altamira Press, 2003),
Pp. 51- 83, and Eric Wakin's Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and
Counterinsurgency in Thailand, (Monogrpah no. 7, Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
University of Wisconsin, 1992).
3 See my "The Incredible 'Tasaday:' Deconstructing the Myth of a 'Stone-Age' People."
Cultural Survival Quarterly, (I1991) 15 (1): 2-45, and Thomas N. Headland (ed.) The Tasaday
Hoaxc Controversy: Assessing the Evidence. Washington D.C.: American Anthiropological
Assn.