Gardner Cowles Lecture

With Ithaca on My Mind: An Anthropologist's Journey

‍Lambros Comitas

Mr. President, Madame Dean, distinguished members of the Board of Trustees, esteemed colleagues, and dear friends:

I am deeply honored to occupy the Gardner Cowles chair in anthropology andeducation. I am sincerely grateful, as well, to the President and Trustees of Teachers College for having selected me and to the late Gardner Cowles for his generosity in having made it possible.

In one's professional development, there are a few friends and colleagues whoexert especially powerful influence. For me, there were three: Professor Conrad Arensberg introduced me to the richness of anthropology; Professor M. G. Smith unravelled for me the mysteries of the field; and, the late Dr. Vera Rubin counselled me, believed in me, and provided me with unparalleled opportunities to learn and grow. I am indebted to them all.

My theme, anthropology as journey, owes much to a reading of the poem Ithaca¹ by Constantine Kavafy, a magnificent Greek poet who wrote during the first part of this century. This deceptively simple poem deals metaphorically with the process ofdiscovery, with journeys of both mind and body, and it draws on Odysseus' near mythicIthaca as symbol and inspiration. For me, an anthropologist with cross-culturalexperience, the intellectual impact of this Kavafy poem is powerful and its philosophicalmessage profound. For an American of Greek descent, like myself, whose mother andfather were born and raised in Ithaca, it also evokes memories of the past, bittersweetdissonances, emotional detritus of a family formed in cultural transition. Perhaps justbecause of the obvious asymmetry in these strong impressions, I make use of this poemtoday to frame my remarks. A spinner of images of beauty and sensitivity, Kavafycaptures for me the illusive core of an anthropology I value and attempt to practice--and--my father would have been so pleased even with these elliptical references to his belovedisland and its Homeric past.

The first stanzas of the poem Ithaca stand almost as an exhortation to thoseentering anthropology, a charge to the science of man. In my translation, the openinglines are as follows:

When you set forth for Ithaca,
pray that the journey be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
angry Poseidon, fear them not,
such you'll never find along your way
if your thoughts are lofty, if select
emotions touch your spirit and your flesh.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
fierce Poseidon, you'll not encounter
if you don't hold them in your soul
,if you don't conjure them up before you.
‍
Pray that the journey be long.
That many be the summer morns,
with what pleasure, with what joy,
you enter harbors first-time seen
and stop at ports Phoenician,
and acquire wares of beauty,
mother of pearl and coral,
amber and ebony,
and sensuous scents of all sorts,
as many as you can,
excesses of sensuous scents.
To many Egyptian cities go,
to learn, and to learn from the learned.

What is it that anthropology seeks to learn, in those many Egyptian cities and Phoenician ports? Here in the United States anthropology is, quintessentially, the science of man, an overarching discipline with ties to the biological sciences, to the humanities, and to its sibling social sciences. A science which in theory explores allfacets of human life through both time and space, it comprises physical anthropology, archeology, linguistics and sociocultural anthropology. Like any science, it is ultimately concerned with the establishment of general laws and principles; as a unique and distinctscience, however, its objective is the determination of the principles that govern mankind. Emile Durkheim, that seminal social theorist, once stated that scientific theory has as its goal the expression of reality--anthropological theory is no exception to this dictum.

There are many theoretical currents in contemporary American sociocultural anthropology, the most popular among them being structural-functionalism and Weberiantheory in their modern guises, structuralism, symbolic theory, and Marxist social theory in its several current guises. Significantly, no one approach dominates American anthropology, nor can any one be viewed as presenting the perspective of most American anthropologists. This situation lends itself to a potentially fruitful combination of frustrations and flexibilities. The plethora of approaches can be frustrating, especially for students new to the field, in that the subject often seems to lack a clear set of epistemological understandings; it is not always obvious what it is that the anthropologist wants to know. Conversely, the absence of rigid boundaries and definitions offers an arena for creative combinations and innovative solutions to theoretical and methodological questions. The history of anthropology continues to demonstrate thevalue of multiple perspectives and the flexibility gained from a lack of a dominantapproach and rigid definitions. In this, the discipline has had great good fortune.

Anthropology, or perhaps better, anthropologies, are part and parcel of thehistorical context in which they develop, in which they are used--to answer some questions and to pose others--and in which, as often as not, they are eulogized. Anthropological theory has not sprung de novo from the heads of individual scholars. It has not developed in a vacuum. It has reflected the concerns of the day, the issues and questions of moment. The tone and direction of scholarly work, more frequently perhaps than its ivory-tower exponents know--or admit--respond to the changing demands of policy makers and to altered financial conditions and constraints. This reality is one that anthropologists need to understand better.

Social and cultural anthropologists attempt to express reality by observing, recording, analyzing, and then abstracting the essentials of specific realities. We normallycarry out these tasks in the field, in vivo, among living groups of people in their quotidian rounds of life. For the occasional romantic and the misinformed, the field is something far removed from the beaten track, a New Yorker cartoon, an isolated locale peopled by bizarre folk peered at by pith-helmeted anthropologists so preoccupied with the savage and exotic as to exclude the complex and the civilized. Such a view, of course, never heldtrue. The anthropologist can find and define the field, the locus of study, as easily, or with as much difficulty, in the boardrooms of Wall Street, among AIDS victims in NewYork and Kampala or among the school children of Barbados and Grenada as it does among the surviving Ona of Tierra del Fuego or the hunting and gathering Siriono of the Bolivian lowlands. Anthropology, of all social sciences and humanities, has pursued avast variety of problems within the widest range of geographical locales and socioculturaland technological contexts.

As anthropologists know, if only intuitively, the field is not mystical ormetaphysical but rather methodological in concept. It is an amalgam of the scientific problem to be pursued, the human aggregations thought necessary for resolving that problem, and the essential locales that link both. To enter the field, then, is to embark on a journey of discovery that, seriatim, confirms or adjusts the parameters for study, identifies the specific knowledge necessary for understanding these parameters, andindicates the appropriate techniques for generating that knowledge. The field, in short, is a process that unveils that precise context in which the specific research problem is embedded. When such a context is revealed and comprehended, the problem quaproblem is resolved, the journey ends.

If anthropology has a soul, that soul is the field. It is the corrective of dogmatic extravagances in theory and zealous chauvinisms in ideology. The field, the cumulative experience of the field, cleanses the anthropological psyche of its own Laestrygonians and Cyclopes and of its other assorted windmills.

There is a personal dimension in this process as well. More than just rite depassage, the field is both crucible and molder of anthropologists-- a placid depository ofthat which must be known, teacher to those willing to learn, stern judge of those who come to it with preconceptions. Perhaps most importantly, it is the source of that constant experiential pressure which helps shape and maintain anthropology's distinctiveworld view. For most who have experienced it, the field is intense and demanding, insome ways comparable to psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. Differing greatly from thepsychiatrist's couch, however, the field provides a litmus test to all who enter, a test ofthat intricate dance between researcher's personality and intelligence and the unfamiliarsocial and cultural forces that initially engulf him. The novice in the field, proverbial bullin the china shop, learns the steps of this dance, gradually adjusts his strengths andweaknesses to a strange milieu, masters the subtleties of his trade, collects far too many answers for far too many questions, and sojourn suddenly completed, he emerges fromthe field, rarely satisfied, but substantially more knowledgeable than when he entered--sprung not from the psychiatrist's couch but from some bull ring of conflicting realities. This cycle tends to be repeated, perhaps more muted in psychic cost and more productivein objective result each time the researcher re-enters the field to undertake new study. For me and, I would hazard, for most of my colleagues, it is the sum of these many fields, the sum of these journeys of mind and body, that constitute the discipline of anthropology. So, would it not be fair to say that repeated and sustained effort in the field, Kavafy's "many summer morns," is what allows his "harbors first-time seen" to take scientific shape, and his "wares of beauty," and "sensuous scents," and learnings "from the learned" to be acquired.

Illustrations drawn from my own field experience might add dimension to these comments. Each quite different from the other, they show my interest in the nature ofsociety and in basic research on real life issues. The first deals with social innovation in Jamaican society; the second with community and change in Bolivian society; and the third with individuals and deviancy in Greek society.

In 1957, I was commissioned to carry out a study of social innovation among Jamaicans who were ostensibly fishermen. At least, they were so considered by those branches or agencies of the Jamaican government most concerned with the fishing industry. The objective was to isolate those factors contributing to the success or failure of a government-sponsored program organizing fishing cooperatives among coastal folk. I include this study here to indicate that youth and energy may well be antidotes to limited resources.

Having just completed work on a somewhat similar study of fishing folk in Barbados, I arrived in Jamaica aware of the many pitfalls that await the brash ethnographer. Consequently, before deciding on an overall research strategy and with the Barbados experience vividly in mind, I devoted the first weeks to familiarizing myselfwith fishing, fishermen, and associated phenomena throughout Jamaica. During this initial reconnaissance, I visited over a third of the 140 fishing beaches of the island. I catalogued the range of fishing methods, equipment and techniques, documented the more obvious relationships of regional or local ecology on fishing activity, and examined, at first hand, as many fishing cooperatives as possible. The reconnaisance yielded some unexpected results: for example, although Jamaican fishermen could come from very different socioeconomic settings, in order to eke out an existence, they all, as a rule, had to combine fishing with wage work of various kinds and, very often, with own-accountcultivation. What also came to light was that the particular kind of fishing practiced by anindividual depended on the type and extent of the work he did on land. Consequently, it seemed that fishing itself was a dependent rather than a dominant variable in the so-called fisherman's economic equation. These tantalizing leads were used as connecting threadsfor the research that followed.

To ensure that all major ecological zones be included, five coastal settlementswere selected for intensive study. Given the constraints on my time, this meant I could spend no more than two months in each study site. This restriction had major, although not necessarily negative, implications on the style of field research that I could conduct and the methods and techniques that could be employed. Consequently, the study tookthe form of what I would call a survey in depth with a balanced, two-pronged approach, quantitative and qualitative. Utilizing the quantitative approach, I managed to collectdata on kinship, marital status, internal migration, schooling, literacy, house types, landtenure, cultivation, livestock, occupations, type of fishing, and the like. Employing the qualitative approach, I was able to gather material on fishing, agricultural and handicraft technologies, to conduct in-depth interviews with key informants and to study thecooperatives in detail. Both approaches yielded rich research dividends. I still find it remarkable how efficient data collection can be when problem, field, and method neatly mesh. For that matter, I still marvel as to how easily such ideal conditions can propel ausually composed ethnographer into manic fits and frenetic motion.

I was able to demonstrate that the people studied did not warrant blanket categorization as fishermen; that even though they cultivated land, they did not neatly fallinto the sociological categories then in vogue, that is, peasants, farmers, or plantation workers. This enabled me not only to meet the objectives of the study, but also to enter into the then quite vitriolic scientific debates about the nature of Caribbean society. With regard to the fishing study, however, the social innovators who had attempted to promulgate fishing cooperatives in Jamaica unwittingly had borrowed a model andconcept of cooperation drawn from the experiences of full-time fishermen in industrialnations and it had little or no relation to conditions in Jamaica. The fishing cooperative was a benign innovation which assumed an occupationally homogeneous membership. Given the heterogeneous adaptations necessary for survival in the harsh socioeconomic reality of Jamaica, it was also doomed to failure.²

The Bolivian case that I turn to now is a rare example of an anthropological teamstudy of an entire nation-state. It is an illustration of some of the theoretical flexibilityand methodological range possible when adequate financial and personnel resources are available. In 1964, twelve years after a major social revolution in Bolivia, Vera Rubinand I were asked by the Peace Corps to identify the major health problems of rural Bolivian communities in different ecological settings; to analyze the dynamics of rural community organization; and to assess the implications of rural social organization for community action. To accomplish these tasks, we undertook a series of linked epidemiological and anthropological studies which were intended to facilitate the work of the Peace Corps and other development agencies in that country. To put these studies incontext, some background is necessary.

In 1952, a combination of social and economic events forcibly pitched Boliviainto the twentieth century. After a series of coups and counter-coups, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement took power. The MNR, a party of urban intellectuals and politicians with widely differing ideologies, led, guided and occasionally diverted theseveral elements in Bolivia clamoring for change and recognition. With a sweeping platform of social reform, in total opposition to the ideas and wishes of the traditional elite, the MNR had to assure itself of the support of the Indian population, that greatmajority which until that time had never been allowed participation in Bolivian nationallife. To ensure this support, a number of basic actions were taken which transformed the power shift of 1952 into a frontal attack on the traditional order of Bolivian society. First, universal suffrage was granted to all adults, with no requirements for literacy in orunderstanding of Spanish. Secondly, pressured by the tin miners, the most highlypoliticized workers in the country, the MNR nationalized the vast holdings of the threemost important tin barons. Finally, and most importantly, propelled more quickly by the extra-legal seizures of latifundia lands by organized Indians, now labelled campesinos, the government legislated a national agrarian reform, returning to the Indians land that once belonged to their forefathers. Through this legislation and its somewhat circumscribed implementation, the government, supported by campesino strength, weakened the power of the traditional elites. The partial redistribution of the country's national resources and the newly mobilized but politically potent force of the campesinos formed the backdrop for social change.

Aside from these three fundamental slashes at the fabric of an almost classic example of a plural society, in the immediate years after the Revolution other less obvious efforts were made by the MNR to integrate a sharply stratified, culturally heterogeneous, regionally oriented, and clearly disunited polity. The most important ofthese secondary efforts in the essential task of nation-building came in the manipulationof social legislation for the benefit of workers, in the building of institutional supports forthe rural population, and in the dramatic expansion of rural education.

In the twelve years of MNR control, Bolivian society had been unquestionably altered. However, given the lack of adequate field and archival research, often misleading national statistics, and the pervasive fog of official propaganda, the extent and form of the restructuring remained unclear. In addition, satisfactory answers had yet to be given as to how far the revolutionary leadership intended to carry its reform, to what extent it was willing to institutionalize and legitimatize change, and to what degree it was ready or even able to incorporate the Aymara or Quechua Indian into the mainstream of Bolivian national life and to permit his free competition for position in society. Answers to these and many other questions were to be sought by the research team.

The theoretical underpinning of the study is revealed by the criteria used to selectsix rural communities for primary study. These six could not be selected to be statistically representative of the hundreds of Bolivian rural communities because there were no reliable national statistics or other indicators that would have permitted representative sampling. Moreover, they were not selected to represent different regionsin Bolivia, or distinctive histories, or divergent economies, even though they were located in different regions, had been formed by distinctive histories, and were widely divergentin economy. Since a primary intent of the study was to assess community action and the mobilization of that action, the theoretically and methodologically appropriate solution was to select communities that represented major organizational types, that is, communities with very different organizational properties.

For understanding post-revolutionary Bolivian communities, the two most illuminating of these properties were undoubtedly social stratification and politicalization. Social stratification, the differential ranking of the categories of people that compose a given social system, was always an integral aspect of Andean history. Even before the Inca conquest of what is now highland Bolivia, highly stratified social systems existed at the local level. The Spanish Conquest compounded the social situationand a variety of complex orders of stratification emerged. By 1964, there would have been no way to understand the dynamics of change without first studying social stratification at the community level. The second property, politicalization, or the intensification of political involvement, is obviously a critical but permutable element in much of the contemporary Third World. It was certainly important in post-revolutionary Bolivia. Before 1952, the vast majority of the Bolivian people, the Aymara and the Quechua, was illiterate, isolated from the centers of power, and totally excluded from participation in national political life, a largely inert but vaguely threatening political mass. The revolution of 1952 began a process of radical alteration, a process ofpoliticalization that ultimately affected, to some degree, all Bolivian communities.

The six communities selected for study, four rural towns and two Indian pueblos, represented variations along these two organizational properties, a continuum ofcommunity types from minimally stratified and non-politicized to complexly stratified and politically revolutionized. Anthropological teams spent a year in each, worked from a common community study guide, and generated voluminous ethnographic andsociological data for comparative purposes. Each community was also studied by an epidemiological team that, among other results, produced the first national epidemiological study of Bolivia. A census of the study communities was completed aswas an extraordinarily extensive social survey of 1130 heads of household. In addition, avariety of sectoral or topical studies were launched and completed. By anthropologicalstandards, the Bolivia study was a mammoth undertaking which, in its three year lifespan, deployed and coordinated the activities of over eighty social and medical scientists.In objective terms, our study of a country long considered scientific terra incognita was aspectacular success. It reached and exceeded goals of scientific and practical value. Of lasting significance, the study also demonstrated the possibilities of productive anthropological team research and produced the most extensive and significant social science data bank on Bolivia to date.³

The third and last example of anthropological field illustrates what is sometimespossible when the scientific problem is complex, the available resources minimal, and theresearch conditions tenuous.

In Greece, hashish users are commonly thought of as deviants, sometimes sociopaths, individuals who are arrested and imprisoned and who transgress the norms ofthe society more often than non-using Greeks. Against this attitudinal backdrop, I directed a research project during the 1970s, a time when the Colonels" Junta was still in control. In tandem with a medical and psychiatric study of the effects of hashish, this anthropological project sought to identify the social, cultural, and subcultural factors that enhanced or inhibited hashish use in Greece; to provide some idea of use and non-use of hashish in the general Greek population; and, to explore the effects and consequences of Greek drug laws on the lives of users. Preliminary investigation had confirmed initialimpressions that hashish use was not extensive at the time of the study; that the fewpockets of relatively high densities of users were to be found only in the large cities; thatthe number of Greek users was relatively stable; and, that confirmed users were mostoften from the working class. The principal problems of delineating the field of study revolved around identifying and studying a population which, deviant by social definition, small in number, and scattered in location, was not overly amenable or accessible to scientific probe. Compounding these problems, no trained anthropologistsor other Greek social scientists were available to help carry out the research. This meantthat the geographical scope of the study had to be constricted without distorting ourobjectives. I decided to focus on the Athens-Piraeus area, where a high density of hashish users lived, and which would permit the most effective mustering and training of a research staff.

Paucity of historical data on Greek hashish use, insufficiency of objective information on current users and practices, and lack of anthropologists, also forced early decisions on the selection of techniques and methods that would both help to train a staff as well as to identify the sociocultural context of hashish use. The collection of life histories, one of several techniques and methods introduced, proved to be the most successful on both scores. The Greek staff became adept at interviewing and was instrumental in generating over a hundred complete life histories of users and controls.From these voluminous materials, a composite history of urban hashish use was drawn relying only on actually spoken words to evoke the context and to explore the meaning of hashish-related behavior in Greece. Collecting the materials for this composite life history, or put more accurately, this social history of modern Greece from the perspectives of the lower class, proved to be a surprisingly efficient method of beginning to train anthropological neophytes as well as of generating those historical and contemporary contexts from which multi-dimensional understandings of the behavior of hashish users could be gleaned.

Over time, as the life histories demonstrate, hashish smokers, never very large in number and largely ignored by the authorities during the early decades of this century, were subjected to increasingly stringent sanctions. Analysis of these life histories indicates that changes in Greek drug laws had less to do with any imagined escalation of a hashish or "drug" problem than the ideological repercussions that followed the drastic political and socioeconomic turbulences long buffeting Greek society. Even a casual reading of these life histories makes this direct relationship abundantly clear. As a consequence, it became obvious that hashish use, hashish users, and the consequences of hashish use in Greece could not be comprehended entirely if not viewed and examined in the context of shifting political, social, and ideological pressures, that is, in the context of contexts.

This goal, the essential part of this journey, was reached through a controlled and systematic presentation of the views of the actors themselves crafted to give a balanced, contextualized, and chronological picture of hashish-related phenomena in urban Greece. By use of this format, questions related to hashish are debated by those most affected, a debate carried through the overlapping contexts of connected issues--how hashish was diffused into the country, the influence of the Asia Minor refugees, the trauma of refugee resettlement, the urbanization of Greater Athens and attendant problems, the ambience of the work place, the jails and their effect, and the paradoxes of the law. These and other issues are traced though time beginning with the great Catastrophe of 1922, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Albanian War, World War II, the German occupation of Greece, the bloody civil war of the post-war period and, finally, the Colonels' Junta of 1967.

The subjects selected for anthropological study lived in several contiguous neighborhoods of Old Athens, neighborhoods that lie almost in the shadow of the Acropolis. Included were a number of older men, ethnic Greeks from Turkish Asia Minor, who came to those once desolate Athenian locales over a half century ago. Victims of Turkey's victory over Greece in 1922 and refugees because of the resultant forced exchange of populations between the two countries, many of these old respondents were born and reared in a particular region of Asia Minor where ethnic Greeks had beenin the minority. Significantly, the use of hashish among the pre-1922 inhabitants of that region, ethnic Greeks included, seems to have been greater than in other Asia Minor regions where Greeks and other Europeans lived in denser concentrations as, for example, in cosmopolitan Smyrna circa 1910. A surprisingly large number of other hashish users, almost all born in Athens, were found to be offspring or otherwise relatedor connected to refugees from Asia Minor. In addition to this refugee link, many respondents held similar jobs as porters, carters, food vendors, and butchers in the central food markets and slaughterhouses of Athens and Piraeus. Throughout this century, but particularly during lean years of war and occupation, these bustling centers of aggregation offered ample opportunity for forbidden activities such as hashish smoking and dealing to those so motivated. One eloquent hashish user, 4 ruminating about thedays when he migrated to the outskirts of Athens, evoked the following sensitive andsociologically precise images.