PERSONAL INFORMATION

This Personal Information Page has three sections. The first section, Extra-professional,  is a selection of several pieces, essays, lectures, introductions etc, more personal than professional, and which reach out to a larger or different public.  The second section, Personal Favorites contains a selection of my preferred professional publications.  These pieces are also representative of collateral and thematic preoccupations characteristic of a career that began with my early fifties undergraduate interest in anthropology and a field research career that began among  Fang of Western Equatorial Africa in 1958, and continues today among the Atlantic Fringe Celts of Western Europe.  The selections are arranged according to decade.  The third section, Dear Friends, is a small selection from among the some 40 odd Holiday Greetings, poems and drawings, prepared and sent out by my wife, Renate Lellep, and myself.

    Reflected also is a teaching career that began at Smith College in 1961 and (although I am presently retired as of October 2000) continues here at the University of Chicago until the present, spring, summer and fall of 2003-2004.  I am presently pursuing research in Northern Spain and on the Celtic revival among the Atlantic Fringe peoples of Western Europe. These pieces begin with a jocular poem of mine contributed to the American Anthropologist by my mentor M.J. Herskovits. The last item in this sequence is the retirement statement (which links back to my earliest years) prepared on the occasion of the Departmental Retirement Party for Paul Friedrich and myself in May of 2001. This series, beside being arranged according to decade, is coordinated with fotos, drawings, caricatures and other images of the period of the particular article referenced.   Several items have been chosen   to represent each decade and the reader  may click on the decade that interests him or her or follow me in a passage from decade to decade of the last half century into the new decade of the new millennium --- passing through a half century and then finally into a new millennium all told!

        EXTRA PROFESSIONAL | PERSONAL FAVORITES | DEAR FRIENDS

 


EXTRA PROFESSIONAL

This is a short selection of pieces I have published (or not published) over the years outside the stricter confines of anthropology as a discipline.  To be sure anthropology makes such a wide ranging claim on one's life that it is hard to escape its presence in even the most errant publication.

1964 "The Sound of Bells in a Christian Country--In Quest of the Historical Schweitzer."  The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, spring 1964, pp. 537-562.

1969 "A Farewell to Faculty Football"
1970 "From the Primate Patrimony to the Fellowship of Flowers:  Anthropological Views of Changing Values."  Alumni College Lectures, 1969.  Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, February 1970, pp. 25-32, 65-72.
1976  "The World--Old and New--In the Trenton Farmer's Market.New York Times, Op. Ed. Article, Sat., June 12, 1976.

1999 "The Wild Man and the Elephant," Anthropology and Humanism, Vol 25 (2): 189-190.

2001 "Farewell Statement, "The Return of the Native,"  prepared for Departmental Retirement Party for myself and Paul Friedrich. May 24, 2001.

2002 "Stereoscopic Understanding,"  requested by and prepared for 50 year Reunion Book at Amherst College (52 Pickup: Compiled and Edited by Ralph Engelsmen).


PERSONAL FAVORITES

This is a selection over four decades of a few articles from each decade that best approach the idea I had for them in writing them, and seem from this perspective of 2002 to still have some importance in them. Given the proud flesh that characterizes what has been nurtured and grown out of our hands so often in the academy this has not been an easy selection to make.

The Fifties   The Sixties   The Seventies   The Eighties    The Nineties    The New Millenium.

 

The Fifties

1954 "Wasn't It a Thought Titanic?"   American Anthropologist, Vol. 56, No. 5:l, p. 742.

The Sixties
JWF_1964.JPG (53026 bytes)

1965 "Symbolic Consensus in a Fang Reformative Cult."  American Anthropologist, Vol.  67, No. 4, August 1965, pp. 902-927.

1966 "Revitalized Words from the Parrot's Egg and the Bull Who Crashes in the Krall.Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society for 1966, pp. 53-64.

The Seventies
JWF_1970.JPG (138870 bytes)

1972 "Persuasions and Performances: Of the Beast in Every Body and the Metaphors of Everyman," Daedalus, Winter 1972 Vol 101 No. 1.

1973 "Analysis of Ritual:  Metaphoric Correspondences as the Elementary Forms."  Science, Vol. 182, 28 December 1973, pp. 1366-1367.

1977a  "Anthropology."   Review Article published in The New York Times, News of the Week in Review. Sunday June 17, 1977.

1977b "The Performance of Ritual Metaphors," in The Social Use of Metaphor, J.D. Sapir and J.C. Crocker, eds., Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 100-131.

The Eighties
jwf_1979.jpg (66950 bytes)

1980 "Reflections on Looking into Mirrors."  Semiotica, Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2, pp. 27-39.

1981 "Edification by Puzzlement," in Explorations in African Systems of Thought, Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird, eds., pp. 44-59.  Bloomington:  Indiana University Press.

1983d "Afterword; At the Center of the Human Condition". Semiotica, 46:323-330.

1985c "Macrothought," Review Article, American Ethnologist, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 749-757.

1988b "Andalucia on Our Minds: Two Contrasting Places in Spain As Seen in a Vernacular Poetic Duel of the Late 19th Century". Cultural Anthropology. Vol 3. No. 1. pp. 21-35.

The Nineties
jwf_199x.jpg (36522 bytes)

Click here to read "Enclosures: Boundary Maintainance and Its Representations over Time in Asturian Mountain Villages (Spain). Symbols Through Time. Stanford Univ. Press. Fall 1990. pgs. 94-127.

1992a "What it is like to be a Banzie!": On Sharing the Experience of an Equatorial Microcosm," On Sharing Religious Experience, J. D. Gort, H. M. Vroom et al. (eds), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. pgs. 125-135.

1992b "Architectonic Inquiry: Review Article," Semiotica. Vol 89 (1-3): 215-226.

1993 "Advice to the Perplexed Ethnographer in An Age of Soundbites," Review Article (Roger Sanjek ed. Fieldnotes) in The American Ethnologist. Vol. 20 No. 1. pgs. 179-184

1998 On Trees of Knowledge of Self and Other in Culture: Models for the Moral Imagination, in The Social Life of Trees. Laura Rival and Maurice Bloch, eds. London: Berg. Pp. 81-110.

1999 "Genealogy.Org: Family Trees, The World Wide Web and The Politics of Cleanliness, A Plenary Paper Prepared fo the VIII Congress of the Spanish Federation of Anthropological Associations. In Las Identidades y las Tensiones de la Modernidad: Homenaje a la Xeneración Nós. Santiago de Compostela: Museo del Pobo Gallego. 1999. pp 139-162

The New Millennium.
jwf_2002.jpg (52067 bytes)

2001 "The Irony of Complicity and the Complicity of Irony in Development Discourse," in J. Fernandez and M. Huber, Irony in Action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 84-122.

 


DEAR FRIENDS

The following is a brief selection of the forty some Holiday Greetings we have been sending out to friends each December since the early 1960s. Some years Renate will do the drawing according to some inspiration of hers and I will write accompanying words. We won’t call them poems. Other years a theme and words will come to me and Renate will do a drawing. This is, in the family way, one of the culminating events to our year. We haven’t missed it yet nor hope to miss it for many years to come. In its minor way it attempts to hold together all those who in various ways over many years have made community with us, although many may now be, in the usual way of American life, widely dispersed in the world.

Black Ice

Empty Nests

Table Rock

Garlic Soup

Our Cooperative Gate

The Pendulum of Time

A Box of Big Words