B.A. Harvard 1968  (Social Relations)

       I have done extended fieldwork in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and have done applied contract assignments in 15 countries for 27 public and private agencies. I designed and directed an agroforestry project in Haiti that during a 20-year period facilitated trees to over a quarter of a million farm families. Recent applied research assignments include child slavery in Haiti and the D.R., potential conflicts surrounding planned dam construction that would flood out farming communities near the Panama Canal, and a month of fieldwork on the Gaza Strip in a religious Israeli farming community in the turbulent weeks immediately preceding the involuntary evacuation of the community by the Israeli government. 

     My evolving research agenda can be divided into five phases.

Agrarian, ritual, and healing systems of rural Haiti and the rural Dominican Republic.   My earliest research on the island of Hispaniola, where I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer,  focused on agrarian communities and their land tenure, land use, and market systems. But my research in Haiti also dealt heavily with the local Afro-Caribbean religious system ("Voodoo" or "Vodou") and with the evolution of the folk-healing system so closely linked to the ritual system.   

The anthropology of agroforestry systems.   My involvement with agroforestry in Haiti led me into a concern with the relation between people and trees.  On the basis of this localized experience, I have been invited to do contract research on tree-related issues in Central and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa (both East and West), and the Indian Ocean. 

Urban microenterprise.   My country of initial research, the Dominican Republic,  pulled a trick on me over the decades.  It shifted from the status of a rural society with an agrarian base to one in which 7 out of 10 people now live in cities and towns.  Following the urban migrants and their struggles, I began researching urban survival strategies and have written three books in Spanish on different types of microenterprise. 

The sabotage of educational systems.   The third book in the above series focused on the burgeoning "business"  or private schools in the Dominican Republic.  The research led to an analysis of the deterioration of the public educational system, which had for decades functioned in a disciplined manner under a dictator (Trujillo) but which, on the dictator's death, was "kidnapped" by politicians as a major source of jobs for loyal followers and by one of the most powerful and paralyzing teachers unions in the Americas. 

The Anthropology of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.   My earlier research into Afro-Caribbearn religion led naturally to a concern with the Abrahamic relgions that, via Christianity, have so strongly affected African diaspora religion.  Research in a religious Jewish moshav in Gaza was spurred by an autonomous interest in Judaism as a religious system and its relationship with Islam.  I have lectured to numerous Jewish community groups in Florida, not only on Gaza, but also on anthropological dimensions of Jewish belief and ritual, have designed and taught a college course on the Anthropology of Judaism, and have designed a mini-course for the local Jewish community called "Killing for God: the Anthropology of violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."

      In the course of this evolving research trajectory, I have written three books, 27 articles and book chapters, and 60 applied anthropological reports. I have studied fifteen languages (some extinct) and have interviewed and/or conversed in eight. 

     My M.A. and Ph.D. students are a heterogeneous crowd of unusual human beings.  They have either lived or have done research in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru,  Panama, Algeria, Fiji, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, and the U.S. with a variety of NSF, Wenner-Gren, Tinker, and other sources of funding.       

     Teaching.   I teach classes at both undergraduate and graduate levels in the Anthropology of the Caribbean,  Anthropological Linguistics, the Anthropology of Religion, and the Anthropology of Judaism.   I have also taught  Introduction to Anthropology (4-field as well as Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics),  the History of Anthropological Theory,  Kinship and Social Organization,  Computing for Anthropologists, and special seminars on the Dominican Republic and Haiti.   

    Applied Anthropology.  I have spent most of my career doing Applied Anthropology.  Though at one point I was heavily focused on the tree issue,  I have also done contract research on folk-medical systems, educational systems,  and project design and evaluation.  Applied Anthropology builds (or should build)  on traditional ethnographic analysis of the structure and behavior of systems, but adds the assumptions that (1) not all human systems are functioning optimally – as seen in conditions of poverty, violence, slavery, environmental destruction; (2) systemic malfunctions and human suffering and abuse are due to a combination of identifiable internal and external factors; (3) these negative factors can often be either neutralized or at least mitigated with intelligent analysis and planning.  Often. Not always.   In some settings Anthropology entails the documentation of human ingenuity and creativity; in others it may entail the documentation of human malice and / or ineptitude.  Most human cultures, and most human lives, probably entail a sui generis combination of both tendencies.