Decades
ago, in the Yale Alumni Magazine, Sid recounted walking into Ruth
Benedict’s class at Columbia in the 1940s and found an intellectual home in
anthropology. About 25 years later he offered me the same. I was 18, at sea at
Yale, wondering how I was ever going to keep up with the brilliant students
around me. By the end of his first lecture in “Anthropology 20,” he already
imparted a way of looking at the world that I could readily discern was rich
and deep, an anchor that would help me make sense of a complex, contested
world. And he did so with incomparable insight, wit, and warmth. I’d found a
guide who not only conveyed cultures’ struggles to negotiate their
circumstances amid profound economic, political, and social challenges, but
also of the individuals comprising those cultures.
Sid
became my undergraduate and graduate advisor, but what he taught me – and so
many others -- was not limited to anthropology. It was a cogent way
of looking at human endeavor of all kinds. What resonated most with me perhaps
were his insights into the practice and writing of social science. What were
problems worthy of investigation? What was at issue in them? In what
historical contexts had these arisen? How could they be accounted for,
theoretically and methodologically? What cultural, social, political, economic,
and technological forces shaped their character? If the analysis seemed valid,
how far could it be extrapolated on justifiable grounds? Or did parameters
limit what could be explained?
I
hoped to use this conceptual framework and other tools to animate my own field
research for the World Bank on the inter-household networks among poor urban
households in Cartagena, Colombia. There I came up against my own limitations
as both an ethnographer and ethnologist. But Sid’s tools never failed me
professionally, or personally. If I was not to be a social scientist myself, I
would put his insights to work in analyzing issues for two foundations in New
York seeking to apply social science research to a range of policy questions.
And Sid’s own formidable mastery of economic factors was one I was able to draw
upon when Cambridge and Oxford University Presses took a chance and asked me to
be their acquisitions editor for economics in their book divisions.
What
I have done for the last 30 years professionally has been to put Sid’s
interpretative vision to work in examining proposals and manuscripts for
publication. Several hundred books have cleared Sid’s bar, with the kind of
peer review that he would have expected to be employed as well. Sid’s influence
has never left me, nor can it. He gave me a vocation that has brought the
deepest satisfaction. There are thousands of us who feel the same way.
Sid’s writings will have their influence felt as long as people seek seriously
to understand the world around them.
