 I am Dan Stagemann, I'm the Director of Research Operations in the Office for the Advancement of Research here at the College. And welcome to the second of our fall book talks for fall 2014. Today's book talk features Professor Elise Waterston and her 2013 book. My Father's Wars, Migration, Memory and the Violence of a Century. Professor Waterston is a professor in the anthropology department here at John Jay. She is a cultural anthropologist who studies the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her areas of specialty include urban poverty and policy issues in the U.S. related to destitution, homelessness and substance abuse, health, welfare and migration and applied policy-related research and writing. Professor Waterston is a president-elect of the American Anthropological Association and is a Soros international scholar affiliated with the Gender Studies Department of Tbilisi State University in the Republic of Georgia. My Father's Wars is an anthropologist's vivid account of her father's journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations and wars. It is a daughter's moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved and his most sacred of beliefs. It's a scholar's reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture and the enduring power of memory. If we could all welcome Professor Waterston. Thank you very much. First let's make sure this is all set up and working well. So thank you very much Dan for that lovely introduction and I want to also thank Laura Lutkin and Anthony Carpe for inviting me to give this book talk today and all the folks at the office for the advancement of research and I also want to thank Anthony Marcus and all my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology, great department for always being so supportive and wonderful and helpful to me in the course of doing this project and writing this book and now in its aftermath. So before we get started I just wanted to say that students in Professor McDonald's class please sign in with Patrick. Just wanted to let you know that. So make sure I have everything. I begin this talk with three short excerpts from stories. The first, Louise Maud Steinberg was the nice girl. She was peaceful and refined, the one who didn't go, who wouldn't go to a man's apartment. She remembered meeting Miguel. It was 1942 and he was from Cuba. She thought he had gorgeous blue eyes and that he was very polite. He even asked her father for permission to invite her out in New York. Tante Betty was very suspicious of him. Even though Miguel said he was Jewish and spoke Yiddish, she thought he had a very strange accent. What is this Cuba place? Her Tante asked. I never heard of such a place. Maybe he's a spy. For their first outing, the couple had an evening date. Louise and Miguel went to Manhattan's Havana Madrid nightclub for dinner. She was 18 and he was 29. He ordered cocktails and bought her a pack of luckies from the cigarette girl. The live show of Latin music and his smooth, controlled dancing seemed so sophisticated. Louise felt like a movie star. The second excerpt. At his noontime and at 82 years old, Don Miguel walks from El Imperio, the empire, his store in Viejo San Juan to sit at the same table at the same restaurant at the same time for the same lunch he had been eating for 30 years. La Mayerquina had ancient wooden fans hanging from vaulted ceilings and tables covered with placemats boasting it was the oldest restaurant in Puerto Rico, a fact most appealing to those tourists who still bothered to wander the cobblestones of old San Juan. Don Miguel's store was just a half a block from the restaurant so it was a convenient place to take lunch. It was close and the waiters knew what he wanted. Serve him quickly and bring a hapocillo when the old man waved his hand. Louise and his four daughters knew that gesture. Finally on, they learned it meant bring me something, water, coffee, salt. If they did it right, the coffee must be in a cup of a certain size, never a mug. Steaming hot, never lukewarm, and in front of him as soon as the dinner plate was removed, no wait time, the waiters would be showered with Don Miguel's famous charm. Everyone outside his immediate family seemed to adore him. Don Miguel was demanding but a regular guy, a paisano. His sky-blue eyes on fire, Miguel shared insider anecdotes with waiters, a demeaning story about one of his women customers, a snippy appraisal of the gringo couple at the table by the arched window, the third. Before the war, the Washersteins were comfortable. They even had a Polish maid to help preva with the children. They had a house and a barn, a horse and a wagon. They had a cow for milk and about an acre of land to grow potatoes. They didn't starve. More than that, it suck, bought and sold wheat. Then the war came. World War I. It was springtime when the troops and their heavy weapons arrived. The snow was melting, flooding the pastures and making mud everywhere. Yet Vabney was on fire. Mendeley, barely past a toddler, his sisters, brothers and mother hid in the basement, huddled all night long against the catastrophe going on outside. They heard the noise of war, bullets, explosions, moaning, death. Morning came and the family ventured from their hideout. The street was filled with dead soldiers. Some soldiers were alive, lying on the street, moaning still and dying. Mendel was terrified hiding in the cellar like that, being in the cellar, hearing the guns, the shooting. When the others went to look at the dead people, Mendel didn't even take a quick peek. He was too afraid. These are excerpts from the book I have recently completed. A multi-layered personal story that is also a social history. My Father's Wars is a journey through family memories that are interwoven with some of the key historical events of the 20th century. It is a daughter's account of a Jewish father whose life was shaped, framed and torn apart by the upheavals of the 20th century. It is an anthropologist's narrative constructed from other people's stories. It is a portrait of a charming, funny, wounded and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a reflection on the forces of history, the power of memory and the meanings people attach to events, to things, to words and to others. I have several goals for this presentation. One goal is to leave you with a sense of the story and a taste of the book. I will also discuss some of the fundamental assumptions I have made in my approach to this work. These assumptions have to do with the personal, political and intellectual objectives of my project and the methodology I developed to accomplish a work I see as firmly centered in anthropology even as it is intensely interdisciplinary. In what follows, I weave narrative, the story, description of the method and explanation of contexts that suggest larger theoretical questions about mobility and immobility in migration trajectories, memory and experience in shaping transnational identities, ethnic and religious conflict and nation building projects, and multidimensionality in diasporic histories. Indeed, I have multiple reasons for pursuing this difficult, often painful project and for writing this book. Like my father's life, his perception of it and his narrative, my motivations are layered and complicated involving who I am as a daughter and as an anthropologist. I am at a point in my life where the urge to reflect on personal history is quite strong. Who was this man with whom I had such difficulty? It took years before I would realize how my father's situation shaped my sensibility and to recognize that his sorrows became my sorrows, his losses my motivation to understand them. Yet, I come to this project not just as a daughter, but also as a cultural anthropologist seeking to understand violence in its various forms and how it is implicated in individual lives. As an anthropologist, I am also concerned about how to bring scholarly knowledge into the public conversation on the critical issues of our times, including migration and the transnational movement of people, ideas and economies, the simmering tensions and major conflicts between groups, ethnic groups, racial groups, religious, national, and the causes and consequences of political and structural violence past and present. As I took on the challenge of the project and of composing the book in the manner that I did, I was also guided by questions and statements posed by three very different writers whose works have successfully moved beyond the narrow confines of the academy to become part of a larger public discourse. One is Eva Hoffman, author of Shtetl and After Such Knowledge, among her other books. Hoffman asks, why remember? To what end and in what way? And then she instructs, the task is not only to remember, but to remember strenuously, to explode, decode, and deepen the terrain of memory. What is at stake, she says, is not only the past, but the present. The second is the activist, scholar, historian, teacher, writer, Howard Zinn, who in 2005 posed the following questions to an audience of anthropologists. Zinn said, the most crucial issue with regard to writing is, why am I doing this? What in the world does it do? What effect does it have? Does it help change the world? The third is James Baldwin, the American novelist and social critic. Baldwin declared, people are trapped in history. The history is trapped in them, a beautiful dialectic that may resonate as true, but the question remained, at least for me, how to effectively reveal it. Baldwin's assertion and Hoffman's and Zinn's questions reflected my own concerns as I took on this peculiar endeavor, an ethnographer working with her father on an anthropological research and writing project. My father's wars is an intimate ethnography, a term I developed with my friend and colleague, anthropologist, Barbara Wilko Bauer, who has just herself published the intimate ethnography about her mother, called a Polish doctor in the Nazi camps. The term intimate ethnography captures that there were two inseparable roles in my approach to this project. I am a daughter who chronicled a family narrative and I am an anthropologist who contextualized the story. Intimate ethnography brings together the dualities, liberating the daughter to enter a deeply private and interior place as an ethnographer. It is important to acknowledge there are multiple and multidisciplinary roots to my project. Intimate ethnography follows in anthropology's long tradition of writing an individual's biography, the classic life history method. This work builds on that anthropological tradition for I document one man's life and locate his experience in space and time. It also grows out of the reflexive turn in anthropology and other social sciences by the conscious nature of my positionality as an anthropologist who is reconstituting an other's personal history and as a daughter whose gendered identity was socialized in large part by the person who is the subject of her study. This project also builds on auto ethnography which Reed Danahy defines as produced by an insider or native observer of his or her own cultural milieu. After all, my cultural milieu was in large part shaped by my father who is also my subject which makes me a most intimate native observer. Even so, I did not have insider access to all aspects of his cultural milieu since so much of my father's life experience occurred before my time and in places I did not know. His boyhood in Poland or life as an adolescent and young man in Cuba. It might be reasonable to think that in some ways I am as much a stranger to his cultural milieu as I would be to any unfamiliar field site. Indeed, this project moves beyond auto ethnography to situate the personal story in larger history and political economy. In this way, intimate ethnography rescues my project, I hope, from falling into solipsism, a key danger and flaw of auto ethnography. Jane Gallop's classic, The Daughter's Seduction, is also an influence. I invoke her famous book to signal that my father's wars is an instance of feminist scholarship and use Elizabeth Wright's words to say, my intimate ethnography seeks to demystify the hidden collaborations between father and daughter, not by asserting the eternal feminine but by exposing a game which implicates them both. Gallop called that game the law, the social order that only appears natural. My project does not engage Freud or Lacan or psychoanalysis as did Gallop's The Daughter's Seduction over 30 years ago. But Gallop's injunction for feminism still stands and I follow it in my project. Feminism must use theory as a means to understand the implication of the political in the personal. I'd like to think that my narrative of my father's narrative exposes the gendered social order, the game that implicates us both. My father's wars is also informed by and coincides with an emerging genre of scholarly endeavors by second generation feminist scholars engaged in rights of homeland return as experiments in memory writing. The second generation, sometimes called the generation after, refers to those who did not have firsthand experience with the trauma of horrific history but who nevertheless have an intense relationship with a traumatic past and a sense of urgency about preserving knowledge of it. I count myself among those in this generation, yet my father's wars is a hybrid work, making it difficult to place it in a single genre. It is not just my father's biography, not just his narrated memoir. It is not about the anthropologist, not about the daughter, nor is it only about cultural frameworks, migration trajectories, national histories or the violence that wreaked havoc during my father's lifetime. It is about all these things at once, thus the term intimate ethnography, a new genre in nonfiction literature that in my version reads like a novel. I spent a long time collecting data, a set of materials gathered over the dozen years of this project, including listening to my father, interviewing him, getting his voice on audio tape and on video, taking journeys back to the multiple settings of his life with and without him and having many conversations with my mother. I gathered and studied a set of materials collected over a lifetime, letters, photographs, financial papers, legal documents, legal claims, scraps, diaries and my mother's unpublished memoir. I put together a set of academic works produced by scholars from anthropology, history, psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, Jewish studies and literature. I accessed a set of archival documents online and from brick and mortar institutes, organizations and libraries. From these sources, I gathered testimonies, government papers, newspapers and specific legislation. Among the materials was a box of photographs sent to me from my teenage nephew, Andres. For a family event, Andres had put together a collage of photos using some kind of heavy duty glue. After the event, he took it apart, layered the photographs one atop the other and shipped them to me. I pulled the photographs from the box and held them in my hand, a thick stack all stuck together. I spent the better part of the day gingerly pulling them apart, one from the other. Some were entirely ruined, forever gone. One that remains is a photograph of my mother from the 1940s. She looks quite beautiful except for the piece now torn from her face. I felt annoyed. Why did he glue these precious photographs together? For Andres, the grandchild, the photographs were adhered, one atop the other, a single stack. It became my job to detach them. My task also, with this project, to pull apart, rearrange, preserve, even tear in some places to tell a story and a history that are at once separate and together. I would work with what remained. On the pages of the book, I take the reader across the full trajectory of my father's life, across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations, and two wars and one revolution. Writing in the third-person omniscient past tense, I lay out the specific features of my father's biography from birth to death in segments by time, by place, culture, and social categories such as gender or religion, politics and political events, relationships to larger social formations, again ethnic, national, racialized formations, religious formations, as well as land, labor, and work, and global as well as local historical events. There is also the first-person voice of the daughter anthropologist. I bring in my experiences with my father and provide information, facts, figures, events, and analysis, edging out from the personal to the larger history, all of it to contextualize and interpret the main story. The book begins in my father's shtetli, his little town in Yedvabne, and with the horrific terror of specific war. World War I, not as backdrop, but as state of being for his young life, war shaped his first perceptions, dead bodies, and ruined houses. He would repeat the same story, the war story, over and over again, a repetition not captured in the sequential narrative of storytelling. When I realized the repetition had meaning, it underlined the shock he experienced at a tender age and the fear that would always haunt him. Telling the story over and over again highlights the destructive trauma that is caused by war, war in his time, war before his time, and war and military violence at any time in any place. I probed my father for details about his early life, trying to get beyond the pat narrative he had recited for so long. They called me mentally, he said. I knew that already, and that he was the youngest of seven children once baby Moishi had died. My mother was Priva, he said. Sometimes I called her Riva, but she was Priva. You know, Priva, he repeated, impatient that I wanted to know why she was sometimes called Riva. I asked if he remembered Moishi. Of course he remembered Moishi. This question did not seem to annoy him. Instead, his eyes softened with a memory, not of the boy, but of the terrible day he died. Can you have another brother that died, a little one? That was younger than you? Moishi. What was his name? Moishi. Moishi. Moishi. Myself. She was so beautiful. She was so, I remember, I was a baby, too. The neighbors were grabbing the kissing. What did he die of? Sick. What did I do? How old? So brother walked without shoes. Well, Daddy? Can you do another carry-on? Can you do a slouching? I have, my eyes. The neighbors were grabbing him possibly. I remember, they got a dog, took him on the tuxedo. Tuxedo? Yeah, on the tuxedo. Mantis. What's that? The cups. You mean like to draw up a fever or something? The cold, the cold, the tuxedo. Yeah. How old were you, Daddy? That's it, that's it. I remember, I went to Haida. And I came back, and everybody was crying. Maybe not shoes. After the talk, I can tell you about this audio and video that I'm going to be showing later as well. I will just say about that particular segment of interview that when I was talking with him, he really did transport back all those decades to that moment. It was really quite a remarkable moment. So my father's migration trajectory from Poland to Cuba to New York to San Juan reveals a trans-ethnic and multi-dimensional diasporic Jewish history, a complicated non-linear course that challenges the standard two-step migration narrative he came from there, the old country to arrive here, the new land, one filled with opportunity, of course, which is itself intimately tied to the American rags to riches origin myth. I trace his voyage out, a passage shaped by the interplay of Polish nationalism, a mother's fears and dreams, and the racialized US immigration law of 1924, a law and a US policy of exclusion rooted in the dangerous rhetoric and pseudoscience of the eugenics movement, which itself would influence Nazi ideology. My father was unable to enter the US. Instead, he landed in Manguito, Cuba in 1930, having survived the voyage, a teenager among hundreds and hundreds of strangers who traveled a ship in steerage together in filthy, cramped quarters. Manguito is a small town in the province of Matanzas, which in the late 19th century had been an important sugar-producing region. There, he joined his brothers to work the general store they had named El Canyón Aleman, the German cannon, if you can believe that they named that store that name. They gave it that name, my father told me, because at first people in Cuba thought the Wassersteins were Germans because of their German-sounding name. Besides, at that time, the Jews favored the Germans since the Germans were good to the Jews in those days, my father explained. Before long, folks in Manguito began asking where he was from. He told them, Poland. So they gave him a name, Polako, or more often than not, Polakito, the diminutive form. In the year 2000, I returned to Cuba with my father when he was 87 years old. We hired a driver and traveled by car from Havana to Manguito, a place my father had last seen 64 years earlier in 1936. We were ready for this right of return, and the mood in the car was upbeat and sociable. How many girlfriends did you have in Manguito? Our driver Ricardo asked. Miguel began to reminisce. I had only one novia in Manguito, he answered the conversation in Spanish. Ayida fundora, she was very beautiful and played piano. She played piano for me, he said with emphasis. The poor thing died of cancer, he told us. We pulled into Manguito and immediately set about to find an older person and what he or she might remember. Not five minutes in Manguito we found him. In just those first few minutes, word about us, the visitors had already spread. Saúl approached Miguel. The main street. The real street. And it was called the German canyon. Ah, German canyon, but you weren't jealous, right? You weren't jealous. Because in the German canyon there were also Poles. That's right, I'm a Poles. You're a Poles. But Perti, wait a minute. First they had the Kaumas, that were in Alaska. In Alaska. Then they came here, the other Poles that were Pertis. One was called Perti, let me remember. Jacobo. Jacobo. My brother would be your brother. He would be your brother. Look, I knew them. Look, these are my children. Ah. And I had a... Here he was drinking a... Aida. Aida Fondora. Aida Fondora, yes. She died of cancer. Look how he knows. I'm here, guys. Look, where does he live? Here. No, the little house. I came here when I was 14. I remember when I was... Jaime. I remember Jaime. Jaime. What's your name? Modesto Molino. Moving through the chapters of my father's life, we see his social positionality as an alien other in the land of his birth, and in his shtetli Yadavne, the site of an infamous massacre in 1941, an event that helped reinscribe my father's belief in the idea of Polish anti-Semitism. He considered a natural, fundamental, and timeless feature of the Polish spirit. We observe the race advantage he held in the Cuban and U.S. contexts at particular historical moments and the gendered habitats he embodied and enjoyed across his lifetime. We notice his unmindful ambition to be aligned with U.S. power, privilege, and empire. Recall, his story was called El Imperio. We write his vulnerability as a petty merchant in Cuba. We follow his fate as an American citizen who, in the U.S. context, was small fry in the Cold War period receiving kind words but virtually no support from the U.S. government in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. We also follow my father's reflexive attachment to the experience of Jewish suffering, the way he viewed his life but always being lived under the sign of extermination. At the intersections of my father's complicated journey, he created, adopted, and adapted to multiple identities across time and place. Identities shaped by larger structural and political forces including the spectacular violences of war and revolution. His name changes offer hints. Across a long century, mentally from Jedwabne, Poland, became Miguelito in Manguito, Cuba, Miguel in Havana, Michael in New York, and Don Miguel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photographs such as those on this slide embody the truth and the fictions of the type, of the atmosphere, of the eras, of the places, of the cultures. My father metamorphized over the course of his life. These photographs reflect the transformations and suggest meanings personal, historical, ideological, and cultural. I have also been transformed by this project. For example, on my own trips to Poland, first in 2001 and later in 2008, to conduct ethnographic research in Jedwabne, I realized I had to come to terms with certain conflicting feelings. It was my first pilgrimage to Poland in 2001 and I felt a terrible unease. I walked the streets of Jedwabne, the site of that infamous massacre that occurred in 1941. I recoiled from the townsfolk. I looked suspiciously at a huddle of old women, a notice of old men peering at me with equal suspicion. Wasn't it antisemitism I saw in their glower? This feeling of distrust was not like me, the person or the anthropologist, and I was acutely aware of the unfamiliar sensation. My first trip coincided with a series of critical events in Poland around the release of Jan Gross's book In Poland and in the US, titled Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Gross's slim volume packed a huge charge that on July 10th, 1941, and I quote Gross, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children. Though the book came out in 2001, the story was not new to me. I grew up on it, hearing from an early age about my father's cousin, Schmolke, Schmolwasserstein, who had survived the massacre saved by a Christian neighbor. In fact, testimony Schmolke gave before the Jewish Historical Commission in 1945 formed the basis of Gross's book, which is dedicated to my father's cousin. Although Poland had been fixed in my Jewish imagination as the land of unreconstructed antisemitism, I felt I needed to confront my uncomfortable experience of recoiling from the residents of Jedwabne and my discomfort at feeling so suspicious of them. For me, those emotions were like a mound indicating something important lay beneath needing to be excavated. I realized I needed to confront my conflicting emotions of loyalty on the one hand and betrayal on the other hand, loyalty to and betrayal of my father and of my cultural identity as a Jew. This realization led me to more deeply explore my father's reflexive identification with Jewish suffering and to the causes and consequences of Jewish collective attachment to that affect. It also led me to expand the focus of my inquiry beyond my father's life history. I would return to Jedwabne, this time to dwell among the Polish Christians who lived there. This is what I learned. Jan Gross's book opened the possibility for critical self-reflection in Poland of its nationalist narrative and of its role during the war years, an ongoing and very important process. But it also dangerously helped re-inscribe Polish anti-Semitism in quotes as if it were a monolith and as if it were an explanation. My time with the enemy has made me see things differently, revealing that easy explanations and blanket accusations seep in easily but are off the mark. That does not mean I pretend anti-Semitism does not exist. It does not mean I ignore the reality of the massacre in Jedwabne, or took members of my own family. It does mean this. The Polish Christians and Jews were torn apart and the Polish Christians and Jews tore each other apart. But ethnicity does not by itself structure hostile social relations, nor does it by itself produce the violent polarization that left the Jews of Jedwabne dead. For that, we need to look at a longer and larger history. The social relations of land and labor in Poland, Poland's relations with its neighbors over centuries of European imperial war, the partitions of Poland as the spoils of war and the effects of these historical processes on the polity, on the emergence of Polish national identity and its nation-building project, its collective anxiety and the making of Jew as other in Poland. We also need to examine the workings of Jewish collective memory steeped in a Jewish people consciousness, collective memory that was and is itself situated in nationalism and nation-building projects. This is a deeper, more nuanced understanding of violent history that may help reveal what made Jedwabne possible even as it requires everyone to confront beliefs that they may hold sacred. I have come to understand that confrontations with uncomfortable truths are essential if we are ever to get beyond the impasses that ultimately divide and conquer all of humanity. At the start of this paper, I promised to take stock of the fundamental assumptions of my project. I believe there are two fundamental and interconnected assumptions. One is that intimate ethnography has the potential to bridge story and scholarship, bringing knowledge and understanding into the public conversation on critical social issues past and present. The second is that this intimate ethnography has potential to illuminate in a powerful way the relationships between violence, embodied subjectivity and self-historical identity, sensate experience, social memory, power and history. In this aspect, I have taken up anthropologist Linda Green's call that scholars explore those relationships to do so without hesitation or detachment and to end to look squarely at a particular lived life that has been affected by violence in its various forms. The two assumptions of my project are intertwined and inseparable. Just as intimate ethnography itself is both method and a written document. These interconnections bring to my mind Vivian Gornick's book on writing, titled The Situation and the Story. Gornick explains, the situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot. The story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer, the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. By means of my father's situation, in this work, I have attempted to unravel the complex processes, dynamics and aftermath of a history that is marked by violence. Gornick's story, the thing I have come to say. In my ethnography of violence, I write the familiar because I believe it captures embodied history in a powerful palpable way. It has allowed me to humanize and historicize my subject and my subject matter. Theory is not abstraction, but embedded in the details of the situation that are themselves linked to the story, the larger contingent history. By this means, I can remember strenuously, explode and decode the tangled masks and illusions of culture, of race, of nation, of society, of citizenship and of civilization. My father's story reveals the cruelties of modernity, the gory structures of empire, the brutality of any nation-building project. There are no exceptions to that. The violent oppression of difference and the effects of these processes in shaping the contours of personal and sociocultural identity which in turn contribute to inflaming tensions between social groups that can lead to ever more extreme forms of personal and collective violence. Across my father's lifetime and across the borders of the 20th century countries and cultures within which he found himself, these processes and patterns held fast. As scholars, we know a lot about the macro-dynamics of power past and present and how it works to infiltrate, shape and manage human lives. We know a lot about how social categories are produced and how difference is constructed and can get turned into ideological infection. Somehow, these analyses get lost in translation when we try to share them with audiences who may be less patient with these understandings and who may resist thinking through their implications. I suspect intimate ethnography may resonate with audiences beyond the narrow confines of the academy because of the personal narrative it offers. It is the narrative that will draw readers in, capturing their attention and their sensibility so they may begin to hear the contextualizing information and analysis the scholar provides. I have come to learn that intimate ethnography is resonating with readers and offer one example from right here at John Jay College. Nico Montano, whom many of you know, a John Jay graduate and former Vera Fellow now studying in London, came to visit me last month. He had read My Father's Wars and wanted to talk. The book prompted him to think about his own family history. His mother came of age in a time of violence in Argentina. His father, too, in El Salvador where he was taken political prisoner by the U.S.-backed military regime. Nico's roommate in London also has an intriguing story. Jacob was born in Israel, the son of a Sephardic Jewish mother and a Nigerian father. Jacob's heritage and his dark skin place him in a precarious social location in the place of his birth. The two young men, Nico and Jacob, are now conducting their own intimate ethnographies, asking their parents and grandparents questions about what happened, when, how, and why. There is much silence in their households on these subjects. The two young ethnographers are bringing the stories to light, interweaving them together and illuminating along the way the larger, contingent history that frames their parents' lives and thus their own. My father is now dead, but the present-day world continues to strain under the weight of contemporaneous war, occupation, poverty, economic and resource inequality, economic collapses, power abuses, and other forms of brutality and dehumanization, including the pathologies of xenophobia, racism, and sexism. This is a morally corrupt, inhumane, and unsustainable condition. At stake is not just the past or the present, as Hoffman suggests, but the future of us all. For all of us, the family line is all too often intertwined with brutal history. No one seems to escape unscathed. In 1995, I tried my hand for the first time at writing about my father, composing a short, descriptive essay. Ironically, at the same time I began to write about him, I severed ties with my father, not calling or seeing him for a four-year period when he was in his early 80s. I could no longer swallow what I perceived to be his assaults on my dignity or suppress my adult self in the service of his requirements or needs. His assaults were always verbal and the demands trivial, but they were constant and overbearing. The project brought us together. By means of intimate ethnography, my father and I transcended the impasse that before had left us at a standstill. Recently, I heard from a rabbi in California who read my book and suggested it to a woman for whom he was providing hospice counseling. The woman was a grieving adult daughter by her father's deathbed. The woman had had a difficult relationship with her father, he told me, and added, I suggested she read your book because of the redemptive thing it offers. He went on, your book has an important perspective about sticking with their lives and with them emotionally. For me, the they are all those with whom we have difficulty, whether they be individuals or they be the social, ethnic, religious, or cultural groups with which we have been and continue to be engaged in conflict and with whom we must also find a way to transcend the impasses. I will conclude on an anthropological note. Anthropology is committed to the task of gathering voices in hopes that voices will be heard, be understood. With reference to voices in conflict, the discipline takes the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's wise counsel to heart. If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. My father was not my enemy, he was the very wounding and I felt hostility toward him at various critical times in my life. But I found in his life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all my hostility. This project brought me there. It offered me a way to step back from what I thought I knew in order to see my father and the world as if for the first time. Thank you very much. Twenty minutes left for audience questions. I see one here at the back. I'll bring the microphone around to you. Professor, please explain to us when you visited Cuba and the process you had to go through to get permission to visit Cuba. I went in the year 2000 and it's actually a little bit of a funny story because I went through... I applied for permission to go through the U.S. Treasury Department for myself and my father as part of a conference through the Association of Black Anthropologists. We're holding an academic conference there. In order to bring my father to the project I wrote up a little bio of him that sounded very scholarly. I described the ways in which he and I were collaborators on a research project and then I described aspects of his self in very scholarly academic terms. Of course, our permits were granted so we were able to go through the conference. My father was so thrilled with that little bio he thought it made him sound so good that he tacked it up on the wall in his house. It was a funny little moment. We did that and then when we were there I basically skipped the conference so that we could go and do our own thing which was to visit sites in Havana and as well as in Manguito and so forth. Oh, I don't remember. It's 15 years ago now. Sorry, but because it was part of an organized event a conference it was not a big deal, really. I think at this time if you're thinking of going I think it's... I'd like to thank you for that, Elise. It was really beautiful and very illuminating and super interesting. So piggybacking off that question about Cuba but about your dad and his scholarly bio he was your collaborator so what do you think he would think about the publication of your book posthumously for him? Yes, so that's a great question because, well, I did publish two scholarly pieces before he died, one which he was able to read and one he really was a little bit out of it at that time so he didn't get to... The one that has a picture of Barbara's mother and my father on the cover of the American ethnologist journal but his reaction... When I into, well, narrative part, the story part with my larger analysis and I don't think he really got my larger analysis stuff but he loved the story part and he loved that he was portrayed. It made him very proud but there is another couple of funny stories. One funny story is that the whole time that I'm working with my father my collaborator, collaborating with him on this project he kept saying to me, I want Arthur Miller to write my biography. Then when he'd see me he'd say, did you find him? I thought you said you're a researcher. You didn't find him yet? Even though his daughter, the anthropologist was working on this project he still wanted Arthur Miller to write the book but anyway, I think he'd be thrilled. Both my parents died before the book came out and I don't have regrets that my father didn't get to see the book really but I do have regrets that my mother didn't get a chance to read the book. The other thing I want to mention is that when he died there was a visiting rabbi at his service. It's a long story why. But who didn't really know him very well and that rabbi read my piece from 2005 and used it as the basis for his comments, his eulogy and what was really great I really appreciated that because one of the things he picked up on that rabbi was that I didn't my depiction of my father and I hope I captured him this way in the book as well he's not, he's an angel or the devil I didn't try to put him up on a pedestal or you know, just criticize him I tried to show him as a fleshen blood human being with his strengths and his weaknesses and his flaws and his virtues and all of that so that the rabbi picked up on that and so his comments were actually quite eloquent. Why the intimate ethnography of your father rather than one of your mother? Yes, well you know sort of you can get a taste from this that the one I had trouble with was my father you know in terms of the relationship I didn't have trouble with my mother my mother has an interesting story too but people have asked me that question and they've also asked me well I want to know more about your mother because my mother is a thread throughout the entire story as you know I'm sure you know people have taken a look at the book noticed and she has the final word actually in the book but you know just on the psychological part on the emotional part for me and the interpersonal relationship aspect of this the micro piece we were talking about micro, meso, macro issues in class you know my mother was a person who despite the fact that she has as we all do you know painful parts in her story she was able to transcend her wounds but he wasn't really and so it's he who I needed to explore Amazing piece of writing I mean just the way you speak the way you speak it and I want to talk to the writing because it seems to me often times in school it seems to me for both students and professors that we are kind of bamboozled into doing a kind of writing that loses the tenor and the feeling and the body that you seem to induce can you talk a little bit about why you chose to do the project this way and a little bit maybe about how and can I ask you please to urge students to write like this and us thank you well you know what I think that's part of why I tried to pick up your last point that's really what I tried to do because I think that okay so where I am in my life and in my work and in my career you know at this stage in my life I don't have anything to lose okay so in terms of that stuff so I and I think it is the responsibility of senior scholars to model this and because the junior scholars and graduate students still you know are afraid and rightfully so because not all you know departments would accept more innovative writing or approaches to scholarship and so I think for me part of it it's part of my responsibility to say you know what we need to model it and we need to say it's okay and and and do that sort of thing so the other part of your the first part of your question though what did you say what did you ask me okay the second part was how I thought right so why so so this is a I feel like I came full circle in this work because I came to anthropology late and then I came to in my life and I came to anthropology with an interest in understanding urban poverty in the United States I wanted to know why in the most wealthy nation in the world is there so much poverty that was sort of my basic question but I was drawn to understanding the dispossessed the marginalized the dehumanized that's that's what I was drawn to try to understand and then as I did my studies and I came to real I came full circle and said wait a minute I my interest in the marginalized and dispossessed and displaced is like it was right in front of my nose the whole time and I didn't even realize it my father's story is that story you know and so um so I I kind of always had a feeling that I would write about my father but I didn't know in what way whether it was tied to the Academy or not I just have that feeling but and then so as I said before you know it's become almost a political project in terms of academic scholarship political and also engagement with the larger public to um to make the to cross those boundaries and create new bridges for for bringing our knowledge and understanding into the public conversation so that's another part of the reason and so all the pieces it was like the perfect storm came together where I'm at in my life where I am in my field where I am in my scholarship what I came to recognize and understand and where I am in the life cycle developmentally you know so it's like all of those forces came together in that way and then um you know I mean because other work I've done prior to this were pieces of it so I have a book on women in homelessness that's you could tell from the title I've tried to not um perform in that strict the title is love sorrow and rage and then a subtitle destitute women in a Manhattan residence but you know I've really tried to and that book also is an effort to tell stories and and illuminate and bring us to understanding through writing so I do I you know I think that's and now how so of course it takes it took practice because I did experiment in writing um you know these other formats and then also um I have an edited volume that I co-edited with Maria Vespiri called anthropology off the shelf anthropologists on writing in which again we got senior scholars to write 5,000 word essays 5,000 words are short essays in this volume um to write about writing because anthropologists do gather such interesting data they have so much to say there's they have so so many interesting fascinating stories they gather in the field and then so often the writing is like oh my god why do I have to read this you know and so you know what's the matter here you know we we don't have to do it this way just because there is um a template for what is scholarship you know so I think and I do think the world of scholar the academic world is opening up more in this way not just in anthropology but in other disciplines and yes I do uh you know want students to write in alternative formats yes thank you again for the presentation I feel like I know you a little more personally and intimately if you like um you know your family's history I wanted to ask I read somewhere that your book comes with audio clips and I find that so creative and innovative and I wanted to know what inspired you to do that if you could tell us a little bit more about that okay so this thank you so much Poppy so this book is published with Rutledge in their series on innovative ethnographies so it's innovative in terms of the writing oh I didn't answer the how the how alright so yeah um so so one of the things that I had an idea to do is we live in this multimedia world we have all these tools and technologies available to us and so why do do our you know in addition to writing differently I thought why can't I produce this book that also in makes use of the new technology so what I have in the book itself are it's hard to explain but are 100 hyperlinks to the internet that means if a person is reading this book on a multimedia enabled tablet like a kindle fire or an iPad words in different places are highlighted are hyperlinks so you can just click on it and go to places on the internet the vast majority of those places are on a companion website so there is a story companion on this website so chapter one you click and it goes to chapter one on that website and there are photographs there are documents there are letters there are audio interviews like the excerpt I showed you here there are video clips of these return trips to Cuba to Poland and so forth I have that but I also have about 15 and there's also music on that and then I also have about 15 hyperlinks to different places and then I also have Google maps so instead of having a map in the book of where Yed Vabne is you just click on the hyperlink and it brings you to the Google maps to there or to Manguito or wherever but there's also music so I'll give you one example of how I think it creates a different kind of reading experience that is also the body embodied so scholarship we use the head this is really separating affect emotion from intellect when it's really all the one okay so there's other senses when you're reading it's just like this one dimensional experience but I think we can use a new technology to have this other kind of experiences so I'm going to give you an example of where I hyperlinked to something that's music so there is a story I won't tell you the whole story but it had an experience that was not a literal slap in the face but like a slap in the face kind of experience and I describe this story and I describe the way what happens to her is that she goes back home she sits down at the piano first she makes herself a cocktail lights a cigarette sits down at the piano and starts to play an Argentinian tango called Jalucí and I have a hyperlink right there you as the reader might be feeling like your face getting as red as Monica's scarf you know with rage at this story the thing that happened to her and then you click on the music and it's like now your heart I mean it's really adds another dimension to it so it's really so I've tried to express my son who created the website for me told me no one's ever done this before this is unique you know we do see things on the internet articles that are hyperlinked to other things and other articles and so forth on the internet but this I don't know if this is the first book that's been done this way but it is unusual and you know I'm just trying to pave the way on that as well we'll talk yeah good idea yeah that's a good idea yeah yeah hi where are you I don't see you oh okay sometimes you know in difficult situations like a complicated relationship with parents and children sometimes I use myself like I have questions to my father whether you know and then I question myself do I want to know that or not I'm afraid of what I'm going to find during the research of the book do you ever find a major theme of the life of your father that wait did I ever what do you ever find like a major theme of this life that kind of changed the perspective of him for good or bad or whatever changed the perspective of him my well yes I think that's sort of part of what I tried to to say it towards the end of this presentation that by by engaging in this project I and engaging in the analytic parts the contextualizing parts and understanding getting a deeper understanding of every chapter of his life what was going on in the world at the time that helped me understand appreciate and understand him better so I think that did occur in terms of of some of the challenges in doing research with one's own parent for me I mean I think everybody would have different things depends on the personalities and the relationships and so forth but for me as I mentioned in the presentation that one of the difficulties was to get him off a pat narrative because you know we all tell narratives stories of our lives and so you know so he has a story of his life that you know but I was able to find out stuff that I didn't know before you know that I could get him but that had to do with the constantly pushing and probing and you know pressing him a bit the other thing in terms of my relationship with my father that I had to be wary of doing research with him is that because I was the daughter he always had a lecture or a message whenever he talked to his children so you know and mostly having to do with sex like don't have sex you know kind of messages so you know but you know there was always that element so I knew that okay if I'm asking him something he's going to be you know what is his behind what is his subtextual message that he's giving me a lecture about you know when I stopped talking to him for four years and then came back to him our relationship really changed because I was no longer just the daughter that you know he could push around but suddenly he had me at a different level like he respected me more it was very interesting unfortunately he was the kind of person that did put people either up on a pedestal or down so all his other daughters were caring for him taking care of him dutiful good daughters and they were the ones that were subject of all the criticism suddenly I was the professor who you know I'm now up on the pedestal but you know I was very well aware that that's what he was doing so I didn't walk around to my sisters to say I'm the favorite now you know but no there is that danger with my friend Barbara Wilkel Bauer who wrote about her mother who was a Polish Christian physician arrested by the Gestapo in Poland and was sent to three concentration camps to serve as a slave doctor to the Polish Jewish I mean sorry to the Jewish women prisoners Barbara was really afraid to ask her mom certain questions about what might have happened to her mother in prison in that situation and so she talks about in her book her hesitation about probing too deeply on those kinds of things I don't think she ever really did probe too much on some things yeah okay well we are out of time if we can give one more round of applause to Professor Watterson thank you so