define those changesâfrom watching Ed Bruner's career. That's something. Matti Bunzl covers provocatively in his piece in this issue, charting Ed Bruner's.
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Knowing Ed Bruner ALMA GOTTLIEB Department of Anthropology University of Illinois 109 Davenport Hall Urbana, IL 61801 [Keywords: biography, history of anthropology, humanistic anthropology] I’ve learned a lot about how to keep up gracefully with changes in one’s discipline—and, even more importantly, how to keep ahead of the curve and define those changes—from watching Ed Bruner’s career. That’s something Matti Bunzl covers provocatively in his piece in this issue, charting Ed Bruner’s key role over the past four decades of theoretical transformations in anthropology toward the humanistic. As Ed himself has moved from publishing articles about “Processes of Change in Mandan-Hidatsa Kinship Terminology” (Bruner 1955) to “Urbanization and Ethnic Identity in North Sumatra” (Bruner 1961), from “A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Culture Change” (Bruner 1973b) to “The Transformation of Self in Tourism” (Bruner 1991), one can chronicle the shifting emphasis in the discipline from the abstract/structural/static/ neutral to the personal/emotional/processual/positional. This is a turn for which Ed has been a major player. Watching Ed’s eagerness to keep rethinking old paradigms and to keep visiting new places—metaphorically and literally—has been an inspiration to me as I have moved in my own research from writing about adults (Gottlieb 1996) to children (Gottlieb 2004), and from working in Francophone Africa (Gottlieb and Graham 1994) to planning a new project among Lusophone Africans in Europe. One needs strong personal models to give one courage in tackling such career and language shifts, and in my own decision making, I’ve been lucky enough to have had several models. Three are former teachers who each made dramatic research shifts of their own (Irving Goldman, Sherry Ortner, Victor Turner); the fourth has been my senior colleague and friend, Ed Bruner. I’ve learned a lot about how to place stories from the field—and one’s life— front and center in one’s scholarly writing from Ed Bruner. That’s something Barbara Babcock addresses with wit and verve, and that Edie Turner reflects on with charm and passion in this issue, in recollecting four seemingly personal but telling moments in Pueblo potter Helen Cordera’s life, and in emphasizing the spiritual underpinnings of many narratives, respectively. Ed has used stories to great effect throughout his writings. His justly celebrated coauthored essay, “Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada” (Bruner and Gorfain 1984), set the stage for new ways to think about history and the way that stories are reinterpreted by actors with divergent agendas across different eras. More recently, Ed has begun telling ethnographic Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 30, Issue 2, pp 196–200, ISSN 0193-5615, electronic ISSN 1548-1409. © 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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stories of bits of his own life experience (both personal and professional) in equally riveting narratives (e.g., Bruner 1996a, 1999a, 1999b, n.d.). I’ve learned a lot from Ed Bruner about how the anthropology of tourism has become a richly developed subdiscipline, in good part thanks to Ed’s own enormously creative and remarkably globalized engagement with all things touristic over the past two decades. That’s a subject that Eric Gable and Richard Handler tackle with honesty and vigor, and that Helaine Silverman is inspired to write about with great originality, in their pieces in this issue analyzing, respectively, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and archaeological tourist sites in Peru. While a graduate student, I staked out an early claim for an anthropology of tourism limned by class issues (Gottlieb 1982). But I soon moved on to other issues. Luckily enough for my wistful but underdeveloped interest in this topic, I began my teaching career at Illinois just as Ed was starting to think about tourism himself; from the mid-1980s on (Bruner and KirshenblattGimblett 1987), Ed began taking tourism as a topic for serious scholarly research. This was a major new intellectual agenda that would occupy him over the next two decades, culminating in his magisterial recent collection of the best of his essays on the touristic turn (Bruner 2005). I’ve learned a lot from Ed Bruner about how creative approaches to the expressive can illumine much about the human condition in all its surprises, messinesses, and contradictions. That’s a subject that Martin Manalansan, Sally Price, and Daphne Berdahl each exemplify elegantly in their pieces in this issue about gay Filipino men in New York City, Maroon artists in French Guiana, and vexed museum representations of life in Cold War–era East Germany, respectively. Over these last two-plus decades, Ed has done much to shape this humanistic end of the discipline. He has done so by producing a multitude of richly evocative and theoretically provocative writings about museums (Bruner, ed. 1993), art and ritual (Bruner 1974; Bruner and Becker, ed. 1979; Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1987), creativity and the human experience (Bruner 1986, 1993), and the politics of representation (Bruner 1996b, 2002). There are two more subjects I’ve learned a lot about from my nearlyquarter-of-a-century colleagueship and friendship with Ed Bruner that the contributors to this issue—and most other people—may not have heard much about. I’ve learned a lot about best pedagogy practices from co-teaching a course with Ed Bruner. And I’ve learned a lot from Ed Bruner about how to take kinship seriously in one’s life—including ties that begin fictively but immediately become real to all involved. Let me explain. During his teaching career, Ed was committed enough to his classroom engagements that he wrote about his pedagogical practices in scholarly publications (Bruner 1980; Bruner and Spindler 1963). He brought this thoughtful approach to teaching to a joint effort. In 1985, Ed Bruner, our then-colleague Ann Anagnost, and I decided to create and team-teach a course at the University of Illinois on Interpretive and Symbolic Anthropology. I was still a new teacher, still figuring out how tough to be on students who don’t finish the assigned reading before class and how to handle intellectual disagreements between students that start to turn nasty in class. Watching Ed deal with these
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and other pedagogical issues of the moment in our exciting but rough-atthe-edges classroom collaboration showed me all I needed to know. His main solution: be honest about disagreements, honor and respect students’ opinions, and don’t forget to laugh—somehow, Ed always managed to lighten a tense moment, often just by naming it. As a far senior colleague—at the time, he’d already been a full professor for nearly twenty years—Ed could have lectured Ann and me, both then new assistant professors, on his pedagogical techniques. Instead, I learned about teaching from Ed from watching him be a natural master teacher. Ed was great about ferreting out everyone’s opinions. He was always keenly attuned to the emotional undertones in a conversation; in the classroom it was often Ed who noticed that a quiet student didn’t appear to be in agreement with a point someone (including Ed) had made, Ed who teased out the diffident student in a way that made him or her comfortable to speak in a somewhat charged classroom. Moreover, in his dealings with Ann and me, he again eschewed hierarchy. We constructed the syllabus with equal input, and Ed completely deferred to Ann or me when it was one of our turns to lecture or guide class discussion. Once, when Ann and I disagreed in class about the merits of a particular author—riveting the students’ attention, but unnerving us—Ed gently intervened. Playing the peacemaker was a role he has cherished, and one he has deployed effectively through the many disciplinary debates of the past two decades. On the rare occasions Ed and I have disagreed about a political or scholarly issue, Ed has always worked hard to keep the dispute civil. In print, Ed came out for accommodating both scientific and humanistic approaches in the discipline. Reflecting on the particularly contentious American Anthropological Association meeting of 1989 in which rhetorical disputes between scientists and humanists were in full swing, he wrote: We all practice anthropology in our own fashion, and there is, fortunately, room for multiple perspectives. It would indeed be depressing if everyone did exactly the same thing. . . . My stance is not just a middle-of-the-road position, which under the guise of reasonableness and moderation stands for everything and hence nothing. It is indeed this holistic perspective, one tolerant of diversity, which is what anthropology is about. [Bruner 1990:28]
This statement surprised many of Ed’s colleagues, who knew him as so humanistically oriented (Bruner 1990). But as a teenager, Ed had attended Stuyvesant High School in New York, which is renowned nationally for its very strong math and science curriculum, and Ed had begun his college career as an engineering major and later produced an engineer son. Having had a healthy dose of the sciences early on, he continued to bring a long-standing respect for the sciences in his dealings with his more scientifically oriented colleagues. In contentious faculty meetings, Ed relished playing the elder statesman role, calming down polemical positions and reminding us of our common humanity. Ed carries his commitment to basic daily decency into his family life. Among his many off-vita accomplishments, Ed is an active father to his two grown children and his six grandchildren; more importantly for me, he is an active “grandfather” to my own daughter, Hannah, who adopted him as her grandfather when she was in preschool.
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At three, Hannah became aware that most children her age had grandfathers. Since both her biological grandfathers had died before she was born, she announced that she would pick out a grandfather for herself. The job description she constructed was right out of Mary Poppins: must be kind, must like to play with little children. We went down the list of possible applicants in my daughter’s circle, and Hannah immediately settled on her first and only choice: my senior colleague, Ed Bruner, whom she knew from departmental parties. Even on those relatively formal occasions, Ed had always taken the time to ask Hannah if she’d like him to put away the barking dog (she did), what toys she’d like to play with (anything he offered), and whether she’d like an extra petit four (she did). Yes, Ed used the great listening skills he must have cultivated during fieldwork in all his interactions . . . including those with his colleagues’ toddler children. I worried that Ed might not have realized what he was getting into, that he might take Hannah’s request as a passing fancy that would soon disappear. I should have known better. The author of an early article on “Kin and Non-Kin” (Bruner 1973a), Ed has made his latest “fictive” kinship role into the domain of the “really real,” as Geertz (1973) would say: he’s been there for Hannah’s performance in a local oratory contest; he’s joined in her school’s Grandparents’ Day afternoon; he always brings round a spectacular, gender- and ageappropriate birthday present; last year, Ed devoted several hours to telling his life’s story to nine-year-old Hannah when she chose him as her subject in a “Listen to a Life” contest interviewing an elder. Many of us take the socially constructed nature of our social worlds quite seriously in our scholarly writings; in his relationship with my daughter, Ed has lived out constructivist theory. As a colleague, as a scholar, as a teacher, as a world traveler, as a friend, and as my daughter’s adoptive grandfather, Ed has been an inspiration to me over the last nearly quarter of a century. In the preceding pages authored by both senior and rising junior scholars all touched in their own intellectually productive ways by Ed Bruner’s creative spark, I hope you have enjoyed discovering the fruits of some of Ed’s many gifts to us in the discipline.
References Cited Bruner, Edward M. 1955 Processes of Change in Mandan-Hidatsa Kinship Terminology. American Anthropologist 57(4):40–50. 1961 Urbanization and Ethnic Identity in North Sumatra. American Anthropologist 63:508–521. 1973a Kin and Non-Kin. In Urban Anthropology. Aidan Southall, ed. Pp. 373–392. New York: Oxford University Press. 1973b The Missing Tins of Chicken: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Culture Change. Ethos 1(2):219–238. 1974 Indonesian Homecoming: A Case Study in the Analysis of Ritual. Module Publication 54. Addison-Wesley. 1980 Anthropology 280: Personal Anthropology. In Currents of Warm Life: Popular Culture in American Higher Education. Mark Gordon and Jack Nachbar, eds. Pp. 111–115. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press. 1986 Experience and Its Expressions. In The Anthropology of Experience. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, eds. Pp. 3–29. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1990 The Scientists vs. the Humanists. Anthropology Newsletter, February:28.
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1991 The Transformation of Self in Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 18(2):238–250. 1993 Epilogue: Creative Persona and the Problem of Authenticity. In Creativity/ Anthropology. Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Pp. 321–334. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1996a My Life in an Ashram. Qualitative Inquiry 2:300–319. 1996b Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora. American Anthropologist 98(2):290–304. 1999a Deconstructing the Role of the Discussant. Anthropology and Humanism 24(2):129–133. 1999b Return to Sumatra: 1957, 1997. American Ethnologist 26(2):461–477. 2002 The Representation of African Pastoralists: A Commentary. Visual Anthropology 15(3–4):275–280. 2005 Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. n.d. My Jewish Father. Unpublished manuscript. Bruner, Edward M., ed. 1993 Museums and Tourism. Special issue of Museum Anthropology 17(3):3–66. Bruner, Edward M., and Judith O. Becker, eds. 1979 Art, Ritual and Society in Indonesia. Southeast Asia Monograph 53. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bruner, Edward M., and Phyllis Gorfain 1984 Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada. In Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Edward M. Bruner, ed. Pp. 56–79. Washington, D.C.: The American Ethnological Society/American Anthropological Association. Bruner, Edward M., and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1987 East Africa: Tourist Performances and Representations. Problemy Turystyki (Problems of Tourism) X (3):25–29. 1994 Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa. Cultural Anthropology 9(2):435–470. Bruner Edward M., and George Spindler 1963 The Introductory Course in Cultural Anthropology. In The Teaching of Anthropology. David Mandelbaum, G. Lasker, and Ethel Albert, eds. Pp. 141–152. Berkeley: University of California Press. Memoir 91, American Anthropological Association. Geertz, Clifford 1973 [1966] Religion as a Cultural System. In Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Pp. 87–125. New York: Basic Books. Gottlieb, Alma 1982 Americans’ Vacations. Annals of Tourism Research IX(2):165–187. 1996 [1992] Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004 The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gottlieb, Alma, and Philip Graham 1994 [1993] Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
