Academic History

I had never heard of anthropology. As an undergraduate, the quarter system allowed me to experiment with many subjects.  Religious studies, histories (many), dramaturgy, poetics, sociology, psychology, and more.  Gradually anthropology bubbled up to the top of my list.  My first anthro classes were physical anthropology and archaeology, essentially the prequels to my many history classes.  Then many flavors of cultural anthropology filled in the map.  I was coming to realize that only anthropology and archaeology were asking the biggest questions of humanity, who are we, where did we come from, and why are we as we are? My two favorite anthro subjects were admittedly diametrically opposed – ecological/evolutionary anthropology and Boasian anthropological linguistics.  That didn’t bother me.

An employment interlude – Six years working at the Kennedy Space Center on the space shuttle.  In that time at night, I earned a Masters degree in computer science.

Following my heart, I returned to anthropology.  Classes of ‘peoples’, Inkas, and linguistics.  Bitten by the computer bug, I also took CS classes in the emerging AI areas – natural language processing, expert systems, and neural networks.  And some cognitive psych to go with it all.  For my Masters, I wrote a paper, “PDP Cognitive Models in Anthropology.”

Then a pivot, to my early passion for ecological, materialist, and evolutionary anthropology and archaeology.  I discovered that I could take ecology classes from a name I knew, HT Odum.  He was a huge influence, still today.  Marvin Harris was also now at Florida, and I took his seminars.  My chair was a very supportive archaeologist with scientific and evolutionary training, Bill Keegan.  I spoke some Dutch, and for my dissertation I took aim at a small Dutch island in the Caribbean undergoing an ecotourism transition.

On my return, with no funds, it was a programming job by day and dissertation by night.  In those years, Odum’s weekly ‘systems seminar’ kept me going.  I taught myself systems simulation, read Prigogine, took Buzz Holling’s adaptive cycles class, and sewed it all together into my dissertation.  With my new wife from Taiwan, we two PhDs crossed the Pacific to this small Buddhist university on the east coast, from which I have just retired.  The rest of the website will tell you what I taught and wrote from then until now.