Life in the Tropics

Living overseas can be a great life, but it does have its downsides. Most of us who left “home” long ago will probably agree that it’s the distance from family and friends that is the biggest downside (well, not being able to go to major league baseball games might be even more of a downside). The amazing technological advances (e-mail, Skype, Facebook, etc.) that have occurred over the past two decades that I’ve been living in Asia have made that separation easier, but still there are these disconnects – not everyone has hopped on the technology bandwagon. So there’s the lead-in for today’s post.

I’ve been working on a post about discontinuities between expats or migrants (as I now prefer to call those of us living in foreign countries around the world), and I thought that I would go back to my Ph.D. dissertation to see what I had written about the topic twenty-plus years ago. As I was wandering through that long, somewhat rambling, document, I got the feeling that I should send a letter to my old mentor at the University of California, George DeVos, and see how he was doing. It’s been twenty years since we last corresponded; as I’ve written frequently, time is a curious thing and twenty years quite often seems like last week these days. So, I navigated over to the UC Berkeley anthropology department’s website. Not finding George on the list of professors, I did a quick Google and found several links to news items about his death last year. It was a shock to hear that George was gone. Not too dissimilar to hearing about my father’s death a few decades ago.

George was known for what one article called his “ground-breaking research” in psychological anthropology and culture and personality. It was George’s work in these fields that brought me in part to study in the anthropology department of the University of California, Berkeley.

On my first day on the Berkeley campus, not long after I had made the move from Chicago, I wandered into the little green house across from the anthro department that was George’s home for the years that I was studying at Berkeley. I knocked on the door which was already open, introduced myself as George’s new graduate student and cautiously entered. George nodded his head, looked up at me for just a moment and asked, “What do you know about the TAT?” Not wanting to lie, but not wanting to seem ignorant of something that was obviously important, I said, “Not much, I’ve been working on psychoanalytic anthropology.”

George solved the problem by sticking me in his little back room with boxes of data cards to sort out and catalog. That was my introduction to the TAT. Although I sat in several seminars where we discussed the uses of the TAT, I never used it in my own fieldwork. Years later, I received a letter from George at my home in Bali. Among a few reminiscences of his trip to Bali (including a humorous question about whether or not I found Balinese women’s breasts lovely), George mentioned that he had just returned from a conference in Europe about the TAT. I was gently rebuked for not becoming an academic with the reminder that “you could have been with us on this trip.”

We had other – theoretical – differences, George could never quite appreciate my Marxist approach to looking at the world and regularly accused me of favoring an economic analysis of society and culture over a more psychological approach. Well it turned out, as I finally realized years later when writing my dissertation, that he was right. That was one lesson that he kept trying to teach me that I finally got.

I was part of his group of students that focused on ethnicity and identity. Our discussions around the big table in the little green house could get heated at times, but some insight, some glimmer of the aha moment almost always followed. I still am focused on those issues in the context of Indonesian society and culture.

And that was how our relationship went. I was the somewhat reluctant graduate student – always feeling slightly out of place at Berkeley – and George was the pestering father, pushing me at times and pulling me at others so that I would follow the direction that he felt was right for me. At first it was easy enough to go along because I wasn’t sure what I wanted out of Berkeley or a Ph.D. In anthropology. Later, when I realized that I wanted to teach children, George and I began to go our separate ways. For George, teaching children was just wasn’t enough for me. He was an academic and for George that was the life.

But despite our differences about careers at the end of our working relationship, I always saw George as a father figure. He got me through my first year of graduate school at Berkeley when I wanted to go home to Chicago for personal and family reasons. His combination of humor and psychological insight always helped me find an answer to what was troubling me. George’s trickster sense of humor was legendary among his students, and he would apply it to the intellectual life as well as to topics of popular culture. When I think of George, it will always be as the trickster with the twinkle in his eye. Rest in Peace, Professor DeVos. You’ll be missed.