The website of a senior anthropology professor is a kind of virtual illuminated manuscript of a life. My own path through anthropology, and life, has not been exactly straight. This site contains some materials on my fieldwork, research and teaching, and you’re welcome to trace some of my meandering pathways, mental and professional.

As for fieldwork: I worked on the Allegany Seneca Reservation starting as an undergraduate, 1971-77, but fieldwork leading to my doctoral dissertation was in India, 1975-79. I worked in Yugoslavia from 1981 until the country passed out of existence in 1991, and in the successor republics (but mainly Bosnia-Herzegovina) since then. While Bosnia was collapsing in 1992, I did more work in India; and also did some more work there in 2013. I now live mainly in Serbia and continue to write on issues in the Balkans. More information on my fieldwork is on the following pages: Seneca Fieldwork, India fieldwork, Yugoslavia Fieldwork, (post-)Yugoslavia Fieldwork.

After a Fulbright in Yugoslavia from 1981-83 and then three years as a Project Director at the American Bar Foundation, I joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1986, with a joint appointment for a few years in Anthropology and in Legal Studies. By 1992, the Legal Studies appointment had lapsed and I was wholly in Anthropology, though with secondary appointments in the School of Law and the Graduate School of Public & International Affairs. My teaching covered a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. The most challenging and invigorating experience may have been in the early 1990s: after teaching a course on socialist Eastern Europe several times, I was suddenly challenged to keep up with the massive changes in the region following the collapse of state socialism. More challenging was devising ways to teach about the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Anyone interested in old syllabi can contact me.

One of the best parts of the job was working with doctoral students, 18 of whom completed dissertations under (or in spite of) my guidance. They did their fieldwork variously in Argentina, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, India, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and Turkey. Helping doctoral students develop their research ideas and plans taught me at least as much as it helped them. They are listed in my CV on my Academia site.