An Interview with George Armelagos
George Armelagos, Goodrich C. White Professor and Chair of Anthropology, was recently awarded the American Anthropological Association 2008 Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists 2008 Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award. With the Boas Award – the highest honor given by the American Anthropological Association – Dr. Armelagos joins the ranks of Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strauss, and H. Russell Bernard. The Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award is the top award given by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists – an international organization of over fifteen hundred members. Together, the awards honor Dr. Armelagos’s lifetime contributions to anthropology by recognizing his pioneering research, extensive scholarship, and service to the discipline of physical anthropology. Dr. Armelagos’s contributions to paleopathology and the study of evolution and the human diet have been revolutionary. In the wake of these accolades, he sat down with a colleague who has a complementary interest in biocultural approaches to infectious disease and long history in the field. Peter Brown is one of the founding members of Emory’s Anthropology Department and now teaches in both Anthropology and the Rollins School of Public Health Hubert Department of Global Health. He served a decade as editor-in-chief of Medical Anthropology and has edited or co-edited three textbooks. At Emory, he has united his interest in culture and health with his passion for undergraduate education by forming the minor in Global Culture, Health, and Society.
Professor Armelagos and Professor Brown sat down in January 2009 to discuss the four-field approach, class with Leslie White, football at Michigan, and Emory Anthropology.
On the Early Days
On Teaching and Research
On Life at Emory
On the Early Days
PB: We wanted to congratulate you again on your big awards.
GA: Actually, I think it’s like a tontine where everyone contributes money and the last person alive gets it. That’s what I think—you live long enough you experience it.
PB: But do you think that your colleagues were trying to get rid of you by giving you all of these awards?
GA: I don’t know. Maybe what they’re saying is, “we’ve got to keep him quiet.”
PB: I think it’s partly that you have all of these students that have done so well; they’re well placed.
GA: I’ve been lucky that way. Right from the beginning we’ve had great students like Owen Lovejoy, Dennis Van Gerven, Alan Goodman, Deb Martin, and Dave Carlson who’s head of Oral Biology at Baylor. That’s been a lucky opportunity.
PB: I’m interested in your beginnings in anthropology. I think for the record we should clear this up: there’s a rumor you played football at University of Michigan.
GA: It is a rumor. I was a redshirt there, which meant that I was on the practice team.
PB: Did you do that all four years?
GA: Three years. My last year I decided I wanted to get ready for medical school.
PB: So you were tired of getting beat up?
GA: That’s true.
PB: What first got you interested in anthropology?
GA: It was probably Introduction to Biological Anthropology from Fred Thieme. He had just come to Michigan and brought a sort of population approach to physical anthropology. He was an incredibly dynamic teacher. One of the big events -- I took a class from Leslie White, who was also an incredibly dynamic teacher. He was actually very conservative in his dress. He once said to me that when you have radical thoughts, you have to dress very conservatively.
PB: But you don’t dress conservatively. Doesn’t that mean you don’t have radical thoughts? It’s kind of like Sarah Palin. (Laughs) So did he wear a bow tie, or something?
GA: No, he just wore suits. You always dress for your next job, and I’m going to be probably a bartender somewhere.
PB: Was that a big class he was teaching?
GA: White’s class was called something like “The Mind of Primitive Man,” and it had about 150 students. But White was just an incredible lecturer. The Catholic Church took stenographic notes of his lectures and then made a formal complaint to the university about him.
PB: Because of his atheism?
You always dress for your next job, and I'm going to be probably a bartender somewhere.
GA: Yeah. And a student just jumped up one time and said, “Professor White! Professor White! Don’t you think it was a miracle when Captain Rickenbacker was on that raft for 30 days and all of a sudden he caught the bird?” And White said, “No, that was not a miracle. If it would have been a hamburger with everything on it and a malt—that would have been a miracle.” (Laughs) Lou Binford was in the class when that happened. Binford would say something, and White would say, “NSR.” And after about the fourth time, Binford said, “What do you mean, NSR!?” White said, “Not sufficiently relevant.” (Laughs)
PB: Binford was a student?
GA: Yes, Binford was a graduate student—and Jack Kelso. There were probably only about 15 or 20 undergraduate majors at that time. After my junior year, I was taking graduate classes because that was all that was open.
PB: But was Michigan Boasian?
GA: No, Michigan was pretty much anti-Boasian.
PB: So Michigan was anti-Boasian, whereas these other schools were run by Kroeber and . . .
GA: And Columbia was pretty much anti-evolution at the time because Boas’s notion of evolution was that it was racist. And so they became really anti-evolutionist. White sort of despised Boas, and I never understood why Boas was an anti-evolutionist until I read some of his stuff in terms of trying to combat racism. A lot of the evolutionists were racist, which actually Claude Levi-Strauss called, “anthropology’s original sin.” The fact that there was sort of this racist background is still an issue because there are people like Daniel Segal and Sylvia Yanagisako who claim that evolution is tainted with a racist past and that somehow we should deal with that.
PB: And you wanted to go to medical school?
GA: Well I thought about Dental School, and then I thought, “Why try Dental School when I could go to Medical School?” So I went to Medical School. Then I didn’t like that and came back to Anthropology. And then I flunked my Master’s at Michigan (laughs), which was probably something that really shaped my career in a sense, because I felt I always had something to prove.
PB: So that didn’t discourage you so much as to leave graduate school?
GA: No, actually Jack Kelso was at Colorado, so I had an opportunity to go there. The program there was just starting, so I decided to go.
PB: It seems like your whole career you’ve been very committed to the four-field approach. Why is that? Even when it’s become less popular . . .
GA: I think partly . . . it’s interesting because White’s approach to anthropology was basically cultural anthropology . . .
PB: And he called it culturology.
GA: Right. He talked about holding biology constant in his approach. So it was interesting that people like Jack Kelso and Frank Livingston and I were really influenced by White because of his notion of culture, and we were able to see that it could be applied to biological anthropology. So, really at that time at Michigan, Frank Livingston had just written his thesis on the sickle cell stuff. He published it in 1958—it was earlier than that. So that was really an exciting time to look at the ways in which the cultural and biological aspects of anthropology interact with each other.
PB: So, at Colorado you decided to go do this work in the Sudan . . .
GA: Right. What happened was . . .
PB: He always says, “Have I told you about Nubia?” (Laughs)
GA: Yeah, when I’m in a lecture—it doesn’t matter what the topic is—just say, “Have I talked about Nubia yet?” (Laughs) But Colorado had a new program, and there were only three or four graduate students in biological anthropology, and there might have been eight or nine students in all. Gordon Hughes had gotten money for a project to save the monuments in Nubia, so he went. They were excavating a town and they found some mummified burials. And they wrote back and said, “You know, we’ve gotta do this.” And so Dave Green and George Ewing and I wrote a grant which the faculty approved and sent in, and we got money to go back and do that. That was actually money well-spent. There have probably been 60 publications from the remains, and we’re actually still analyzing some of the material. In physical anthropology what would usually happen is every summer someone would go out and excavate a new burial, and these burials would pile up. But with the Nubian material we just kept analyzing it from the very beginning, and there wasn’t an interest in going out and trying to get new burials. And actually that was a problem because I was so associated with the Nubian stuff, but a lot of the graduate students weren’t interested in working on it. So I had to just continue working on it myself—a lot of times with undergraduate students who didn’t know any better. (Laughs)
PB: So there were Sudanese excavators? Is that right?
GA: Yeah, and actually there were Egyptian excavators from the island of Kuff. They were the ones who were sort of specialized - they worked in Egypt and would come down. Actually we had a lot of workers from the southern Sudan—there was unrest in the southern Sudan—they were sent up to work with us. It was a big excavation. We had probably 60 to 70 people working on the site.
PB: So you had a tent for doing the analysis?
GA: The problem was that we were there November through April, and it would be 50 degrees at six in the morning and by two in the afternoon it was 110 to 120 degrees. We had a tent there, but we also set up our lab in a house across the river. And at the time when we did this research, they had assumed that there was a Meroitic X-group in Christian sites and that the Meroitic was a time of major expansion of Sudanese culture into Egypt and the Near East. And then it collapsed. And then you had this X-group period, and they always thought the X-group periods were Negroes. And that was sort of the racist interpretation that the blacks were the reason for the collapse. And what we were able to show when we started working with this was that, archaeologically, there was no difference between the Meroitic X-group and the other population. When we started, even our preliminary analysis showed that there wasn’t much difference between the morphology of these populations. But, you know, 20 years after that (this was done in the 1960s) I’d be at a meeting and someone would come up and ask me, “Weren’t the X-groups blacks? Weren’t they Negros?” And I’d say, “Well, they’re Africans . . .”
PB: This was all historical hypotheses by somebody?
GA: It was a prevailing interpretation of Egyptian archaeology. Because the notion that Egyptian civilizations were white civilizations, and then its collapse . . . there are people that would talk about the dregs of civilization when drops of Negro blood from the south came into that area. So that’s always a problem.
PB: So you did your dissertation on this?
GA: I planned to go and autopsy the mummies, but when we got there almost all of the internal organs had decayed. We just had the exterior parts of the mummies—the skin and so forth—so I decided to do stuff on the pathology. And I didn’t know anything about pathology, but I knew stuff about normal bone, so if it didn’t look normal, I could say it was something we had to look into.
PB: So was there much paleopathology at the time?
GA: Basically paleopathology was called “the doctor’s hobby.” Doctors would go in and do diagnoses, and most of the publications at the time were publications saying “the earliest case of tuberculosis in Egypt,” “an earlier case of tuberculosis in Egypt,” “the real earliest case . . . ,” so that was part of the problem.
PB: And these publications were just short letters right?
My major contribution in the thesis was the percent . . . I just took samples of a hundred, so I didn't have too many problems.
GA: Yes, and most of the time they were interested in specific pathologies. So you might have someone talking about trauma in a particular population. They were probably interested in tuberculosis, leprosy, and syphilis, because those are the diseases that left a real mark on the bone.
PB: And so it seems like your early experiences having a population approach then influenced the way that you looked at the pathologies in the Nubian population?
GA: Yeah, my major contribution in the thesis was the percent. (Laughs) That’s how basic it was . . .
PB: Did you have trouble with the statistics of it?
GA: No, I just took samples of a hundred, so I didn’t have too many problems. (Laughs) But actually I became the local expert on Chi Square, and we bought a computer that could be programmed to 64 steps for 2,500 dollars. And you could probably get something like that now for 50 cents that could do most of what we were able to do on that. But what happened is that previous publications in paleopathology—there are 10,000 burials that were examined in Egypt—would only say, “We found 4 cases of trauma,” but they never told you how many observations they made. So what I did was actually look at each bone and make an observation on each bone so that we could talk about the percentage of trauma or something in the population . . . or how many observations we made of humeri that might be fractured.
PB: Did you think at the time that part of the goal was reconstructing the health disparities of these populations?
GA: Yes . . .
PB: So how they changed over time . . .
GA: Right. So that was always the goal—to look at what was happening in that time. To tell you how much support I had . . . Actually Jack Kelso -- who was my mentor and still one of my friends -- I told him I was going to go to the Sudan and work on bones, and he said, “Bones bore me.” (Laughs) But the point is that he was still very supportive. I had on my committee Jack Kelso—I actually had a biologist that was a population biologist—and Alice Brues. I was defending my thesis and I kept talking about the biocultural approach, and finally Alice Brues says, “Why do you keep mentioning it?” And I said, “Well, I don’t think I’ve really proved it. And so I have to keep telling you.” It’s not real obvious, is the point.
On Teaching and Research
PB: That’s like when students write at the beginning of a sentence, “Clearly comma . . .” It’s kind of magical thinking that the rest of the sentence . . .
GA: Actually, one of the things I’ve learned in teaching is that if anyone asks a question, sometimes they just ask a question that’s not really relevant—you might call it a stupid question—but you can always say, “Well, in a sense . . .” And then you can talk about anything you want. That’s one of the teaching tips I give students. Just say, “Well, in a sense . . .” (Laughs)
PB: It seems like you have a reputation for always having been a really excellent teacher and mentor. You’ve been a mentor to so many students. How many doctoral theses have you supervised?
GA: I’ve never counted—probably 25 or so I would guess. Owen Lovejoy was the first, and he was pretty much self-taught . . .
PB: You’ve published with your students from the very beginning. How did that start?
GA: Well, actually with Dennis Van Gerven—who’s at the University of Colorado—I’ve published five decades with him. Actually, talking to Dennis I said, “Dennis, you know this is our fifth decade we’ve published.” He said, “Gosh, we should get matching chenille robes for the old people’s home.” (Laughs) But Dennis was really sort of a funny story because I was teaching a class on Africa, and it was 7:45 in the morning, and he was sitting there just before class and I said, “So, what kind of research are you doing?” He said, “What’s research?” (Laughs) I said, “You come by.” He stopped by the lab and I showed him around, and by the end of the semester he had something ready for publication. And I had a student—Gary Fry—that finished at Utah and he worked on fecal matter. He said they took trisodiumphosphate and they had original consistency and smell. And I said, “Well, I’ve never seen that -- that’s why you have graduate students.” (Laughs) Gary Fry was working in a lab and we had fecal matter from Danger Cave, so I went to Jess Jennings. He said if we did analysis on it, we’d destroy the material. And I said, “Jess, the stuff has been in the ground for 10,000 years and you’ve had it here for 60 years and you’re worried about destroying it?” So we took a little bit. And that was a big deal because there had only been two or three other studies that had been done on coprolites.
PB: And you used that to reconstruct diet?
GA: Yeah, it all sort of came together, looking at disease and trying to look at all the different angles and see what you could find. This was before stable isotopes so you couldn’t use that to reconstruct diet -- you had to look at the actual fecal remains. And they could actually find pieces of food. I mean, now they’re taking pots and pulling out starches from them and so forth—it’s pretty amazing what they can do. One of the turning points was when I did a symposium at one of the AAA meetings in ’62 or ’63 in Denver. It was on paleopathology and it attracted about 400 people.
PB: Was that one of the first times that word itself was used?
GA: Well, “paleopathology” the word had been used from the 20s or 30s, but I think it was the first time that there was a population approach to paleopathology, and that created a lot of interest in the field.
PB: So you were at UMass?
GA: No, this was when I was still at Colorado in the early 60s. Then I got the job at Utah and I was there for three years. And I actually hadn’t finished my dissertation when I applied for and got an NIH grant. I also got an NSF grant but they said they wouldn’t give it to me until I finished my dissertation. That was in November, and so I finished it in January. I had incredible support and I was able to get a lot of stuff done fairly quickly.
PB: So you were already publishing by the time you had finished.
GA: Oh, yeah. I think I had published 10 or 15 things by that time. So that wasn’t critical. And I had an article in Science.
PB: You were showing them at Michigan.
GA: That’s right. That’s true.
PB: So you came to UMass and started a PhD program.
GA: Yeah, they had the PhD program when I got there. But then it really expanded. It was a four-field program, but also there was a really strong political-economic perspective, which is another part of what I always proposed -- that if you’re going to do archaeology and bioarchaeology, it should have some relevance to contemporary problems. And so the whole aspect of inequality was something that we were interested in.
PB: I guess that goes all the way back to the experience with Leslie White…
If you're going to do archaeology and bioarchaeology, it should have some relevance to contemporary problems.
GA: Yeah, White would talk about aspects of economic inequality—sort of a Marxist approach. He didn’t call it Marxist, but that was . . .
PB: Everybody else called him that.
GA: Yeah. In his biography, they talk a little bit about that. But actually other people got in more trouble because they were more vocal, and White was not political even though he had published some things in the socialist journals under other names. They didn’t look to him as a sort of evil person.
PB: So how long were you at UMass?
GA: 23 years. So I was at Utah for three years and 23 years at Massachusetts, three years at Florida, and I’ve been here for 15 years. So I just can’t hold a job. People would talk about me as a careerist.
PB: Was it hard to leave UMass?
GA: Actually, there were something like 15 snowstorms at the time that I left, and I just felt that I needed to get repotted as an anthropologist.
PB: So repotted—into a bigger department or a different . . .
GA: Well, just a different department. And actually, I had evaluated this department when I had taken the job at Florida. I’d rather have come here but I had already accepted there and I was Chair there.
PB: I could tell a story about this. When I was Chair, we invited George to be one of the evaluators because we wanted to attract him here and get the Dean interested. We were disappointed to find out that he had just moved to Florida, and when I asked him about what Florida was like, what his house was like and so forth, he whipped out his wallet and showed me all these pictures of his house which was really, really cool. An indoor/outdoor pool . . . So they did the evaluation and it was very positive, and people asked me if I thought we could attract him here. I’d say, “No way, he’s so tied to that house.” And then, when he finally came, my kids were little and we were on our way to Disney World and we stopped in Gainesville to visit George. My kids, particularly Patrick, were very, very taken with the house. And when we finally attracted George here (Emory), he lived in an apartment. When we visited, Patrick came in and looked around and he said, “George, what happened to you?! You had this beautiful house, and now…!” Later, when they moved to the apartment on Peachtree, they were very deliberate in the way it got remodeled. And Patrick came in and he said he liked that they were doing one room at time. He said, “That’s the art of it.” (Laughs)
GA: At the time, we had the dining room and a bedroom and boxes in the living room for about two years. And Patrick said that was the art of it.
GA: When we did the review here at Emory, I was on the review committee with George Stocking and Elizabeth Coleson. We were quite impressed with what was going on, especially with the notion of the dialogue between biological and cultural anthropology. And I remember George Stocking saying, “Yeah, wait until they start arguing over resources. Then we’ll see how this dialogue occurs.” But in the report, we said that the proof would be in the ability of the students to get jobs, and that’s what’s been really remarkable: the employment record of our department is just unheard of.
PB: I think part of it is that we kind of announced this dialogue thing which was an ideal in some ways—a shtick—because none of us really did it, and we were interested in George because George was actually doing that.
GA: Well you were doing it. You were basically doing it.
The employment record of our department is just unheard of.
PB: Anthropology itself has kind of fissioned a bit over your career.
GA: Actually, I’m doing an article right now on the foundations of bioarchaeology, and one of the things that happened in the 60s was a criticism of the new archaeology, where really the postmodernists started saying that you couldn’t test out theoretical constructs in the archaeological record because you didn’t have any independent means of verifying what you were doing. Because I was doing bioarchaeology, we always had independent means of testing out the hypothesis: the skeletal material. So we could talk about the impact of agriculture on health, and we had ways of measuring that. Or we could talk about religious unification—what impact that might have. We had ways of testing it out. So basically, we never really stopped dealing with a scientific approach. So the approach that I’ve really focused on is an old one called “strong inference” in which you have multiple hypotheses that are testable and falsifiable. This is sort of a positivist approach and has been criticized, but it seems to work.
PB: Well you also seem to have a different dependent variable in terms of health and well-being of a population, where before that time archaeologists were either working on theories of the expansion and collapse of civilization or something kind of . . . more of a cultural evolutionary framework that became unpopular . . .
GA: That was part of it. Part of it was also that a lot of the criticisms at that time were coming in about adaptation because of the super adaptational approach—everything that you found was adaptable. But what we were finding is things that weren't adaptable because there were all these things where the cultural system wasn't effective, or the cultural system was increasing the stressors in the population. So that really was another aspect of the research that led to its continuous use.
PB: So in that regard, something like Jared Diamond talking about the beginning of agriculture being the worst mistake in human history…
GA: Well, that's really a misrepresentation. We wouldn't even be talking about it here if it wasn't for agriculture. The way I always addressed it was agriculture had biological costs. So that's the factor—the biological costs were borne by the women and children. That is another aspect of this work that I think is interesting: we're really providing a gendered approach, and even a life history approach to these issues.
PB: Yeah, I think that's really important, but in that series of case studies or in the Dickson Mounds stuff, you also found that in some populations the beginnings of agriculture didn't make the health worse.
GA: Yeah, we were looking at the Dickson Mounds and finding that as these populations became intensive agriculturalists, their health declined, which we sort of figured theoretically might be because of infectious disease. But what we really found was the nutritional health also declined, which is really counter-intuitive. And at that time, Mark Cohen had published The Food Crisis in Prehistory, and he said that what was happening was that the late Upper Paleolithic populations were becoming sedentary and started to increase. Their health declined and they discovered agriculture. Well I thought we have an opposite case here so we did Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, and there were 21 studies. Most of them show that with the rise of agriculture, there was a decline in health, but the point of the book really isn't that that's what we want them to do -- the point of the book was that we want to use multiple stress indicators to make these evaluations.
PB: To me the most impressive take-home lesson was the negative cases that had to do with populations that became agricultural and then started exploiting other populations, or . . .
GA: . . . or dependent on a single super crop, for example the Valley of Mexico—it was a broad spectrum agricultural society. When they developed agriculture, they still maintained a lot of the other crops. They didn't show these changes until colonization with the European contact. We also found situations where groups that didn't develop agriculture—for example, acorn harvesters—that were sedentary started showing the infectious disease factors because they became sedentary, but not the nutritional factors. So that was a basic part . . .
PB: But with much greater complexity about what the local ecological, political, economic conditions were.
GA: Right. Part of what was successful with Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture was that we were consistently using the same measures of health.
PB: Between all the cases . . .
GA: Right. All the case studies. So you look at trauma and iron deficiency anemia and infectious diseases and so forth. So that’s how the work maybe had a big impact.
PB: On kind of a bit different topic, it seems that the battle against racial typological thinking has been central in your intellectual career all along.
GA: That actually grew out of the interpretation of the Nubian material, because a lot of the Egyptian interpretation was so racist, and so I think initially we were providing an alternative to that. And then I think looking at what Frank Livingston and Loring Brace had done, it became sort of an anti-racial approach, and that actually was influenced also by the study of the blood groups and nutrition, because this was a non-racial approach to that. So part of what we were looking at was ways in which you could do non-racial analysis. Basically, the problem with racial analysis is that it is only looking at one variable: gene flow. So part of it was to try to deal with natural selection, so that was a way of negating racial studies not because they are racist but because they weren't telling us a lot of things.
PB: Well, was your motivation also because they were racist? I mean was this turn in anthropology influenced by the civil rights movement?
GA: I think it made it easier to talk about some of the stuff, but I think basically . . . I don't think we want to use racial analysis, because part of the problem with racial analysis is that every person that does it has their own . . . whatever traits are used, uh, they give different racial classifications…
PB: The different racial classifications don't work. I guess that was happening at roughly the same time that Harris was doing the stuff in Brazil. But that seems to have been a major turn-around in intellectual history in anthropology and a very important contribution to science.
GA: But what's interesting to me is that there is almost a resurrection of race with the human genome and diversity project where they're looking at populations. Initially they were looking at racial studies and now they're talking about geographic studies, which are basically the same thing. I think Loring Brace said that population studies are the last bastion of typology, because what you're doing is looking at genetic traits and you're using genetic traits and you think you can't be racial. In fact I was just reading something yesterday in which they said, “Well, this isn't typological because we're using population.” Well that's not the case. You can be typological, you know, you substitute the genes for the traits, and that's actually what happened. This was a big factor in the 1950's in the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium volume 15 where they talked about the population approach. It was against the blatant typologists like Sheldon and things like that, but basically they were still typological.
PB: I am impressed by the notion of the myth of race and the reality of racism. When did you start becoming interested in that kind of work?
PB: You never seem to slow down in research and publication. How do you do that?
GA: Um, I'm getting old, and I need to get it out.
GA: Well, I taught a course on race and racism at Utah. Actually, it was a required course for nurses there . . .
PB: Really? On race and racism?
GA: Yeah. So that became one of the courses that I taught. I taught it at Utah for the three years I was there, and I taught it intermittently at UMass, and I've taught it here. So that's been a constant.
PB: One of the things we notice in looking at your career is that you never seem to slow down in research and publication. How do you do that?
GA: Um, I'm getting old, and I need to get it out. (Laughs) When I was in my thirties or forties I could always say, “Next year I can do that, and, you know, next decade I can do that.” Now I'm 72 and you just think you'd better get whatever you can out as quickly as possible. So this Christmas I think I got three or four things done.
PB: That's pretty remarkable.
GA: Well, it's always essentially the same stuff. (Laughs)
PB: It's not always the same stuff, because I want you to talk a bit about the St. Catherines Island project. Here kind of later during your career you embark on a completely different topic and one which is cultural anthropological or cultural historical.
GA: As I was doing an article on evolution of diet—I started thinking “I've done this so many times”. I had Beth Turner take it over. I was on the coast and my neighbor John Woods had been the caretaker of St. Catherines, so I thought I'd do something about his relationship to the island. John talked about his Dad taking over the island from the Keys. Well I started researching and found out that Keys was C. M. Keys who was at the time head of 26 aviation companies in the late 1920's. What had happened was that one of the companies was a holding company, and all of the money was coming into this holding company, and the market started to crash, and he didn't have the money to pay back. So it was a Madoff type thing, but because he was in such esteem they let him off. And so he came basically I think to the island to escape, really. But he did a million dollar renovation of the island and started a hotel.
PB: So it seems like with John Woods you found a kind of ideal informant….
GA: John is an incredible story teller. He also had documents that, you know—this is his dad's day book [pulls out old day book from desk, opens day book and begins to read] . . .
PB: From what year?
GA: Uh, 1960. "Cloudy. Mild. Holmes over with groceries. John Underwood over and went fishing. Caught, uh . . . uh, a bunch of trout." So that had . . .
PB: So he had documents as well.
GA: Yeah. And he had letters. Then actually the island was sold in 1943 to E. J. Noble who was president of ABC, bought ABC and founded the Life Savers Company.
PB: Has there been an anthropological angle in this book?
GA: Well yeah, I think that there's a whole aspect of a regional approach. These are all northerners who come down and take over the south—and the whole relation of the northerners to the locals . . .
PB: Tell us the story about selling stuff to the Yankees.
GA: Ok, well let me say one thing -- both the Keys and the Nobles would have workers go into the live oaks and pull down all the moss because they thought it looked too Southern. But John is a gifted story teller, and one time we were talking and he said that the shrimping business got bad and some to the shrimpers sold the boats to the Yankees. I said, “Well why would a Yankee want to buy a boat?” And uh, he said, “Well, George, they burn their boats and collect the insurance. That's selling to the Yankees.” (Laughs) But Whitney's [Whitney Easton is a recent graduate of the Department of Anthropology and current Undergraduate Program Coordinator] honors thesis dealt with race and slavery on the island. There is no mention of the slave population on the island in the history of St. Catherine’s, even though it was owned by slave owners during the 1800s—the Waldburg family. So they talk about the slave owners and their ambitions, and mention Tunis Campbell—who is an incredible character—but they don’t talk about the other part of it—the black population. Whitney did an analysis of the census records and so forth and was able to reconstruct that whole period of the 1800s.
On Life at Emory
PB: So what about your anthropologist/nurse spouse?
GA: Well, I'm married to Lynn Sibley who is actually an incredible researcher and applied anthropologist in many ways. She's going at the end of the month to Geneva, and going to Nepal, and going to Bangladesh. Things that I would at one time . . . I don't like to leave my bathroom, so . . . so I stay mostly at home now. She teaches in the nursing school, and I just see her preparing classes, and she works at it so much harder than i do. I'm in awe of her, so.
PB: So your time at Emory…how has it been?
I'll probably keep writing. I have a few more things to say.
GA: The department here is just a wonderful building, and we have a staff that -- Joe, before and Miriam and Pablito now, -- it's just wonderful to come to work. The building is so clean. At UMass sometimes it looked like the third day after a student strike, because there'd be papers and stuff all over the floor. And I think the staff we have here -- Debbie and David and Whitney and Sybil and Stephen -- makes it a place where you really enjoy working. We have good students and good facilities. It makes it just wonderful. You don't want to leave.
PB: Have you enjoyed being chair? You’re just finishing a term of six years . .
GA: Yeah. . . well, first of all, Sally has been such a wonderful Associate Chair that a lot of the onerous tasks are taken over by her. . . I think the department's in good shape now.
PB: It's really grown in the fifteen years you've been here.
GA: Yeah. So, but I mean even with Dietrich Stout coming in and Craig Hadley and Peter Little . . . Even recently with the tightening, we've been able to expand, so I think that's exciting.
PB: So you're going on leave next year. What are your plans?
GA: Uh, god, I don't know. Probably keep writing. I have a few more things to say.
PB: We had an article due last week. (Laughs)
What you do is basically demystify research. If you can do that with undergraduates, they realize they can do it, and it's going to change their academic life.
GA: We can do that. But uh, you know, there's always something to do. I'll be teaching another class. Well, I get some sabbaticals now, but I . . . teaching is always fun. I taught a course on the anthropology of emerging disease, which was exciting. I'm teaching a skeletal biology class right now . . . the students have gotten over 30 papers published or presentations at a national meeting that are projects from the class. That's always an exciting thing to get students . . . what you do is basically demystify research. If you do that with undergraduates, they realize they can do it, and it's going to change their academic life.