Interviewed by Lawrence A. Babb
April 20, 2001
[0:00] Babb: My name is Lawrence Alan Babb. My friends call me Alan. I'm a member of the Anthropology and Sociology Department at Amherst College and also a member of the Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. I came to the college in 1969. And the man who hired me, Don Pitkin, is sitting here at my right. Don is the founder of the Anthropology Sociology Department at Amherst College. He's the one that brought anthropology, the discipline of anthropology – and sociology as well – to this college and it gives me more pleasure than I can easily say to be here with you this afternoon, Don. It's a real privilege.
[0:45] Pitkin: Alan, thank you for those kind words. They are very well spoken. I just appreciate that a lot.
[0:49] Babb: Well, I think we're here to talk about how you came to Amherst and what it was like to be here and what your mission was in coming here. And I thought perhaps a good question to begin with would be how did you first hear about Amherst College? How did it swim into your awareness the very first time?
[1:14] Pitkin: Well I’ll start with the word ”Amherst,” that swam into my consciousness before Amherst College did, but I'll just say briefly, the first time I really ever heard about Amherst was when I was a kid, about 13, 14, 15, I went to a camp in Maine near Bucksport called Camp Sparta and as the custom would be at camps like that you sit around the campfire at night and sing songs. Well our favorite song was Lord Jeffrey Amherst, soldier of the king, who killed all the Indians with a sight. It was that line about killing all the Indians that really turned everybody on.
[1:44] Babb: Oh, boy. Well [chuckles].
[1:46] Pitkin: And that was long before I decided to become an anthropologist but I could tell you that it was clear that Amherst College needed an anthropologist. [Laughs].
[1:52] Babb: Yeah, well, that's for sure. [Laughs] Now this was when you were about 14.
[1:57] Pitkin: I was about 14. The next time was when I was in school, high school or boarding school in Dedham, Mass., and there were four or five of us living in a room, and we're– Senior year was 1939. And I can remember that one of them was not going to you-know-where, was not going to go to Harvard. And we kind of looked at this guy, and he was a perfectly normal kid, and he was going to Amherst. [Laughs] And I was, you know, really a sort of [?] with all of us. But the thing is his father was Richmond Mayo-Smith
[2:28] Babb: Oh yeah.
[2:28] Pitkin: who was chairman of the board at Amherst College. So what else could he do but go off to Amherst?
[2:32] Babb: Well, had you ever considered a place like Amherst?
[2:34] Pitkin: No, no, I really hadn’t.
[2:35] Babb: Why not?
[2:37] Pitkin: Because I was so constrained in my vision of things that I never, never did. But now I must say I really kind of– I don't regret going where I went. But there were things at that place that Amherst provided that I didn't get, and that was small size and an intimacy that I would have liked, and I didn't have where I went. So in retrospect it would have been a good reason to go to Amherst.
[3:01] Babb: Now when you finish your graduate education, had you any idea of teaching at an undergraduate college at all?
[3:09] Pitkin: Yeah, I think I did. I didn't think I was going to teach here though again [chuckles]. I'm gonna just say something about how that proposition came to be okay?
[3:19] Babb: Mm hm.
[3:20] Pitkin: I was [?] in the war for four years between 1942 and 1946. Came back. Finished up. Got my undergraduate degree in 1947. Got married in 1948. We lived in Cambridge and I was then teaching at Northeastern. Well Northeastern couldn't be more different than Amherst. A great big urban college, sort of a subway college, where people go to school practically 24 hours a day. But an extremely good one. I liked working there very much. And I can remember one night, 1962, I think was October 25th or 26th or 27. The very height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Emily, my wife, and I are invited to dinner by Ernie and Ginny Khan. Ginny Khan was Emily's roommate at Vassar College. Ernie Khan was Leo Marx's roommate at Harvard. So we went to dinner and it was– Everybody sort of felt this tension in the air. And there's a guy called Roger Fisher from the Harvard Law School who was talking to us about sort of the contextualizing the whole situation. Everybody felt sort of the question of kind of war and peace and the whole thing might blow up and so forth. But after all that Leo drew me aside and said, “Don, the faculty at Amherst College has voted to include anthropology in the curriculum. They're looking for someone to come out and help get the program going. What do you think, would you like to apply?” And I said, “Yeah.” And one thing led to another and I ended up at Amherst.
[4:48] Babb: How was the job described to you or the task? What sort of context was put around it?
[Crosstalk].
[4:55] Pitkin: I was supposed to– Yeah well I began to know a little bit about that knowing also Leo. And Leo, the humanist that he was, wanted to sort of break away. Well, not just the humanist that he was, but the perspective he had, wanted to add another dimension to American Studies. So it would go beyond American history as we traditionally knew it.
[5:18] Babb: Now he would have come here, when, about two or three years before–?
[Crosstalk]
[5:21] Pitkin: At least three or four years before I did. And he was very much an American Studies person among other things now. And there's another link there in that too between Emily and Amherst was that his mentor at Harvard, his principal mentor. Well, he had two. One was Perry, the [?] mind guy, and the other one was F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and he was the most important of the two. So he came with American Renaissance very much in mind as a way of thinking about literature. But also he had enough anthropology under his belt to think there should be something else there should be another dimension in American Studies, namely culture. So we need an anthropologist. And eloquent as Leo was he was able to convince the faculty that they should have it.
[6:04] Babb: He was just that, he really was eloquent.
[6:06] Pitkin: Wasn’t he though?
[6:06] Babb: Oh yeah.
[6:06] Pitkin: Remember? He was the very moral center of this place in a way which no one really–
[6:11] Babb: He really was. He really was.
[6:12] Pitkin: was, as I know, before. I don't know about before, but certainly no one's really filled that capacity after him.
[6:17] Babb: I know. Well now, when he described the place to you did he describe it as a place with a vacuum in the niche of anthropology? Did you have any sense that, I mean– How was the anthropological situation at Amherst?
[6:33] Pitkin: It was zero. No it wasn't quite zero. It wasn’t quite zero.
[6:36] Babb: It wasn’t quite–
[6:36] Pitkin: There was a biologist, gosh I remember–
[6:37] Babb: His name was Plough, I think.
[6:39] Pitkin: Oh thank you. Plough.
[6:40] Babb: Plough, Plough.
[6:41] Pitkin: P-L-O-U-G-H.
[6:42] Babb: Right.
[6:42] Pitkin: He taught anthropology. I don't think he was an anthropologist, I think he was a biologist. And in fact he had– There was a lot of teaching material here. They had a great collection of artifacts, a great collection of cranial material. And he had given a course but it was sort of always something, you know, peripheral to his major interest. So they wanted a real, you know, kind of hundred percenter.
[7:05] Babb: Well now then you must have been, as I was by you, brought out here for an interview?
[7:11] Pitkin: Oh, yeah. Wow.
[7:12] Babb: Had you ever been here before?
[7:14] Pitkin: My sister went to Smith. She's the class of 1939. And every once in a while our family would make a trip to see Jane at Smith. Well that was quite a trip, you know, going out on Route 9. It would take us almost all day. And whenever we got to Ware my father would say, “Well, where is Ware?” and we'd all laugh uproariously and continue on.
[7:36] Babb: [Laughs] Yeah, right. This was an old fashioned motor trip, wasn’t it?
[Cross talk]
[7:39] Pitkin: Oh, yes we were motoring. We motored out to Northampton.
[7:41] Babb: [Laughs] Right.
[7:42] Pitkin: And I can remember that place in Belchertown, or on the way from Belchertown, where all of a sudden you see Johnson Chapel. And I thought ‘Oh my god, there it is.’ I both said ‘Hooray,’ and sort of my stomach turned over at the same time. No, I’d never– I mean, I’d obviously been through it when I was a kid, but I didn't know anything about Amherst. So I was put up at the inn. I was told to go see the president, who was in Johnson Chapel. And after having come from all the cement and steel and glass of Northwest–eastern, Johnson Chapel and the president's office there, it was entirely different proposition now. Went up those funny stairs, along that creaky floor.
[8:19] Babb: Yeah. Right.
[8:20] Pitkin: There was one woman sitting outside. That was all and––
[8:23] Babb: Well now that was before the president's office then was shifted over to–
[8:26] Pitkin: Oh, yeah, it was long before–
[Cross talk]. [Inaudible].
[8:29] Pitkin: I don't even know if he had a secretary. I guess he did. So I was introduced to– I hadn’t met Cal before.
[8:35] Babb: Well now had he been– Had you heard about it?
[8:37] Pitkin: I'd heard about him. I’d heard about Cal Plimpton, a doctor who’d become a college president now. And I knew a little, just a little bit about his family, I guess because this guy I mentioned before, Richmond Mayo-Smith, was president of the Plimpton publishing company. Must have something to do with Cal. Okay, anyway. So here is Cal, very, very large and very– He’s a presence. He was a presence.
[9:03] Babb: Oh I remember well, he towered–
[9:04] Pitkin: Towered over everybody.
[Both laugh].
[9:07] Babb: Yeah. In fact everybody at the front office did in those days.
[9:09] Pitkin: I know. And he had a sort of bluff patrician way about him.
[9:12] Babb: Yeah.
[9:12] Pitkin: [speaking as Plimpton] ‘Oh, well Mr. Anthropology.” You know, something like that. ‘Come on in here.’ You know and so forth. And wow, away we went now and I can remember asking what I thought was a very essential question to ask. And I said, ‘Well, Cal,’ I guess or ‘Mr. Plimpton,’ ‘Dr. Plimpton,’ whatever I was calling him then, ‘tell me what would the expected teaching load be? Because I'd been teaching four separate courses at Northeastern in a nine week–
[9:35] Babb: Four?
[9:35] Pitkin: Four. Four. Year in year––
[9:37] Babb: Separate?
[9:38] Pitkin: Absolutely separate courses, you know? And I thought that's the way things were.
[9:44] Babb: You must have been busy with course preparation, morning till night.
[Cross talk].
[9:47] Pitkin: Yeah I was. I was very busy, morning, noon, and night.
[9:49] Babb: [Laughs] Yeah.
[9:50] Pitkin: And he said, ‘Whatever you want Don, whatever you want.’ [Laughs] And he also used the word fun a lot. ‘We have great fun having anthropology here.’
[9:57] Babb: Yeah.
[9:58] Pitkin: And so forth.
[10:00] Babb: Did he refer to it as another ‘ology’?
[10:03] Pitkin: Yeah. I think he probably did.
[10:04] Babb: Because I think that was one of his locutions [inaudible]–
[Cross talk].
[10:08] Pitkin: [Inaudible] – another ology here. Exactly. And I got sort of more going over with– I remember being asked lots of questions by different people at the inn for dinner, we went there for dinner. Joe Epstein, for instance, pressed me very hard on some things and I met George Kateb and Bill Halsted and – John Halsted rather – and it was quite a time. It was quite a time.
[10:31] Babb: Well now was there skepticism of it– Were some of them saying ‘Now prove to us that somehow anthropology is up to snuff’?
[10:39] Pitkin: Well I don’t know. They didn’t go quite that far. I guess the case has been made pretty well by Leo.
[10:45] Babb: By Leo, yeah.
[10:47] Pitkin: But I do remember, the next morning – I spent the night going to chapel – which an institution no longer existed when you were there, but it was required for students to go a certain number of times a week and there I was standing up there. With the, sort of you know, indifferent lounging men from Amherst that are looking at you very quizzically. ‘Hey, what's this guy going to tell us?’ You know? ‘Come on bud’. So I got through that one. And I thought I did reasonably well.
[11:14] Babb: What’d you tell them about?
[11:16] Pitkin: I talked about Margaret Mead. I have a lot of things to say about Margaret Mead I thought. And Cal made some rather critical remark about my remarks but I can't remember quite what it was now. But let me tell you what really one of the best things about the whole people I met. I met a lot of people and I was very impressed with really most all them. That was with Ruthie Plimpton. She was really really very central. In her warm, wonderful way she really sort of included me and made me feel good and I was just so glad she was there. And so I went home and then just to go a little bit further, later on, both Emily and I had to make an appearance at Amherst. She had to be also checked out. [Laughs].
[11:59] Babb: Yeah. I remember there was some of that even when we came.
[12:03] Pitkin: There was a little bit?
[12:03] Babb: I think it must have been in full force then that faculty members came as pairs, didn't they.
[Cross talk].
[12:10] Pitkin: Yeah. Yeah. I know. That’s right they had to come as pairs.
[12:10] Babb: Yeah.
[12:11] Pitkin: And she was an outgoing person and good fun. But the real test was – the dance wasn't for us, they just happened to have a faculty dance. And I think that was it. And she did well. She did well. As [?] said, she got high marks.
[12:25] Babb: High marks.
[12:25] Pitkin: I know those people used to talk about high marks. She got high marks, thank God. And so we were in– Oh no, and one more thing that Cal came and said – called me up and said – ‘I'm passing through Boston. Could I come and stop and see you for dinner?’ And, ‘Sure you can.’ It was really quite a pleasant time. And whatever it was he needed to know about I think he felt kind of reassured.
[12:46] Babb: Mm hm [affirmative].
[12:47] Pitkin: That was okay. And I guess as I told you, that was the first time. He had wonderful sort of patrician metaphors for things and he talked about his raven and I couldn't figure out quite who he was talking about until I realized it was Ruthie.
[Both laugh]
[13:03] Babb: Well now, during the interview, as you walked out of the interview process and were headed home, had you decided this is where you wanted to be?
[13:12] Pitkin: Yeah I think that was what I wanted to do because I'd sort of been at Northeastern, and I kind of knew that. And I really admired Northeastern because it was a place where the people who went there were very serious in a way which I didn't think some Amherst students probably ever could be because they were the first people in their family to have any contact with higher education and they had to explain to them why they were taking – those who did – philosophy, religion, or anthropology, rather than engineering or something of that sort. And so they were a lot of good people and very bright people in a way and I really felt very good about that place. And I knew Amherst would be very, very different, but I wanted to try a place like this.
[13:52] Babb: Well now did you and Emily have any regrets, or feel any regrets about leaving the city scene with all the excitement?
[13:59] Pitkin: Yeah she did. She did particularly because she was very much taken by Cambridge, and we lived there then and you know, just a lot of stuff going on. And also we– By that time we had a baby in August of 1964, August 10th. And there had been some difficulties about that. And she wanted to be not too far from her doctor. So the agreement was that I was going to go out to Amherst for that first year, and she was going to come out with Steve who was then five or almost six, and the baby Roxy, Roxanna. And I was going to go there first. So I finally came out. I was given a house that Mishkin had, the music teacher, he was away on sabbatical. I was given an office in Appleton.
[14:46] Babb: Now just that would have been the fall of what year?
[14:48] Pitkin: That was fall of ‘64.
[14:50] Babb: Fall of ‘64.
[14:51] Pitkin: I don't know quite where all that intervening time went to, but somehow or other it sort of got eaten up with this, that and the other thing. And so I started. I taught two courses. I start off that fall with Evolution of Culture. And I think I started right then with that course on Marx and Freud.
[15:08] Babb: You called it Personality and Culture?
[15:09] Pitkin: I called it Personality and Culture yeah. Culture and personality. Culture- I started with Freud and I went to Marx and I sort of felt we should end up the course with Marx. And maybe later we can talk a little bit more about that. But then–
[15:23] Babb: So it was Anthro 11?
[15:24] Pitkin: Anthro 11.
[15:25] Babb: Which then–
[15:27] Pitkin: Evolution of culture, yeah.
[15:28] Babb: Which was Evolution of culture, and the emphasis was largely on physical anthropology.
[15:32] Pitkin Well it was a lot of physical. It was a way of teaching physical anthropology, but it's sort of major component, major purpose, where I was concerned was to sort of transcend the confines of history and sort of the imperatives of history. Which there was said, ‘Well, you know, it's human nature that we do this and this and this and this.’ And I have a thing that much of that sense of property or a sense of gender or whatnot was more given to history then they were in the essence of mankind himself since our first appearance. So I sort of used anthropology to test some of those ideas, I think. That's what I was sort of trying to do and had a good time with that.
[16:10] Babb: I’ll bet.
[16:11] Pitkin: Yeah.
[16:12] Babb: How many students did you have in those first two classes?
[16:15] Pitking: I don't know. There were about 25 I think, something like that.
[16:17] Babb: In each course?
[16:18] Pitkin: Well, not– The other one was a seminar of the [inaudible]. It was a seminar.
[16:20] Babb: So it would be a small– Okay. But about 25 in your intro?
[16:23] Pitkin: Yeah, and I can remember Bill Heaney, I think was one of the students, in that first course. Dick Grossinger was very close. He was our first anthro major. Got to be our first anthro major. Did his thesis in the University of Maine on lobster fishermen in Portland and is– done a lot of stuff. And a wonderful guy was in the other course, and I wish I could remember his name now. But he said the course politicized, I think he was already politicized, but he said it politicized him more. He was the one who was– [laughs] He was the one involved in knocking over the tower in- did you know that one, that s-?
[17:05] Babb: No.
[17:06] Pitkin: No, not too far from here, which was going to facilitate I think military transmissions of this or that and so forth and so on. And he was the guy who knocked it over.
[17:15] Babb: He did?
[17:15] Pitkin: Yeah.
[Both laugh].
[17:17] Babb: And this was attributed to his anthropological education?
[17:20] Pitkin: Well he kind of attributed it to me and that course and I thought, ‘Wow, that's a powerful course.’
[Both laugh]
[17:29] Pitkin: Well that semester didn't quite end because Emily came down Thanksgiving night with gallbladder, turned into pancreatitis and in two weeks she was dead. And so then I had to come out, find a person to come out with and come back out, someone at the university very, very kindly, filled in and filled out that semester. So all of a sudden my life had changed a good deal. And here I was totally responsible for the two kids and so we started off our year. And that’s where Ruthie Plimpton came in. She was just absolutely marvelous. Absolutely wonderful during all that period. Gave Christmas, birthday parties for Steve–
[18:06] Babb: Did she?
[18:06] Pitkin: and had me over for drinks and it was just great. I don't think I could have gotten through without her.
[18:12] Babb: Now you were living where at that time?
[18:14] Pitkin: Okay. By that time, by the time we came out for good, so to speak, I was living on Lincoln. I moved from on the one side of Lincoln Avenue where Mishkin used to live across the street over to what used to be Al Guest’s house. The Guests used to live 61 Lincoln. Which was a mighty big house. [Laughs].
[18:32] Babb: It sure was. Well that was the house you were living in when I came. Right. I stayed in one of those rooms. There were many rooms. [Laughs].
[cross talk]
[18:38] Pitkin: When you came. That’s right. Many rooms in that house. Remember the tin bathtub on the third floor?
[18:42] Babb: Vaguely. Vaguely.
[Pitkin laughs].
[18:44] Babb: What I do remember from that house there was a beautiful, beautiful garden.
[18:47] Pitkin: Oh, yeah it had a great garden. It had a great garden.
[18:50] Babb: Yeah.
[18:50] Pitkin: We had a– After a while a very wonderful person you knew, Anne Perino, who came to help me out for 6 weeks and stayed for 13 years. And among other things, being the good Italo-American that she is, she was a wonderful gardener.
[19:04] Babb: Yeah she sure was.
[19:04] Pitkin: A good cook and a fantastic cook–
[19:06] Babb: And a good person. Great person.
[19:07] Pitkin: Great person too, yeah.
[19:08] Babb: Well now in the second semester what did you teach then?
[19:12] Pitkin: Well, I think actually, I'm trying to think about again [indistinguishable]. I think I repeated Anthropology and Evolution of Culture in the spring and I taught the Personality and Culture thing also in the spring. I think that's what I did. The other course in the fall, I'm not quite sure what it was. I’ve forgotten.
[19:31] Babb: So how did Amherst students strike you? I mean, it must have been a very different experience with them.
[19:39] Pitkin: It was quite different. They were taking things for granted that the Northeastern students weren't taking for granted: that as a kind of security, a kind of facility, a kind of place in the world for themselves it’s just a question which door they're going to use to enter into it. No question they were going to enter into it. They were. And anthropology then was not to be sort of dismissed as something unlikely to get them a job, but, well, how it would fit in generally with a general sort of picture of themselves and so forth and so on. But, you know, fairly soon we started getting some very, very good people, as you know.
[20:14] Babb: I do know.
[20:15] Pitkin: Certainly by the time–
[20:15] Babb: They’d been gotten by you by the time I came on the scene.
[20:19] Pitkin: Well, no, they were showing up.
[20:20] Babb: Right. I remember in particular Ted Baxter?
[20:23] Pitkin: Ted Baxter [affirmative]
[20:24] Babb: And Hugh Lawrence. Those are the ones that stand out in my mind. They were seniors when I arrived in the fall of ‘69. And they were just outstanding students and young intellectuals.
[20:35] Pitkin: They were. They were.
[20:36] Babb: And, you know, I thought to myself, “Something's going on in this department.”
[20:40] Pitkin: Yeah. Yeah. Well you helped to make it go on.
[20:43] Babb: Well it was going on already. It was very interesting students. But now, when you arrived, there was no anthropology program at all.
[20:54] Pitkin: No. There was no anthropology whatsoever.
[20:55] Babb: So how did you sort of tackle the task of putting together– I mean you had, you had two things: one is to teach courses but also a program to put together.
[21:04] Pitkin: Well, the next one, you couldn't really have very much of a program unless you had more than one person. So that was an extra job to recruit someone. And there seemed to be sufficient evidence the thing was working to go ahead and do that.
[21:16] Babb: Had Cal committed himself to that?
[21:18] Pitkin: I think he had.
[21:18] Babb: He had.
[21:18] Pitkin: I think he had. He must have committed. He didn't actually say, “I've committed myself to this,” but I’m sure he must have done that. When I first came I was put in Appleton. I was associated with psychology. And I think the sort of assumption was of all the disciplines that exist at Amherst, perhaps psychology was close enough to anthropology to sort of have me there. So I was sort of there with Rose Olver, which was great, and Hank Coplin and so forth. And Bob Birney who has left. Yeah.
[cross talk].
[21:45] Babb: You were an anthropologist in the psychology department. So there was no department–
[21:48] Pitkin: I was an anthropologist. So I didn't have any independent existence other than that, no. We had to have a little more weight to do that. So we went looking. I guess it was after I was there two years maybe? We recruited and we hired a woman called Lowell Eayrs. A very remarkable woman. She was and I imagine still is. She had some connection with the Lowell family, but was she was not a Lowell in any sense of the word.
[22:16] Babb: Yeah, I remember.
[22:16] Pitkin: She was very non conventional. Very, very bright. Good fun to be with. Great sense of humor. A real iconoclast. And she really wowed a lot of students. She really did. She brought in some very– Fred, remember Ted, Fred D'Agostino?
[22:32] Babb: No, the name rings a bell but I don’t remember.
[22:34] Pitkin: Or was it Ted D’Agostino? I forget what it was. He was–
[22:36] Babb: He might have graduated by the time I showed up.
[22:38] PItkin: Yeah. Yeah. He probably did. He was one of the first students and just was very good and she really helped him to be better than he already was. And she didn't pass muster though in terms of some things that women – Women of Amherst– they were called Women of Amherst sort of– There was only one other faculty member, that was Rose Olver, I think who was a woman faculty member. Maybe there was one other. I think there was only one. I remember one occasion–
[23:05] Babb: There was a young woman in classics.
[23:07] Pitkin: Oh, no, there was a young woman in classics.
[23:09] Babb: Right. Anne Labeck.
[23:09] Pitkin: Anne Lebeck. Anne Lebeck.
[23:09] Babb: She might have been there at that stage.
[23:10] Pitkin: Yeah she might have been there.
[23:12] Babb: I’m not sure.
[23:12] Pitkin: But I can't say this was determining. It just seemed to be kind of funny that Lowell went to the president's house without wearing stockings.
[Both chuckle]
[23:24] Pitkin: And I don’t think that went down too well. I'm sure there were other reasons why she didn't stay on but I can remember, I think that was perhaps one minor consideration.
[23:32] Babb: Well even when we came here there was this, you know, this white glove sort of stuff going on. It was just going out at that time.
[cross talk].
[23:38] Pitkin: Yeah. Yeah I know it. I could see that when the faculty members met down, I guess– They played a lot of cards I think. I believe. Anyway, so after three years she left and then I began to really look in earnest. Really look in earnest.
[23:55] Babb: Yeah right. [Laughs].
[23:57] Pitkin: And I was on the telephone a great deal. I went to meetings a great deal. And I can remember either he called me up, or I called him up. Remind me of his name now.
[24:12] Babb: At Rochester?
[24:13] Pitkin: Yeah.
[24:13] Babb: Oh, Al Harris.
[24:14] Pitkin: Al Harris, ok. Al Harris.
[24:16] Babb: The late Al Harris.
[24:17] Pitkin: The late Al Harris, who I often talked to at meetings. And he said, “Look, Don, I know you're thinking about someone else, and I’ve really got an absolutely top notch person here. Extremely good, and I really suggest you seriously think about him.” And I said, “Thank you Al.” Well he talked more in glowing terms about you. And I remember then after I guess, calling you up directly.
[24:36] Babb: I remember getting the call.
[24:38] Pitkin: [laughing] you remember getting the call.
[24:39] Babb: Oh, yes. I remember the call. And I was sitting at my desk in the room where the teaching interns in the Indian Civilization Program at the University of Chicago had their desk. This was in a place called Foster Hall. And I was sitting there and the phone rang.
[24:55] Pitkin: How ‘bout that?
[24:56] Babb: And it was somebody by the name of Don Pitkin.
[24:57] Pitkin: How ‘bout that?
[24:58] Babb: Invited me to come up to Amherst and I came and it was a beautiful Sunday, the day after I arrived, and we had ourselves a winter picnic. Oh I'll never forget it. That's a lifelong memory. Yeah. It really is.
[25:10] Pitkin: [laughing] It was a lifelong memory. I was wondering about that. Well, it was sort of a– I wouldn’t say it was a test but, whatever it was, you certainly passed it glowingly. And it was sort of a family anomaly. We often went on picnics in the Christmas, wintertime, and usually it was best, the more miserable it was the better it was. But that day the sun was shining, it was warm, it couldn’t have been better. And Leo Marx and Jane were there.
[25:32] Babb: Right. That was a big part of the whole–
[25:35] Pitkin: I think it probably was and you were just the person we wanted to have. And you very willingly came.
[25:41] Babb: Well.
[25:42] Pitkin: And that really was absolutely significant, absolutely critical. So we're on our way then, now and we began to put a program together and you began to do things which were complimentary to what I did and different things and your Indian course and the religion course, and the theory course.
[25:59] Babb: Oh I enjoyed it from the start. I really did. But now let's move backwards just a little bit if we can. When you arrived here, was there a nucleus of colleagues who were supportive or provided, you know, a kind of, I don't know, help and assistance and advice and so forth?
[26:18] Pitkin: Well, they tried. [Laughs] And if it didn't work it was partly my fault. But I can remember certainly we spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time with Leo and Jane Marx at their place. And that was just– Whenever I said, “yeah I know that's what happens,” or “Don't worry,” or “this is okay,” or “this is the way it goes.” So Leo couldn't have been better. Absolutely couldn't have been better. But I remember just, yeah, I can remember Goodman also being very helpful to me at one point, and several other people coming. I remember– I'm forgetting names now. We might want to cut this part out. Gordy, okay? Was asking me to dinner at a certain point and there were a lot of dinner parties, had nothing to do with me, they just that was the way it was. There was a real Amherst College culture. And it all disappeared after the quote revolution of the ‘60s.
[27:21] Babb: Yeah it did. Which we must get to.
[27:22] Pitkin: Yeah okay. Okay. But supportive I can– Yeah, I can just remember more than that, characters of the old Amherst like Ben Ziegler and King Turgeon and Charlie Morgan. Now these are these are real Amherst figures of several generations–
[27:45] Babb: These are names to conjure with. That’s right. [Laughs].
[27:47] Pitkin: Names to conjure with. John Moore you know?
[27:49] Babb: Oh, yeah, he was a very nice man.
[27:52] Pitkin: He was a nice guy. Everyone was wonderful. They really were.
[27:55] Babb: But were there friends of anthropology? I guess that's, you know, those whose sympathies, intellectual sympathies, inclinations–
[28:04] Pitkin: Well, yeah, I mean John Halsted and others wanting very much to have anthropology and wanting to make a go of it and wanting to make use of it and interested in what I was doing. And there were others who felt the same way. I remember Bernie, who was a psychologist, was also very much interested in it. That was there. What was always sort of lurking in the background was our sister discipline. And that was sociology.
[28:28] Babb: Yeah, I was about to ask about that.
[28:29] Pitkin: Because it was anomalous that we came as the first of these two disciplines. They're often linked, as you know. Only in large universities, well not just, but in larger universities they’re all separate. Many colleges, their combined department always, almost always particularly in the Midwest, sociology then anthropology sort of an afterthought or an appendage or whatnot. But that wasn’t the case at Amherst and I was very glad that, for whatever reason, we were kind of there first and so sociology came, they had to be united, but we were the first guys to get there.
[29:00] Babb: And hence to this very day.
[29:02] Pitkin: [Laughs] That’s right.
[29:02] Babb: This is the Department of Anthropology and– Yeah.
[29:05] Pitkin: [finishing Babb’s sentence] Anthropology and Sociology, which is quite unusual. So the question came up about sociology, not necessarily from me, but from other quarters. It obviously had been ‘round for a long time, longer than I knew about. It was a matter of discussion on the part of the faculty.
[29:20] Babb: Well now Talcott Parsons was an alumnus who–
[29:22] Pitkin: Talcott Parsons was an alumnus, which was both a good and a bad thing. I mean, we have perhaps reason to be proud of Amherst for educating Talcott Parsons. People could say they could have done a better job in some ways. But nevertheless, he went here and became one of America's leading, if perhaps leading sociological theorists, certainly. But it was also a kind of debit because people would sort of say, “Talcott Parsons? We’re going to get that stuff?” You know?
[29:50] Babb: Yeah, I think– I must say that I think that sometimes his contributions get overlooked.
[29:57] Pitkin: Yeah I know.
[29:57] Babb: I mean he brought Max Weber to an English reading– [inaudible]
[30:02] Pitkin: Absolutely did and he brought Pareto [corrects himself], for better or for worse.
[30:04] Babb: Exactly so.
[30:05] Pitkin: Yeah, very important. But he was
[30:07] Babb: So I think the College does have reasons to be– [inaudible] you know he's
[30:09] Pitkin: No he’s hardly ever mentioned, I don’t think, in that respect, in fact I mentioned it to our president the other day and he said “I didn't know that Talcott Parsons was gone to Amherst. I don't think many people do know that.”
[30:18] Babb: That's interesting.
[30:20] Pitkin: But the general sort of feel– As I heard it, the general thing was, “Sociology, well that's social engineering. We don't need that”. Or–
[30:29] Babb: Oh it’s not Parsons. This wasn't the problem. Because they think of it as somehow–
[30:32] Pitkin: No that wasn’t Parsons. Just mundane stuff your getting where before–
[30:34] Babb: For prison guards.
[30:36] Pitkin: Yeah, prison guards, exactly. Or it's Max Weber and we've all read Max Weber so what do we need it for, you know?
[30:40] Babb: Ah, okay.
[30:41] Pitkin: Well, that was a strong voice that was very much in the– But that kind of began to sort of weaken after a while and I think the time had come, finally did come to get sociology. And a search went out. And we got, as you know, Norman Birnbaum, which is a incredible choice in many ways. I mean we really hit the jackpot in some ways because Norman was an illustrious person already by then a thinker, a theorist of some note. Certainly the New York School of intellectuals, connect with The Partisan Review, he had lots of sort of connections. He had a lot of connections with European intellectuals. He knew the French scene, he knew the German scene, he knew the Italian scene. He knew people there at Oxford and so forth. And so we had Norman and that was the beginning then of getting someone else, as you know. So we then, we became a joint department and Norman brought quite a lot and Norman also was eager to at some point leave Amherst and go somewhere else, which he did finally.
[31:45] Babb: And he brought Jan Dizard.
[31:46] Pitkin: And he brought Jan Dizard.
[31:47] Babb: Jan Dizard who came the same year I did.
[31:51] Pitkin: Yeah, that really did it then, and then we were there then. We had a joint department and we were offering a number of courses. And having students and having majors and writing theses and were in the business.
[32:04] Babb: We were in the business but the environment in which business was being conducted was very different in those days too, because of the political upheavals that were taking place in the country.
[32:18] Pitkin: Oh yeah. Oh yeah that’s right.
[32:04] Babb: And these upheavals and disagreements in the national community had a real impact on Amherst College, virtually from the time you arrived, isn't that–
[32:31] Pitkin: Well, certainly virtually. By the time you arrived it was already almost one– well at least it started certainly. I go back to that time, in some concern, because I don't have a clear memory. Considering how important it was, I wish I could remember years to events, but I'm not sure I do anymore. But I remember the first event, seems to me, the first event was the commencement with McNamara getting a degree. An honorary degree from Amherst.
[32:57] Babb: A year before I came. I heard about that.
[33:00] Pitkin: McNamara was involved, of course, with the Vietnam War up to his neck and beyond. And a lot of students, even by then, were very, very strong against it. So the idea of Amherst College giving this warlord, so to speak, a degree was just untenable.
[33:12] Babb: Now was he a commencement speaker?
[33:14] Pitkin: No, I don’t know if he was commencement speaker–
[33:16] Babb: But it was an honorary degree.
[33:17] Pitkin: And I can remember sitting down with the faculty there and the senior class was ahead of us. Some of the seniors had already gotten the idea of taking all their clothes off, I think by then–
[33:26] Babb: This was the spring of ‘69, just to pin it down.
[33:29] Pitkin: Yeah. Yeah. And opening their robes at certain critical times. That was already beginning to happen. And I forget what they did. Some just apparently got up I think when he was given the degree and walked out. And it was hard on Cal, I can remember Cal just, here he was, and he had to speak later. And I think it’s true, his voice almost broke. And he talked about his father being at Amherst and what it meant to him, and what it meant to his father. And here was this dissension, so to speak. I don't think he was combining the two, necessarily, but there was this sense of dissension and awkwardness and concern. And so it was off to a running start and it kept going, as you know, year in year out for about four years.
[34:10] Babb: Oh yeah. Well yeah there were tremendously exhilarating years, weren’t they? I mean at the beginning.
[34:16] Pitkin: Absolutely exhilarating.
[34:17] Babb: I wasn't here that spring. So just so I'll have it straight in my own mind, there was a moratorium that spring too, wasn’t there?
[34:24] Pitkin: There was a moratorium.
[34:25] Babb: So the moratorium must have been a kind of preface to the commencement.
[34:29] Pitkin: Yes, it was a preface and I remember Bruce Morgan, who was a professor of religion, I think. Very capable guy.
[Cross talk].
[34:37] Pitkin: Very good facilitator. And things were so tense. It was a feeling that we couldn't probably finish classes. I don't think we did.
[34:46] Babb: I think that's right. That's what I heard.
[34:48] Piktin: But in place of it there should be a moratorium to which everybody was certainly welcome and sort of expected to come and it was a major thing. It took place, I forget where, I think down where the baseball diamond is now, anyway. Some of it was inside, some of it was outside. It was the first really big political event I think of that kind probably in Amherst history. I don't know what happened when the Civil War, what happened the First or Second World War, but it was impressive indeed and it made a difference.
[35:19] Babb: Were you involved in speaking?
[35:20] Pitkin: No I wasn't involved in speaking. There were speak-ins. I remember Gordy Levin having speak-ins. And Gordy Levin just did it beautifully and I kept thinking, ‘gosh, how does he know so much about this already?’ You know?
[35:33] Babb: Now he still does [laughs].
[35:34] Pitkin: He still does. You know, I thought [??]. You know he knows places and facts and dates and the French presence there and when that ended, and who was in charge of the Chinese and so on and so on and so on. And that was wonderful. So teach-ins became part of it, and then we began to– I forget when the visits to Westover began, and the vigils at Westover with the police there and people's names being probably taken down and license plates being taken down. And that went on for a long, long time and began to sort of heat up and then the succession of events, I’m a little bit forgetful now how they came, Kent State, King, Bobby Kennedy, the invasion of Cambodia was sort of towards the end of it I think, remember? Something of that order now.
[36:21] Babb: Right, we should have swotted up on this.
[36:25] Pitkin: We should have swotted up on this, I know, because it was part of our history.
[36:29] Babb: Well in any case we remember what happened.
[36:31] Pitkin: Yeah, we remember what happened.
[36:32] Babb: And the Westover event was really the culmination of a lot of things.
[36:38] Pitkin: It was the culmination of it. I remember that day, don't you?
[36:40] Babb: Oh yeah.
[36:41] Pitkin: First I remember the night before going to Johnson Chapel and getting rehearsed in terms of how to be arrested in – oh I forget the word – in a nonviolent way. We went all through that. If I remember, I think that Bill Ward was at that event the night before. I think he was.
[36:57] Babb: He must have been. I don't have a clear recollection but he must have been.
[37:00] Pitkin: Yeah. He was certainly there the next day.
[37:01] Babb: That was the crucial thing.
[37:02] Pitkin: Tension was in the air, you know? He was closely followed by John Callahan, who was sort of a spokesman, or the intermediary between him and the trustees. And John’s job was to make sure that Bill Ward didn't do anything that would look badly for Amherst College. I remember riding over there, you and I.
[37:18] Babb: I do.
[37:19] Pitkin: I remember I think George Kateb was with us.
[37:21] Babb: Yep. He was.
[37:23] Pitkin: And sort of both kind of excitement and some apprehension about what's going to happen. And will we come home that night or won't we come home?
[37:29] Babb: Well, I think we all knew we'd be in one piece at the end of the day.
[Cross talk].
[37:32] Pitkin: Okay, we’d be in one piece. Yeah. Yeah, I know. That’s right.
[37:33] Babb: But still, it was something new. And you know, obviously Bill's presence there made all the difference. I mean, that's what made this really a very important event rather than just another demonstration.
[37:44] Pitkin: Not just another, ‘cause that’d been going on for some time. Faculty had been there and getting arrested before. I remember Kim Townsend going out and telling me about and other people too. So as you know the press was there, I remember all these cameras were fixed on Bill.
[37:57] Babb: I do.
[37:58] Pitkin: As he sat down a certain way. I can remember that picture now of him sitting down and Barbara sitting down. They both had trench coats on, raincoats on, I remember. And John Callahan right over here, right behind them, the whole time. And we went to jail. No, we went to court, remember?
[38:15] Pitkin: Oh no first we went to jail. [inaudible]. We were locked up.
[38:17] Babb: Yeah we went to jail. And then we were all talking about what to plead.
[38:20] Pitkin: That's right.
[38:21] Babb: And as I told you the other day, that's when I finally learned what nolo means.
[Both laugh and inaudible cross talk].
[38:27] Pitkin: Good for you.
[38:30] Babb: This is the extent of my legal education.
[38:31] Pitkin: Your Latin came in handy.
[38:34] Babb: Well, yeah, what a, what a–
[38:36] Pitkin: I remember a lot of, I don't know if you were around the time there was a guerillas– People came on campus, mostly dressed in black, and there was a lot of improvisational theater going on too, remember?
[38:51] Babb: Mm-hm. I do.
[38:53] Pitkin: I can remember one faculty meeting when the president was asked to come back to, as he had a job to do I think, tell the faculty about the last board meeting he was at. And these guys came in around the back of the Red Room. And they were obviously not there to applaud Cal. They were there to do just the opposite. Began this sort of chant and jeering and “you!” and so on and so forth. So you could hardly hear Cal’s voice and it was really, uh, uh, uh [emphasized noises], would he get through that or not? And he finally did. I remember another very dramatic one was the day that, oh god what’s his name? Very effective Black student. I almost have it in my head, I can't quite remember. Big guy. They took over what was then Morgan Hall. It was a music building I think. They fully took it over.
[39:47] Babb: Oh.
[39:48] Pitkin: I think it was the first takeover and locked all the doors. And then at that time I was in the Committee of Six with Bill Ward. We were just [??].
[39:55] Babb: Oh I heard about this.
[39:56] Pitkin: And we had to walk over with these representatives of the Black students to meet the president. They wanted to meet the president. They had to walk across the street, up the stairs, [makes a noise as if turning] turn of the door, and there he was with microphones and cameras everywhere. And they're presenting him with an ultimatum about what has to happen at Amherst College or else, you know? Black Studies, more Black professors, so on, so on, so on and Cal you gotta read this. “You got to read this sir” or “you got to read this president Cal”. Whatever they said. And he had to read it. And I think the general statement was that was it. They were gonna agree. He decided to do that. You know, I don't know how you feel about it, but particularly in the light of contemporary politics where the culture war notion is sort of very much afloat and you get the feeling that much during that election was an attempt, time to turn back the clock and get rid of all the stuff we've just been talking about, you know, the cultural revolution of the- I can’t help feel that was really a very major turning point in recent American history.
[41:01] Babb: I think that’s right.
[41:01] Pitkin: It really was absolutely crucial. And generally I very much applaud it. It really made a difference. Different in relationships, different way sons and fathers would treat each other, the way men and women treat each other. And it was really, really a step ahead. Some of it was self-serving, of course, but by and large I thought it was great. And Amherst did well.
[41:20] Babb: It was. It was.
[41:21] Pitkin: Yeah.
[41:22] Babb: Well, now, may I step way back?
[41:27] Pitkin: Okay.
[41:27] Babb: Into something that we haven't even talked about, that's also a huge part of your life.
[41:33] Pitkin: Oh.
[41:33] Babb: And that's your relationship with Italy.
[41:36] Pitkin: Oh yeah. Okay.
[41:37] Babb: Your field work and your ongoing relationship.
[41:41] Pitkin: All right. Well, let me just briefly. I was in graduate school at Harvard and I was destined to go– I was supposed to go to study, as all anthropologists did, a preliterate culture. Now, one in which reading and writing was not an integral part of the culture. That was the way, we always felt, by dint of culture shock, real difference, you would–
[41:59] Babb: Right, I remember that.
[42:00] Pitkin: ––cultivate the idea of what culture was all about. You couldn't get a, sort of a laboratory idea you know. So I was supposed to go with John Fisher to Micronesia. Or if we didn't go to Micronesia, we were going to go to Columbia. And that was all sort of set. But meanwhile, into my first year, my friend from Kiska Island, we were on the ski trips together, 10th Mountain Division, he and I shared a tent after we took Kiska, and he talked to me always about – he was an artist – always about wanting to go to Italy to see in person the paintings he had always studied in books. So when 1948 came around he called me up one day and said, “Do you want to go down on a student ship to France and we'll go down to Italy?” And I said, “Yep.” I’d just finished my first year as a graduate student and I’d also just met Emily, then. I said, “Emily, I want to take this trip.” So we went off and we went to France and then we took the overnight train to Rome and as soon as I got to Rome, uuh, [makes audible emphasis], it just happened.
[42:57] Babb: Uh huh.
[42:58] Pitkin: Just everything: the sounds, the smells, the people, the look.
[43:01] Babb: I know the feeling.
[43:02] Pitkin: You know the feeling. Probably happened when you went to India, no?
[43:04] Babb: Yeah it did.
[43:04] Pitkin: Just I was smitten. And I came back absolutely convinced that this was where I had to do my fieldwork. And then I read a book, one of those books. There were two books that made a difference. One was reading Patterns of Culture.
[43:15] Babb: Uh huh.
[43:16] Pitkin: When I was still a history major at Harvard, in a course with Darby Nock. And I said, “This is what I want to do.”
[43:24] Babb: Did you become an anthro major at Harvard?
[43:26] Pitkin: No, I didn't.
[43:26] Babb: You didn’t.
[43:27] Pitkin: No I finished my history, because she in this book talked about women, talked about children, talked about family, something that the history that I learned never ever mentioned. They just talked about, you know, Wilson's politics and Napoleon's this and so forth.
[43:42] Babb: Right.
[43:43] Pitkin: I thought, “Wow, that's great.” And the other book was a book by a man called Carlo Levi, who wrote a book called Christ Stopped at Eboli. And he'd gone there as an anti-fascist and had been confined to this little village and he wasn't an anthropologist he was a doctor, but I said “The book he wrote, that's what I want to do. I want to write a book about Italy that way.” So I convinced them at Harvard, I should do it. And they said, “Well, you know, sink or swim, it's up to you. If you do it, fine. If you don't, that's your fault,” so to speak. “Take off.” So I did. And I was very close to– Conrad Arensberg had already done his stuff on Ireland, but it was very close to the very, very beginning of Americans going and studying in Europe. And we find a village and start in and stay there from 1951 to end of 1952 in this village.
[44:30] Babb: How did you find this village?
[44:32] Pitkin: Went out with a friend from Rome, who said– we'd been to this place and that place and so forth. Nothing had quite worked. And he said, “Come out here.”
[44:39] Babb: Now you speak? At this point you knew Italian?
[44:41] Pitkin: Well I was beginning to learn Italian. So we went out there and all of a sudden, like, the other thing, like Italy it just, there it is. It was the place to be. And we knew it was. We came back about a month later and settled in there. And let me just say that Emily, who had never been outside the states, when she woke up the first morning in Naples and looked out the window she confused Vesuvius for Mount Fujiyama, but–
[Both laugh]
[45:09] Pitkin: “Oh look, Fujiyama!” She said. But otherwise she caught on very quickly to everything Italian, learned the language quicker than I did, and became a superb anthropologist.
[45:19] Babb: Uh huh.
[45:19] Pitkin: She really was and I just want to say, like you can confirm this too that that fieldwork, particularly that first fieldwork, was such an incredible experience. It was one of the great experiences of my life.
[45:32] Babb: Same here. And it's a great experience to share it with somebody too.
[45:34] Pitkin: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's something about it that really changed me. It really politicized me in ways in which I hadn't– Emily was already politicized but it politicized me–
[45:44] Babb: She was more politicized than you?
[45:45] Pitkin: Yeah, she was but it politicized me in ways I hadn't been before because just simply the difference between rich and poor was so stark, so clear, there was just no question where you’re– Now of course it created a problem studying a place you had to sort of listen to everybody, or pay attention to everybody. That was hard to do. Sometimes and you knew the people at the top were people you didn't really agree with or respect or anything else.
[46:08] Babb: Well now you were particularly close with one family.
[46:11] Pitkin: Yeah we got to be close with one family that came from Calabria in 1933. They were very, very poor there, and the man came looking for work and he got a job draining the Pontine Marshes, which was that big fascist project to drain the marshes and put farmers there and he was part of that. So he brought his whole family up and we were looking out our window – we had a room – and then we saw this family sitting outside their door just, I don’t know, there was something about them. They were just different. They were having a good time. They were talking or sort of laughing and we said, “Boy, you know, we'd like to get to know those people better. We know a lot of other people around.” And so we did. Actually, there were only two cars in the whole town and we had one of them and we took Rosa, the mother, one day to market in the neighboring provincial capital and that's the way we got to know that family. And they became an absolutely crucial part of my life. Very important part of my life.
[47:10] Babb: Well, you later wrote a book about them.
[47:11] Pitkin: Later wrote a book about them. Came back, and I’m still in touch with them. The incredible thing is that when I first knew them and got to know Maria, she was barely literate. Most everybody in the town went to third grade where you could learn to read and do a little math. That was it, and you'd leave. And her reading wasn't very good, but she could kinda write a letter. That was in the ‘50s when she's writing about her marriage, then, you know, around ‘75, they got a telephone and I could actually telephone them instead of having to run across the street. Six months ago, her son is now emailing me.
[47:46] Babb: Yeah.
[47:46] Pitkin: Isn’t that incredible?
[47:47] Babb: It is incredible. That's happened with me in India too.
[47:50] Pitkin: I bet it has happened with you.
[47:51] Babb: And nowadays, if I have a question, a connection with my research or something like that, I don't have to go there anymore.
[47:57] Pitkin: Yeah I know.
[47:57] Babb: Just ask my friend by email. It’s amazing, it really is.
[48:01] Pitkin: It was such a deal before, you know, you had to wait a long time, the telephone was always tricky and so forth and so on. It's been a great experience.
[48:11] Babb: Well now you've continued to go back and forth from Italy. Is it annually?
[48:14] Pitkin: Almost annually. Yes, I go and I like to sort of see how things are going and a lot of things have happened. The father of the family, the person that Maria married, Giacomo, died two years ago from lung cancer. And all the children are married and have children. And what happened is that they've all ended up very close to their mother and their father. And that was their mother and father's idea was to have them as close as possible. Because there is a prevailing notion that to live alone when you marry is– You rent a house and it’s throwing good money after bad, you're lonely, you're isolated. It's always better to be with your family. Even after you get married, it's better to be with your family. And you know, it's a little bit of a stereotype about Italians but at least in this part of the world at that time it was very true and it still is true.
[49:00] Babb: Now when you came here, certainly later on, the University of Massachusetts Department of Anthropology became well known for its expertise––
[49:11] Pitkin: Yes it did.
[49:12] Babb: ––in European anthropology. Was that true at the time you came?
[49:17] Pitkin: It was getting to be true.
[49:18] Babb: Can you tell us something about what the department was like there and what your relationship was with this group of Europeanists?
[49:26] Pitkin: Yeah. I'm trying to think of some of the names now. John Cole was the most important Europeanist, but not the only Europeanist. There were two of them whose names I should remember. And I'm afraid I don’t, partly because they died quite a few years ago and I’ve forgotten them. But let's just use John Cole as an example. Who was I think always a Europeanist. He may have done something else initially, I don't know, but I'm not sure. He got to be best known for his work in Romania, which he did with government support and government grants. Not only he went but he also helped a lot of students to go and become anthropologists there. They did their fieldwork there and wrote dissertations on the basis of it. And that was sort of a big operation. And that sort of set the tone to some extent for that department. And John has just retired and then he did that wonderful book with Eric Wolf about the hidden frontier. About that village which is halfway between Austria and halfway between Italy. Yeah, so Europe was very, very much there. And then Joe Halpern from Yugoslavia came so it was–
[50:32] Babb: And Pi-Sunyer.
[50:33] Pitkin: Pi-Sunyer from Catalan, Spain. I think it was Catalan, yeah. And so it was unusual that– I don’t think there was any other- I think there was a time when Columbia was that way with Connie Arensberg and Connie Arensberg was very important to me, not only because the work he did, the influence that had, but he was the one who I think wrote the determining letter of reference for me when I applied for Amherst College.
[50:54] Babb: Oh is that right?
[50:54] Pitkin: Yeah, dear guy.
[50:56] Babb: Well now, was that one of the reasons you came here, that is to say, the presence of Europeanists?
[51:00] Pitkin: Well, Joel Halpern wasn't there. In fact, when I decided to come and I remember Joel Halpern coming and talking to me at length. He was – I don't know where he was, Michigan or Wayne State – at length about University of Mass and what do they do and was it a good place to come and should he be there and so forth. But John quite sure was already there. Now I'm not sure it really was, but I'm awfully glad that it existed when I arrived. We didn't ever have, as you know, as much contact as probably we should have and did the things we might have done and we should have done more of those things together but-
[51:36] Babb: This is true of South Asia too.
[51:38] Pitkin: I’m sure it’s true.
[51:39] Babb: The truth is these are full-time jobs.
[51:41] Pitkin: These are full-time. You get so worked up and so involved in your own that anything else seems sort of immoral taking away from your obligations here somehow or other.
[Cross talk].
[51:48] Babb: And so then we all feel guilty about it and every time we meet we apologize and promise to do better in the future.
[51:54] Pitkin: Do better, but if you do that at the expense of what you’re doing here. Anyway, Five College thing is great and I'm glad it exists and it's certainly a drawing card I think for people.
[52:02] Babb: Yeah, sure is. It sure is, yeah. Well now you've continued right up to the present day with your contact with Italy. When were you last there? You received some prizes?
[52:13] Pitkin Well, two years ago, they decided – I don't know how it all began – anyway, the decision was that I was going to come back. The decision was they're gonna make me a citizen of the town.
[52:25] Babb: Yeah, I remember.
[52:26] Pitkin: Yeah. And there's gonna be sort of this and that and so forth. And I was to help sort of draw up a program, which I did. What I really wanted to do was to– I had a lot of pictures, which are good pictures. I really took- One of the things I did when I first got there to make contact with people– I was the only person who had a camera in the village. I was the only person who had a typewriter. You know, all these things just didn't exist. I mean, they just didn't exist. So I took pictures of everybody and gave them pictures and they would end up sometimes in the cemetery, you know, because–
[Cross talk].
[52:56] Babb: Yeah I’ve seen those, yeah.
[52:59] Pitkin: So the pictures are very valuable. And so I thought this is one thing I can do is have a show of these really quite wonderful faces and so forth. So that was one thing. And then we thought of having a seminar with some colleagues of mine from Italy. We’d talk about the kind of work I did there. And so it developed into a whole afternoon's program and it happened in June and July of 19 – let me see – 1999. That was two years ago. And I went there. It was really quite great with my sister and brother-in-law and my daughter, my son and my grandchildren.
[53:32] Babb: Family, family.
[53:33] Pitkin: Family family. And I said, “Look, all these years I've been talking to you guys about your family. Well, okay, here's my family. A little bit of that now. And it really was a very, very good occasion. And I really liked it a good deal, and it was fun.
[53:50] Babb: I'll bet. Now just a year back there was a panel at the American Anthropological Association. Didn't you address some of those questions?
[53:58] Pitkin: Some of those questions. One of the things, one of the things that let me say that I did it was a question of restitution. I want to make a point of being as an anthropologist to try to get back to them in some way rather, some of the things they had given to me. The pictures which I gave to the town is one way of doing it. Another thing I did was to make recordings of songs I used to sing I heard every day, particularly women, this is before radios existed there would sing endlessly, you know, while they're working, and picking olives and so forth. So I have RAI come down from Italy and from Rome and make recordings. So I had a pianist and a singer, sing some of those songs for us that day to the audience. And that was another thing I was giving back to them. And that question of restitution was was was very important.
[54:45] So I said I was going to be, I thought, made a citizen of the village, that didn't happen. And it's interesting why I didn't have because of the woman who's a teacher, very bright woman, very articulate, very antagonistic, [laughs] who had a shop where she sold things too. And she said “no way is that American gonna to get, over my dead body, to be a citizen of this town!” Now, because I wrote another book about the town called Mamma, Casa, Posto Fisso, it’s an Italian book, in Italy, in Italian. And it was a sort of a sociological critique of modern Sermoneta as I’d seen it in 1986 and read one way it seems critical, read another way, it seems like a sort of normal American social science. She read it critically and said it was a defamation of this place and so forth and so on and “you can’t say this.”
[55:36] So she with her allies prevented any vote of affirmation of me getting a citizen of the town, which I thought was well worth it because it's such an interesting situation. This sort of, to them, what you say about Sermoneta is history, only history. What you talk about is a former noble family Caetani and their history and other aristocrats but he's writing books about [Clarby?] and she hated that idea I'd done that sort of stuff. And so she was supported by two of the former landowners who were still quite influential in town. And so the sort of reactionary resistance to what I've done there was was very apparent.
[56:17] Babb: Well perhaps that's a badge of honor actually.
[56:21] Pitkin: Well I began to think it was and really extremely interesting and someone should go back and you know, get some work on that because the resonances of that are much deeper level in the town.
[56:34] Babb: Well, I mean, you know, if you say something––and one must say something––sooner or later somebody–
[crosstalk]
[56:43] Pitkin: Somebody- I remember the terrible, terrible time that- Okay, I gotta think of it, you know, the guy who wrote about the village at Vaucluse at Harvard and got that chair? Perhaps you don't remember him.
[56:55] Babb: I do remember that, but I'm having a little–
[56:58] Pitkin: Village in the Vaucluse we’ll get it in a minute. But anyway, he couldn't go back. When he did go back they just jumped all over him. Not for saying anything bad, but just for knowing the things he knew. “How dare you tell other people about, you know, these aspects of our lives.”
[57:13] Babb: Well now, tell us about the panel though at the triple A meetings. This was, what now?
[57:18] Pitkin: That was just last November.
[57:20] Babb: Just last November, right?
[57:21] Pitkin: Well, I don't know. Some people got together, there were a number of Italianists, in the, in the association, they got together and decided that “we got some old men now, we got some old people––they just happened to be men, they couldn’t be women. John Cole is one and Don Pitkin’s another and they decided to honor both of us, I guess, me at the meetings and John was honored over here not too long ago at a very nice event that I went to. So it was absolutely wonderful. There were nine papers, two from Finland, one from Italy, one from Germany, the rest of American. And by and large, the idea was to sort of take off from, I don't know, family or things that I’ve sort of talked about and do their own thing. And they did that. It was a very good discussion, they just did a wonderful job pulling it together. And I felt wonderful about it.
[58:11] Babb: I’ll bet, I’ll bet.
[58:11] Pitkin: I think everybody else did too which is very, very neat. And I made a little film on the base of that thing in Italy that I’d done. It’s a 40 minute film, and I'll show it to you sometime. And I showed that too. And that was a good, a good deal. So now they have their, you know, their Totem figures.
[58:35] Babb: Well, now, to shift back to the college, we sort of left matters in midstream, I guess with the anthropology department taking shape. And a great deal of tumult in the culture and here at the college as well and a great deal of excitement, really intellectual excitement, I must say. And anthropology and the college are both developing and changing. What's your general sense of where things were going with the college? You know, as your years here began to go on into the 70s there are a number of landmarks, one of them is co-education.
[59:24] Pitkin: Yeah, no, I agree with you. I mean, by and large from the time I came here, I think everything most everything has been, formally that is, very good. I mean, I came here, it was all men, and the model was the Marlboro Man. You know, this kind of guy, you know [gestures]. And everywhere there were dogs, everyone had to have a- and I couldn't get over it! So many people had dogs and dogs were allowed to be almost anywhere. Dogs everywhere! Finally they had to get rid them.
[59:50] Babb: Was it like a boy with his dog kind of thing
[59:51] Pitkin: Yeah it was a boy with his dog kinda thing. You know, you’d be sitting in a classroom somewhere. And you know, all that, thank God, has gone now. And co-education was such a blessing for this place. And the new Womens and Gender study program is another such blessing, you know, so then by and large, and the new members of faculty, I think the ones that I know are fantastic. So it's been all good. What I guess is more difficult is the kind of disparateness but that's almost inevitable, I guess. Kind of fierce kind of competition, which I guess exists now, tremendous emphasis on PR, publicity, image, the fear that we might not be the top anymore, we might sink down or I think concerns that didn't exist so much as they did before. Sort of we live in a performance world, a representational world, a PR world. We have to always, sort of, you know, make the mark on that.
[1:00:46] Babb: You’re referring to that US News and World Report?
[1:00:48] Pitkin: Yeah, US News and World Report. And if Williams is doing it, we better do it. And Wesleyan probably says if Amherst is doing it, we better do it. I think this is sort of what's going on. And that's not to the good. I think anthropology is incredibly important because it still gives us that, should give us––I mean, I've always felt the question of the, among other things, the derivation of humanity is not to be taken for granted. And we still have to understand that, we're still working on it. I mean, who are we and where do we come from?
[1:01:19] Babb: Incredible findings, incredible findings. It’s a field and it's just galloping forward.
[1:01:25] Pitkin: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely in both disarray and excitement.
[1:01:29] Babb: Oh, yeah.
[1:01:30] Pitkin: True. And what is our, I mean I've always felt very strongly about understanding what our connection is to the natural world are. And knowing that we're an animal, a very particular kind of animal, a symbolic living and making animal, but an animal nevertheless. And to say that without being a biological determinist is something I think anthropology should feel free to talk about.
[1:01:51] Babb: It's a crucial thing, really.
[1:01:51] Pitkin: It’s a crucial thing. But we should take on much more than we do, the whole question of race. But you're going to ask another question.
[1:01:59] Babb: Well, I was gonna observe, I don't mean interrupt, but I was going to observe that we've talked about this before. There is in, in the culture of institutions like Amherst College, and also to some degree in anthropology itself, a certain anti-science attitude, a suspicion of science and scientists.
[1:02:21] Pitkin: Which has hit anthropology very hard.
[1:02:23] Babb: I believe that it has. Is-?
[1:02:25] Pitkin: No, I think it is and those of us who sort of treasure ethnography and like it and try to do it, have been under fire. But since, you know, a lot of books have been written about that, about our being the masters and the using the law of the major text, and hiding behind our personage, and so forth and so on. The whole question of lacking subjectivity and reflexivity and subjectivity and so forth has always been ways of sort of taking all that apart, deconstructing it. And a lot of it is to- I mean we were beholden to the colonial enterprise. And we start on the colonial enterprise and we mistook many things for being indigenous when they in fact in were colonial products. But still, that question of being there, looking at, thinking about, and reporting on a culture is, well, it's what we do.
[1:03:17] Babb: It is, now I suppose that some of these critiques could hardly apply to a Europeanist in any case. Italy is not an American colony in any sense.
[1:03:31] Pitkin: But then you get sort of interior, internal kind of criticism for not being really hardcore stuff, you know, you're sort of on the fringes of, and I suppose in a certain way that's true.
[1:03:44] Babb: Do you think that entering into a lifetime relationship with a community, with a people mitigates the critique at all?
[1:03:59] Pitkin: Well, I think it personally mitigates the critique, but there wasn’t a question. We didn't harbor the critique anyway, necessarily. I think we try to understand it. But I'm not sure that that's persuasive to other people, the fact that it's made a tremendous, important personal commitment to us. And I think we're saying that it has.
[1:04:17] Babb: I'm wondering if it's not two ways. I mean, I do think, certainly you gave a great deal to the community in which you worked. And it seems to me that the writings that you've done, and the film that you made also, you know, really, really do constitute contributions to the life of this community and to the, to the way this community and communities like it are understood by others.
[1:04:50] Pitkin: Well, I think so. I think so. I think that if you're sort of also talking about the sort of postmodern movement which has sort of put us, I think, under particular criticism. I think that is, again, some of that is definitely misunderstanding what we're doing.
[1:05:12] Babb: I think so, too. We've talked of these things before.
[1:05:17] Pitkin: I know, we have.
[1:05:19] Babb: Well, anyway, the debate goes on.
[1:05:22] Pitkin: The debate goes on. I guess as I’m thinking, what more, what other contributions could we make? What other things should we be accountable for? I think as anthropologists, and I guess we talked about race as one. And I think the whole question of evolution and all that is definitely under attack––
[1:05:39] Babb: Oh, yeah.
[1:05:39] Pitkin: ––the whole concept of it. And we should and our relationship to evolutionary biology should also be a sort of question and social biology, it has been. And I think we've also assumed that sort of role
[1:05:54] Babb: But at the same time, I think it's very important and we've, we have talked about this before, and it's I think we both feel that it's very important for anthropology to keep a bridge to the biological sciences open. And this is something that I think some have lost sight of in our in our field.
[1:06:15] Pitkin: Absolutely, disconnect from it entirely.
[1:06:18] Babb: Because we are animals, after all.
[1:06:19] Pitkin: That’s right, we just sort of take it for granted. The story starts when we're already there. But the question of ‘who are we?’ never really gets enjoined somehow or other. And I really think that seriously has to, because if we don't do it, someone else is going to write that script.
[1:06:31] Babb: Exactly so, exactly.
[1:06:32] Pitkin: And that's true of so many things. So a lot of confrontational things where we only have to think of Kansas and the school committee and what they did now––
[1:06:41] Babb: Although that’s been rectified
[1:06:42] Pitkin: That’s been rectified, but a lot of other people, I'm sure, are ready to sort of pop up with something else
[1:06:45] Babb: Oh yes, oh yes.
[1:06:47] Pitkin: Let me just say one, this is just pure fantasy, but because you're an astronomer at heart. If I was to start teaching again, one thing I might do is to start us with a recognition of our sort of, I guess, yeah, with a recognition, kind of what we might call our address in the cosmos, where are we? I mean that that speck idea, that insignificant thing, you know, that Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin put us there you know? And now the Hubble has put us even more there, you know? And you look at this in terms of what's going on out there. It's so well, what can you say, you know?
[1:07:24] Babb: There’s a marvelous book called Powers of 10. Did you ever see that?
[1:07:28] Pitkin: No. You told me about that before?
[1:07:30] Babb: I don't remember whether I did or not. But Nancy's coach over at Smith gave me a copy. And it goes from the speck of an atom in powers of 10 in expansion. From atom to molecule to larger molecule to life itself to the country to the planet, to the solar system to the galaxies.
[1:07:56] Pitkin: Exactly.
[1:07:56] Babb: Yeah, it's an amazing thing.
[1:07:57] Pitkin: And to think that everything we are was already there, initially the preconditions of it were already there in the Big Bang is also, bugs me out. So if we were just sort of start with that, does that make a difference in our consciousness of what it means to be a human being? It's another way of being an anthropologist.
[1:08:16] Babb: It is, indeed. It would be a great kind of freshman course in a way, you know. A team-taught, some kind of team-taught course, on the, on the question of our address. What is our address in the universe? And it's something to which anthropologists have something to contribute and George Greenstein is obviously gonna play a big role in this. We don't do teaching of that sort very much anymore, you know, these are team taught courses have become a kind of personal hobby.
[1:08:48] Pitkin: I know, they have, but I remember when you did Evolution, you were you were doing that sort of thing.
[1:08:54] Babb: Did it for years, yeah. Well, I’m still doing it in the national identity course. Yeah, with with Gordy and Bill Taubman and some others occasionally. But back in those days the Ev and Rev course, as it was known, was a very big deal. It was a large and flourishing project with people from the humanities, Jack Pemberton, from religion was involved, and biologists and chemists, and anthropologists. We should, we should, I think we should be doing more of this kind of thing. I really do.
[1:09:24] Pitkin: I agree with you. That, one of the things that turned me on to it was going to the new planetarium in the Museum of Modern of, you know, in New York.
[1:09:34] Babb: I've got to see that.
[1:09:35] Pitkin: And the Tom Hanks thing about his [?] that, I'm copying it from that: what our addresses is. It’s extremely well done. I just want to say another word too about, we talked a lot about the Evolution of Culture course. But two of the courses that I, the Culture and Personality one and sort of what I was trying to do a little bit in that course, to sort of make a connection between Freud and Marx in terms of, in a certain way, losing parts of ourselves. Freud talked about this in respect to losing parts of ourselves and then becoming unconscious, the whole question of repression. And Marx talked about losing ourselves in terms of alienation. I always thought that there's a major connection between alienation and Marx's part and repression on Freud's part, I always left Marx to the end because I thought he's got to be useful in terms of consciousness and false consciousness, human nature, species human nature, which we refer to it as something that comes into being, we're not born with it, it's not a centralist view ourselves, but we create ourselves and seems to me that was all important things to say particularly by a man who said lots of other things as well. And what we sort of came to towards the last five or six years I gave the class was the notion that this institution really has to do with the reproduction of class. And that's a way of looking at it. And I wonder if that was true––and it seemed to me it has to be true. It has to be true of Harvard and Chicago and Williams. Well, if it wasn't true, why would we be here? I mean, being, if you will, you know, spokesman for disinterested knowledge could only exist unless, only because it has a payoff somehow or other.
[1:11:23] Babb: Kind of paradox in our-
[1:11:25] Pitkin: I mean, Amherst has tremendous payoff all the time that’s kept, kept alive. So when I think about it I can only think of it as our assuming leadership in places which are important and keeping the class system going, and having said that, then other things tend to follow from the chorus. And, you know, if we were here who wasn't here, and what does that mean, you know? And what, what function does liberal arts serve, philosophically being idealistic as opposed to materialistic and so forth. And that really, I think, I like doing that and some students really kinda think quite hard about that way of looking at the college. The other course that I liked doing a great deal was a thing that turned into quite a big course that one on Nature of Deviancy.
[1:12:08] Babb: I remember
[1:12:09] Pitkin: And really trying to just sort of get people away from sort of thinking existentially about crime and thinking it was a social construct. It only comes into being, essentially in terms of social process when someone is arrested and processed and judged guilty, you know? It was very difficult for people to give up the notion that if someone kills someone, they're ipso facto delinquent, or deviant. I mean, they might be horrible, but they weren't deviant, I didn't think, until they had been adjudged. Anyway, saying those things, I like saying that and that seemed to kind of work. It was fun doing it but it got so big I sorta stopped it.
[1:12:47] Babb: Well it was a great course, it did get very big.
[1:12:50] Pitkin: It was a good course, I enjoyed that.
[1:12:53] Babb: As long as we're on the subject of courses, you participated in the P of I, the Problems of Inquiry. Was that a good experience?
[1:13:00] Pitkin: Yeah, I learned a lot. Well, I remember doing the old ones with, about poverty and I remember doing one with Gordy Levin; we wrote about China and India. We were doing one of the Jack Cameron which we’d talk a great deal about, well, the romantic. No we talked about, what was it we talked about––
[1:13:13] Babb: Was it Romanticism and Enlightenment?
[1:13:16] Pitkin: Well, I did that course, too. I learned a great deal from that, great deal from that; love that course.
[1:13:22] Babb: I never did that one. I wanted to at the time.
[1:13:26] Pitkin: Yeah, yeah. Just a wonderful learning experience. So just, just, Diderot and the whole question of the Enlightenment, and how much I always feel indebted to it. Particularly, yeah.
[crosstalk]
[1:13:40] Pitkin: And the discourse we had among each other.
[1:13:44] Babb: Yeah, I think it's one of the most valuable experiences that Amherst College offers its faculty. Is being involved in that kind of––
[1:13:53] Pitkin: Yeah and it's too easy to just let it go by and not sort of appreciate that at the time it happens.
[1:13:59] Babb: And you know, to be perfectly honest about it, often the staff meetings are more interesting than the classes it has to be said [laughs]
[1:14:04] Pitkin: If they went so well as the staff meetings went-
[1:14:09] Babb: Well, what have you been doing after your retirement?
[1:14:16] Pitkin: Well, in 1992––
[1:14:19] Babb: When did you retire, I guess that’s the––
[1:14:20] Pitkin: 1992, I became a 70. And I thought the time had come to stop. And I did and I thought this was a chance to go do something which became apparent to me about, ooh, 1989 when the wall came down. I thought, wow, the walls down, you know, this new, other, old, different Germany's now available, someone ought to do something about that, you know? It'd been really very difficult to do anything with it whatsoever. Germany, even as a whole had been not really represented very well at all by American anthropologists for, I guess, in a way, obvious reasons. So I thought that's what I'll do. I'll go there to Germany. And I'll do something in Germany like what I did in Italy, I'll find a family and make a study of them. So you know, boom boom, I went there and met someone from Amherst.
[1:15:11] Babb: Did Uta play a role in this?
[1:15:12] Pitkin: Well, she got to play a role. And Don White got to play a role. Don White came and visited me once. We went off together for the day and had a meal and it was a lot of fun. But what, who was really crucial was an Amherst student of class, I don't quite, forget what it was now, a guy called Steve Kampmeier.
[1:15:29] Babb: I remember him. He was a student in a class of mine too.
[1:15:34] Pitkin: You remember him? What a guy. And he was being, I think, one of the very first American students to study in Leipzig, which was also very innovative. And so I heard about him and went to Germany first to sort of explore this and met Steve, and we went to Jena, and we met someone else he knew and we talked about what I wanted to do, and this guy was an American teaching he was in a Fulbright, he said, “Hey, come with me. I'm going to a family this afternoon. It may be of interest to you.” So I went. This is a farm family in a very small town called Göttern, they had the, they had the birthday and before the time was out the father had his albums out he was showing me pictures, he's talking about the land and I said “wow, better do this,” you know?
[1:16:13] Babb: Now this is covering up the period from Weimar?
[1:16:17] Pitkin: It was gonna start, it was going to cover the period almost from the Weimar through to the present time. And if you go back just another generation back to the Kaiserreich, you would have people, some people who could still live in five different Germany's: the Kaiserreich, the Weimar, the Nazi time, the Communist time, and the present time without ever leaving their front door. Not just different governments but different different Germanys.
[crosstalk]
[1:16:42] Pitkin: I thought it was absolutely incredible, you know? So I did decide to do it and I packed up and went and lived pretty much off and on for three years in Weimar and first with the help of Steve, who was absolutely wonderful. Then the help of another, other young German who I’m still in touch with very much called Andreas Westerwinter. A lot of times just there by myself and made this study and this is an interesting family because they were farming, was five generations. and they got involved in the collective business. Their farm was, first their animals then their tractors, then their land, everything went. They never lost ownership of the land, but they lost control of it. And they went out when work teams. I mean, they were farmers before and they went out with you know, six, seven, twenty people after that to work the field. So their life was just drastically changed. So all these things I talked about and finally wrote up and have it written and finished and sent off to publish and didn't get it back and I'm still thinking about it [laughs] thinking how I'm going to, as time goes on, revise it. I mean, go ahead.
[1:17:47] Babb: I was gonna ask you if Pia Bungarten played a role.
[1:17:49] Pitkin: Oh, Pia Bungarten, Pia Bungarten
[1:17:52] Babb: She’s a favorite of mine.
[1:17:53] Pitkin: Well, she’s always played a role in my life. So yeah, she certainly was and I’ve seen her, I remember spending a whole––
[1:17:58] Babb: You should explain to our viewing audience who is she––
[1:18:00] Pitkin: Who she was, a wonderful woman who came to Amherst and just gung ho, she was just gung ho the whole time and went out and studied the Navajo, remember?
[1:18:09] Babb: Yeah, I do.
[1:18:09] Pitkin: That one summer, that really turned her on. I mean, just, she was Navajo, Navajo Navajo.
[1:18:13] Babb: Right.
[1:18:14] Pitkin: She learned so much about them and came back, wrote a thesis about them and, what a woman. And is now married to Tom Baker, who was also an anthropology major.
[1:18:22] Babb: Now did she play a role in your project in any way?
[1:18:26] Pitkin: Mmm, not really
[crosstalk]
[1:18:29] Pitkin: She was there and I thank God she was mostly there. They went off to Thailand later. No but she was a resource and a wonderful spirit and I got to know her family and that was great.
[1:18:42] Babb: Now in addition to all of this, you've been involved in a number of civic issues in the town here.
[1:18:47] Pitkin: Oh well, I live in a place which is sort of on the cutting edge of neighborhood and downtown so. And is full of University of Mass and also Amherst students. So a lot’s going on on South Prospect street. So it’s kinda hard to sit there and just––
[1:19:02] Babb: [Laughs] As I have come to know.
[1:19:04] Pitkin: As you’ve come to know, it’s hard to sit there quietly. So yes, I have become a town meeting member. I've been involved, invested in a number of things. And really, I think town meeting is a splendid institution, absolutely invaluable institution, a precious institution, which place––
[1:19:16] Babb: Must be kept at all costs.
[1:19:17] Pitkin: It must be kept at all costs. If we let it go, we’d, I think, regret it terribly. One of the reasons I put the German thing a little––it makes you feel guilty just to talk about it, but it has happened––because of other things. I've found out that I have prostate cancer, and I heard that, when was that, last winter I guess, by March 6, I knew it. And then enlisted the help of people at Sloan Kettering hospital, which I got help getting to and have a fantastically good doctor there called Doctor LaBelle, who was one of the three people written up in the New Yorker several months ago about prostate cancer. And he's a top notch man, and a research man, a teaching man. And so between August and October, I had nine weeks of radiation treatment at 81 grays, which is pretty high and I needed it because I have what they call a high Gleason [?] cancer. Five days a week. And I gotta tell you, it was a piece of cake. And I really liked it because I was doing something about it. And I found that such an incredible place to go. And such supportive and good people there that it was something I almost, I really look forward to.
[1:20:28] But what they did to me [laughs] in this very complex system, and it just draws upon biology and physics, and math, and chemistry, among other things I never really quite understood. And now I really do understand it and I want to understand it historically too and go back to sort of the beginning of radiation as a tool for medication, in medication. And go back to Röntgen and [Becquerel] and the Curies and see if I can’t draw a picture, if you will, from them to what happened to me and to other people who go there to have their cancer. treated. And that's what I'm gonna get involved with now. That's why I just came back from, one reason I just came back from Paris the week ago just to go and see where the Curie Institute, the Radium Institute was. Sort of get a feeling, getting started on it.
[1:21:13] Babb: But I’d just like to end by saying Don, what a source of great personal pleasure it's been for me to work with you all these years. And what a privilege it's been to work with you, to be with you here, and to be with you here now. I just can't say how much I appreciate all that you've done for me and for the college. Many thanks, old friend.
[1:21:44] Pitkin: Thank you that’s very, very nice of you to say that, Alan. When this was proposed that I might do this and he said, “who would you like to have interview you?” And I said, Alan Babb, there’s no question about that. I have tremendous respect for you, as you know. You won’t agree with this, but you're one of America's most eminent Indianists.
[1:22:05] Babb: No––
[crosstalk]
[1:22:08] Babb: It's a nice to imagine such a thing but it’s not true––
[1:22:11] Pitkin: No it’s absolutely true. I'm proud of it, the department’s proud of it, and Amherst’s proud of it. Very much so, and you're a remarkable teacher, remarkable scholar, and an extremely good friend. So thank God, I got hold of you and brought you here.
[1:22:24] Babb: Well, I'm awfully glad to have been here. This really was a great privilege for me––
[1:22:28] Pitkin: Good––
[crosstalk]
[1:22:28] Babb: ––to be able to do this and-
[1:22:29] Pitkin: I enjoyed it very much.
[Addendum]
[1:22:38] Pitkin: So Alan, I think there is something else I want to say about two students that I got to know quite well and unfortunately aren't with us anymore. One was Bob Denig. One of our first anthropology majors. And I remember he, spending a lot of time at my house and we talked a great deal about lots of things including religion, one of the very few people I could talk to about religion who could persuade me that it was an important thing to think about. And Bob then went from being an Amherst student to a theology student in Chicago, became ordained in the Episcopalian church. And one of his first posts, if you will, was in Frankfurt, Germany. And I was there doing work myself and went over to see Bob and spent time with Bob and his wife and their two kids. And well, that was a really, really very, very, very fine time. Bob's German was excellent. Then he came back and he came to be, in time, the ordained Bishop of Western Massachusetts. And that was really a remarkable step for a man so young to become a bishop so soon in his career. And shortly after that he contracted cancer in his hip and died at a very sadly young age. I miss Bob.
[1:24:01] Pitkin: The other person I want to speak about is George Sherman, who was not an anthropology major, as far as I know, class of ‘69. And he introduced me to, among other things, to rock and roll and particularly to Bob Dylan. And I remember going to his room once in DU and he sitting me down and saying, “Don, you sit there and listen to this music and get something out of it.” And I did. For the first time I really sort of heard Bob Dylan and heard what all those people were really trying to do, I think. He went to Cornell, got his degree in anthropology, worked in Sumatra––did a splendid piece of fieldwork in the rice fields of Sumatra. And then came back, got a teaching job, didn't get tenure, got a little discouraged about teaching, went back to Montague, to the commune that he had spent so much time at as a student, the very same commune that was so important to Marshall Bloom while he was here. And then one day, driving produce to market, he was hit full on by a car, driver without a license and was immediately killed. And I miss George too because he was beginning to work on something in the last years of his life that is a definitive bibliography of the Holocaust, which I knew was gonna be very, very important, I was going to find useful too. So I also, I was looking forward to that, about working with George. So I look back on these guys with a great deal affection and a great sense of loss and want to dedicate this narrative, this interview to both of them.
Donald S. Pitkin, professor of Anthropology, taught at Amherst College from 1964 until 1992. The American Anthropological Association honored him in 2000 as "one of the pioneering U.S. anthropologists to do fieldwork in Europe." In 1985, he wrote The House the Giacomo Built, which was made into a film of the same title.
Lawrence Alan Babb has been a professor at Amherst since 1969 and is the Willem Schupt Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations and professor of anthropology. He is a social anthropologist whose main area of interest is South Asia where he has conducted fieldwork in India.
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