Remembering Gail Kelly

Gail Margaret Kelly, my undergraduate adviser and the woman responsible for my choice of anthropology as a vocation, passed away yesterday. Readers of the blog might remember that my friend Thomas Strong and I recently organized a conference in honor of Profesor Kelly entitled Fashioning Anthropology in which students from across her forty year career at Reed College paid tribute to the influence she had on their career. As Joel Robbins noted in a recent email to the Association for the Social Anthropology of Oceania informing the group of her passing, “no fewer than five of the scheduled papers at that event were by students of hers who had gone on to do graduate work focused on Melanesia,” noted Robbins, and although “She did not seek much attention for herself beyond Reed’s campus” and thus “many ASAO members may not realize how important she has been to our field… her influence on those she taught and mentored, her impact on our corner of the anthropological world has been quite deep.”

Professor Kelly (never ‘Gail’) is a difficult woman to memorialize because she was simultaneously unknown to the wider world of scholarship and an unmissable presence on the Reed College campus. There is an additional paradox that must be frankly dealt with as well: although many of us consider her to be the epitome of the teacher and mentor some people (perhaps most?) disliked her, often intensely. In fact, her ability to humiliate and anger students was sufficiently strong that one person responded to our initial invitation to attend the conference not to accept, but to let us know how, two decades after all her graduation, the memory of Professor Kelly still angered her. “Ms. Kelly’s contribution to my academic education was stifling and intimidating,” she wrote, “teaching to the few she deemed worthy of her attention instead of looking to inspire all of her Anthropology students.” Another friend of mine (who did not major in anthropology) remembered Professor Kelly recently along similar lines, but in a way more in keeping with her spirit: “She was mean to people, but only the ones who deserved it.” She was so intimidating that she was named the “scariest college professor” in Portland by one of the local papers. As anthropology major turned international drug smuggler and possible zooerast Doug Spink summarized, “Put simply, Gail’s is the sharpest mind under which I’ve ever studied. Not in the grandstanding sense of self-importance, but rather in the literal sense of cutting, quick, and deadly effective. She had no tolerance for students without intellectual depth and a high work ethic. She expected more, something of interest, presented with flair, substance, and intellectual rigor.”

Trying to understand how Professor Kelly could be admired as a great mentor while simultaneously disliked by many around her requires understanding the woman capable of evoking such contradictory responses. My memory (written with the help of the Internet and not much else) is that she was born in Portland Oregon in 1933 [update: I was wrong about this, she was born in Deer Park, WA] and attended Reed College as an undergraduate. Like many anthropology students she wrote about Wasco-Wishram culture, the Native North American group that David French, the dean of anthropology at Reed, had worked with and knew well. Her thesis applied Morris Opler’s idea of ‘themes’ to her material, and she graduated in 1955. She pursued graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. There she grew interested in the project on new nations that was active at the time, and was particularly influenced by Edward Shils and the Committee On Social Thought. Professor Kelly wrote an MA on social organization in the Northwest Coast that was in keeping with her Boasian Reed background, and then turned to Africa for her dissertation on “The Ghanaian Intelligentsia” and graduated in 1959. If I remember correctly there was a bit of concern that she had not done fieldwork as part of the thesis and was perhaps distant from the department, and Shils had to vouch for her work. Shortly after completing the dissertation she conducted 18 months of fieldwork in Ghana — partly in order to satisfy the anthropology department — of which I rarely heard her speak at length. She returned to Reed in 1960 after publishing an essay in Bert Hoselitz’s collection “A Reader’s Guide To The Social Sciences” and continued to teach there for the next forty years. Between 1976 and 2000 she advised over 60 thesis students, including me, and is probably responsible for close to 100 undergraduate theses written at Reed.

In Professor Kelly’s classes ‘anthropology’ meant ‘British Social Anthropology’. Even by during her time as a student at Reed the anthropology department had an unusually strong tradition of excellence with links to the Boasian tradition. David French was a student of Opler, who taught at Reed (although not during Kelly’s time there), as did Alexander Goldenweiser. But as far as I can tell her experience at Chicago aligned Professor Kelly her much more closely with the synthetic project of sociology. I went through my entire undergraduate education with her without reading Boas, Sapir, Lowie, Benedict, or other Boasians. The exception to this was Coming of Age in Samoa, which we read in Intro Anthropology so, as she put it, “You can say you’ve read a book by Margaret Mead.”

As macrotheorists go she focused on a very Parsonian (now considered tendentious) reading of Weber and, above all, Durkheim. Marx was something that I had to learn about in the political science department — I think Professor Kelly considered him a cargo cultist slightly less interesting than Yali — and Freud was simply never mentioned, except perhaps occasionally as we dismissed all psychological theories as studying phenomenon ineffable and transitory when compared to objective, enduring social facts. Adam Smith never even appeared. Professor Kelly’s interest in ‘the classics’ of social theory was the legendary flip side of her immersion in a sort of Parsonian synthesis of social science — she had come of age intellectually, after all, when Parson’s two volume reader in “Theories of Society” was creating a cannon of the ‘sociological tradition’ out of imported European theories, and authors like Henry Sumner Maine, Fustel de Coulanges, and William Robertson Smith were considered to be important theorists worth reading in their own right, not merely for historical interest. She lamented the retranslation of Mauss’s Essai Sur Le Don and continued to speak of ‘prestations’ rather than ‘gifts’.

Our ‘Advanced Social Anthropology’ class started with The Andaman Islanders (ALL of it) and ended with Political Systems of Highland Burma. Our ‘Social Theory’ course involved a close reading of The Division of Labor in Society — indeed, a page by page examination of each passage and footnote as if it was holy writ. Her Religion and Ritual course focused on Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In fact I took them back to back, discussing Elementary Forms for an hour and a half, waiting fifteen minutes, moving to another classroom, and then discussing Division of Labor. All of her classes during my time at Reed had titles like this. “Gifts and Goods,” “Millenarianism,” “Religion and Ritual,” and so forth. Professor Kelly was not opposed to other disciplines. All right-thinking anthropology majors obediently shuffled off to take Ray Kierstead’s course on the Annales School since these historians were considered cousins of the Annee Sociologique. Equally, at an earlier stage in her career she was quite interested in the philosophical literature on cultural relativism and alternate rationalites and co-taught a course on it with Bill Peck. Equally, she was not opposed to novelty, particularly in ethnography. The Gender of the Gift — hardly your traditional ethnography — figured prominently in her Gifts and Good Class. She dismissed (disastrously, I later realized) Bakhtin as worthless, but picked up on the work of Bruno Latour a decade before mainstream anthropology would discover him. But above all she valued the classics.

She viewed the academic world in the highly personalistic terms more familiar to those familiar with the tangled social web of indy rock bands or the private lives of celebrities. The key to the Fortes-Leach debate (which we read. In intro anthropology.) was not the way that Leach was beginning, based on his reading of Levi-Strauss, to articulate a theory of alliance rather than descent. What mattered was, we were told, that Fortes had to pass through Leach’s office in order to reach his own, thus making confrontation inevitable. She could be very candid about the world of anthropology and its characters. She was quite frank in saying that most anthropologists simply didn’t read half the books they talked about — something I thought impossible until I got to graduate school, and realized the value of being able to call someone on the minor details of Divinity and Experience Amongst The Dinka. It was this sort of gossipy, informal approach to these books — who was teaching where, and so forth, that made this work come alive for us and informs my own sense of intellectual history (which is as good a description of what she taught as ‘anthropology’ is) to this day.

Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to remember exactly what I read for each class because I did not have a sense when I was an anthropology major that I was reading for a class. One of the participants at the Fashioning Anthropology conference remarked on Professor Kelly’s well-known penchant for having syllabi that did not include lists of books or even very explicit lists of reading. He remembered when he asked her why this was that she responded “Because I do not consider you responsible for a set list of books. I consider you responsible for the entire literature.” The entire literature: this was her all over. I remember her remarking in class to us that “being an anthropology major doesn’t just mean doing the reading for class. It means reading the latest journals, checking used bookstores, keeping up with the field as a whole.” She was serious. My office hours with her consisted of me mentioning a topic of interest, and then her suggesting that I read a book on the topic. Further meetings would include a discussion of the book and then mention of another book ‘I might like to look into.’ If I hasn’t read it by the next time I saw her, stony silence ensued that made it clear to me she wondered what I was doing in her office. The result was basically another independent study course that stretched over my three years as an anthropology major, combined with the development of a keen interest in what was being published and what sorts of things were being ordered or, more telling, remaindered and sold used at Powell’s. There were no secondary sources (although some of us found them out on our own and read them secretly), there was only the primary text. We did not skim. We did not skip. We read books closely, and in their entirety. It was the beginning of a total immersion in the life of the mind.

But of course in the end, nothing was good enough for Professor Kelly. The idea that you could do anything to please her simply never occurred to us — the goal was simply to mitigate as much as possible her aloof disdain at your inevitable failure. In fact despite the fact that I was one of her most successful students — close enough to her to organize a conference in her honor — I consistently earned Bs and B-s in her class. The sole exception to this was her Weberian Themes in Social Anthropology Course, in which she begrudged me an A-. This was only the smallest part of the humiliation that one suffered at her hands. In order to be admitted to the anthropology major one had to take a junior qualifying exam which consisted of something like 5 4 page essays written in a single, morning-long examination on a reading list of 10 or so books which one had to read in addition to one’s usual coursework. It is telling of Professor Kelly’s (impossible) standards that in the class before mine — a class that would send students to SOAS, The University of Chicago, and Princeton, among other schools — no one passed the qualifying exam unconditionally, and everyone had to rewrite their answers. In fact, I myself did not pass when I took my qual, and had to rewrite a question (I believe it was a comparison of Levi-Strauss’s hot/cold distinction to Appadurai’s theory of global flows).

As my discussion of her intellectual habits suggests, Professor Kelly was a conservative in the best meaning of that word. She had a keen appreciation of tradition — both scholarly and otherwise — and was aware of how the oft-invisible rules of our heritage made our life more meaningful and worthwhile. She combined this love of etiquette, fashion, and manners with a cool blondism (her beauty, though long past when I met her, was something we had all heard of) and mixed it with a good deal of condescension to the degraded state of the world in which she was forced to live. At one point after a recent sexual harassment scandal that resulted in a policy of no closed-door meetings with students, she invited one of my classmates in to her office for an office hour and — in violation of the policy but in keeping with Reed’s long-standing tradition — instructed him to close the door. “Unless,” she added, transforming momentarily into Grace Kelly, “you think I’m going to rape you or something.” The unease that many of us felt around her was the sense that we were in violation of secret rules of which only she was aware. She told one student of Scots descent that his shortcomings as a person were due to the fact that he “was descended from a race that subsisted entirely on oats and apples.” Professor Kelly was the kind of person who could ruin my day by archly noting that I — a Californian raised in t shirts and shorts who attended her classes in tie-dyed t shirts, hair below my shoulders, and mutton chops — was wearing white after labor day. We were often put in intimidating and uncomfortable social situations. There were rumors of her hiring her male students (she had few female students) to act as waiters at cocktail parties and dressing them in tuxedos. Our mandatory weekly thesis meetings occurred early on Sunday mornings at a local coffee shop where she would hold court in an overstuffed chair. At 7 or 8 in the morning — a brutal time for a hung-over college student — she would ring you up and tell you what time to arrive. Bleary-eyed students would dully appear, join her and her previous student, chat together until she dismissed the one she was finished with, and then met with you. This enforced salon continued until she had met with all of her students.

Anthropological critiques of a denial of coevalness seem hopelessly inapplicable to Professor Kelly, since she considered no one to be her equal. Similarly, she was unabashedly interested in the exotic because it was not boring. On more than one occasion she told me that the most important thing in life was not to be bored, and often mentioned that Malinowski ought to have put this directly after food and shelter on his list of human needs. It was clear that she kept me around because I was not boring, and I think this was how she chose her students (and make no mistake about it, she chose you as an advisee, not the other way around). She had the keen eye for ethnographic detail that only comes from a life time of shopping. Her interest in Melanesia was undoubtedly due to how strange people were there, but she also found the average Oregonian exotic. Why, for instance, did people wear baseball caps backwards? Why in the 1970s did all of her students, as she put it, “walk around dressed up like Oscar Wilde”? She mused on the totemic significance of the icons that allowed one to identify which part of town different buses went to. “We,” she would say definitely of Reedies and other people living in southwest Portland, “are people are the beaver.” She would then arch one eyebrow as if to suggest that there was perhaps something unpleasant about the people of the Deer, Raindrop, and Rose — Portland’s three other neighborhoods — that would require us to exchange shell valuables or wampum with them. How could critiques of anthropology’s authority or colonial background touch a woman who didn’t buy the idea of cultural relativism (or even tolerance) in the first place? This was the person, after all, who described hippyism in a lecture as “hedonism if it had been invented by puritans” and who remarked to me once that people spit in public “because they wanted to be disgusting and were disgusting.” In fact she considered freshmen to be inhuman and refused to have anything to do with them — you were not allowed to take Intro to Anthropology until you were sophomore. She knew how to play hard to get.

Professor Kelly was the ultimate in sink-or-swim professors, and I look back on my time as her student with some ambivalence. I spent a lot of graduate school unlearning my dysfunctional ways of coping with authority figures and advisers, and it wasn’t until the final years of my program at Chicago that I developed a friendship and rapport with the chair of my committee. But ultimately I owe her more than she owes me. She taught me how to live the life of the mind, and instilled me in that the only reason people cannot achieve great things is that they believe they cannot. She gave me the ability to become whoever I wanted to be in life, and taught me that anthropology was a part of living it. When Tom and I picked her up at her house to drive her to the conference, we both wondered aloud at the beauty of Oregon in the fall as if, despite our years at Reed, we were seeing it for the first time. “Yes,” she said quietly, “you don’t notice these thing when you’re young, you know.” It was a moment that helped remind me that I owe Professor Kelly not just for what I have learned from her so far, but for the continuing role her teaching will play in my life as it unfolds in the future.