The past few months have been very busy ones, but I wanted to write a quick update on my progress just to keep myself honest and provide a public accounting of my work so far.
I spent most of September not working on the biography, except to slowly start processing the material I had discovered in August. In late September I began a research trip which took up most of October: I flew to the University of Michigan, where I did work at the Bentley library. It was a wonderful experience. The Bentley staff were very helpful and working in the Wolf and White collections was literally a dream come true. However, I must say the best thing about the Bentley was its reading room: One wall is a giant glass window with a view of a courtyard outside. It is amazing how much this improved my experience of archival work. Library research can be tedious, ritualistic, isolating, and can lead to a lot of sensory deprivation. So having a view of something green and alive was really wonderful.
Ann Arbor was also wonderful to visit. Going to Michigan and meeting with people who were influenced by Sahlins was like meeting my matrikin: People I had heard about but never met, who were uncannily similar to me, but also so different. I received a warm welcome from the people I talked to (who didn’t ask to be named in this blog post) and learned a lot about Michigan and Sahlins.
I took a bus from Ann Arbor to Chicago — that was a real American experience — and then spent a week working at the archives in the Reg(enstein) at the University of Chicago. It was like Ann Arbor except the reading room was five degrees colder and there was no window. Do you know why? Because real intellectuals don’t need a window. #UofC. At any rate, the staff was helpful and I had a great visit back at my old stomping grounds. The highlight of the trip were the David Schneider papers, which were scandalously vivid and inappropriate.
I was back home only briefly before I headed to the last and final trip for my research. I flew to Melbourne and did work in Greg Denning’s papers, which were spread out at two collections: The University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria. Both institutions were very helpful, however I must say that the SLV completely earns its reputation as a great cultural institution. Now only were the hours fabulous and the facilities beautiful as usual, but the building is always so alive with people that just walking in is always a pleasure.
From there I traveled to Warrnambool for the Pacific History Association meetings. The meetings were great in terms of scholarly content and had an above-average number of people from PNG there, which I really appreciated. That’s not always true of the PHA conferences held in the American Pacific. However, it was extremely cold. I had a good time, but next time I visit Warrnambool I will buy one of those merino sweaters they sell in duty free.
After Warrnambool I traveled to Fiji to retrace Sahlins’s steps there. It was the least-planned part of the trip and I wasn’t sure what to expect. However I, like many others, was bowled over by Fijian hospitality. Government officials helped plan my trip to Moala and hosted me on the island. Of course, part of being an honored guest involves being steered in certain directions and not others, which I was aware of. Still, even the arrival of tropical cyclone Mal couldn’t make a dent in the great experience I had. Colleagues in Suva — a great little town — were also very welcoming. After years of dealing with Port Moresby it was a great change of pace.
My sabbatical will end in January, when I begin teaching again. At that point I plan to start processing all the material I have collected. I will also begin interviewing people over Zoom then. While this is going on I will start pounding out a rough draft. I might make a few brief detours to collections which are relevant, but I think the main body of research is done now.
Thanks to the hard work of librarians and archivists, there is always more past than there is present. That’s especially true of the recent past. Sahlins’s papers are not even fully catalogued yet, and much of the late 20th century is still in oral memory, not deposited somewhere. So I could do research for this book forever. But I think I have more than enough to put together a fairly strong biography of Sahlins with what I have, and I feel confident that this admittedly arbitrary stopping point is a good one. Now… on to the writing!
Alex Golub 