Becoming an anthropologist is a slow and challenging process. As I remarked in an earlier essay, Expanding
American Anthropology, 1945 – 1980, published through the Association of
Senior Anthropologist, brought back lots of early memories. One article is by
Robert Textor where he described the formation of the Peace Corps. This brought back many memories.
In 1960, toward the end of my freshman year at Brown
University I walked into Faunce House, the Student Union at the time, and
picked up a copy of the Brown Daily Herald, the campus newspaper. That day
there was a Supplement (I don’t remember the name) but I do remember an article
about the British Overseas Volunteer Corps[1].
As I read the article, I thought to myself –“Wow, I’d like to do that!”
I had enrolled in NROTC in the Fall of 1959, this article
suggested an alternative type of service. Little did I know at the time that I
would be suspended from NROTC that fall because of my grades the previous year.
Those grades which included the math required for my planned major in
astronomy, were to be life changing as was the article I had read.
According to Textor[2],
a few days after his inaugural address President John F. Kennedy began work to
establish a new governmental organization that became known as the U.S. Peace
Corps. President Kennedy chose his brother-in-law, Sergeant Shriver, for the
task of turning the concept into a reality. On March 1, 1961, Kennedy signed
the Executive Order that created the Peace Corps.
Textor’s article traces the development of the early days of
the Peace Corps and some of its key personalities. He also recounts his role in
the process. At the time, I was still struggling with the immediate personal
issue of being placed on academic probation as I entered my sophomore year.
Textor’s major contribution to the development of Peace Corps
was to lobby and insist upon a strong language training program for the
volunteers who would be assigned to serve in the program. The tradition of US
representative such as embassy staff, USAID, and military advisers to live in enclaves and
work in English in the metropolitan cities and with host government
officials. But this would not work at the village level where the PCV’s (Peace
Corps Volunteers) would be assigned.
At the time, Textor was a post-doctoral fellow, Yale/Harvard
anthropologist, who was working on a book about Thai Religion when he got the
invitation to join the Peace Corp/Washington. The goal was to develop a
language program to train the PCV recruits in Thai and to get them in place
quickly. Textor’s article brought back memories of my own training for Peace in
the summer of 1964.
In the May, 1964 I graduated from Brown University and faced
the question – “What next?”
This is the perennial question facing AB graduates
in anthropology. “Is anthropology simply a major, like history or English,
preparation for a middle-class job or professional graduate school?” Or, “Is it
a path toward an academic career?”
Another question I faced at the time was, “What about the
“peace time” draft?”
I considered my options. After an interview with a J.
Walter Thompson recruiter, who chained smoked Marlboro cigarettes while
bragging, “This is one of our clients!”, I decided that advertising was not for
me.
I consider OCS, Officer Candidate School, as a way of fulfilling my
military obligation. I also applied to 10 anthropology graduate programs mostly
west of the Mississippi. I figured that I would play the IVY LEAGUE degree and
geographical distribution card to overcome my early academic record.
And, I
remembered the British Overseas Volunteer Corps article I had read and how it had excited me. So I decided to apply to
the newly created Peace Corps.
I was accepted by several of the graduate programs in the
mid-west and south-west. However, an offer from the Peace Corps to train for
Peru arrived and was more attractive. Our training would be at Cornell (famous
for the Vicos Project). There I became one of some 50 candidates who would go
through the basic RCA/Tools project training.
I wrote to the schools that had accepted me and indicated my
decision. A problem I’d been concerned about was how I would handle the
logistics of applying from overseas while serving as a PCV. So, I asked in the
letter, ”If I went to Peru, could I update my application for the entrance
class of 1966?” Most responded that I would have to reapply for the 1966 class.
One, however, the University of Arizona, wrote back that they would update my
acceptance to the class entering in 1966. This solved my problem.
In late June, I prepared to go to Cornell and begin my
training. There I ran into Robert Textor’s idea for intensive language
training. The Cornell Program, headed by William Rideout and anthropologist,
Cara Richards, had two language tracks. For those who knew Spanish (either as
Spanish majors, or native speakers) there was training in Quechua, the
predominate Indian language of the highland Indians. For the rest of us, the
language was Spanish. Language training was the dominate subject we trained in
for 4 to 6 hours a day for the 8 weeks of training. If we survived Cornell, we
would spend 2 weeks in Puerto Rico at Camp Radley.
Reading Textor’s essay brought all this back. My Spanish
teacher was an American Graduate Spanish major, a young woman, who spoke
Castilian Spanish. Other classes had native speaking instructors who were
graduate students at Cornell and represented different Latin American
“dialects”.
The classes seemed to go on and on. I found myself getting out of seat and pacing back and forth in the
back of the class. That earned me the nickname, El Tigre. I found that as I was
learning Spanish, the German I’d studied at Brown also improved as I tried to
not respond in English but would go to a German translation first.
I learned from this training the two major truths that
Textor described in his essay. Most Americans, outside of the diplomatic corps
and who were US representatives in country, did not have good language skills.
Most lived in American enclaves that insulated them from the local population.
Peace Corps was modeled more like the traditional anthropological field
situation, living and working with the locals and in their community.
Our first
task was to learn and/or develop our skills in the indigenous language
As an anthropologist, I observed how my classmates’ language
skills had improved and been altered by their communities. Indians, Cholos, and
Metizos did not speak Castilian. They spoke with accents that combined Spanish
and Quechua derived elements. Second, those of us assigned to work as a link
between the PC and the American community – tended to fall into the class that
Textor was attempting to have Peace Corps avoid.
I fell into this
latter class. My spoken language
proficiency never exceeded a 3.5 on the foreign service exam. I was based in
Cuzco but covered the Departments of Cuzco, Puno, and Apurimac where I was
assigned to work on Special Projects as a liaison between USAID/Alianza para
Progreso and the Peace Corps Volunteers working in Southern Peru. Special projects
included local school construction, potable water, introduction of rabbits as a
food source, etc. at a cost to USAID of around $1,000.
Textor’s essay describes the ideals behind the Peace Corps
and documents the history of the very earliest days of the Peace Corps, from
the Washington perspective. It is a valuable lesson in the history of
anthropology and points to the anthropological input in the development of training
for the foreign service.
My “class” was part of the second wave of volunteers into
Peru. When we arrived at the airport, we were met by the local PC office’s American
secretary. The problem was she was there to meet her friend returning from
vacation. No one had informed her of our arrival. There were no preparations made
for us. In addition there were the representatives of two other classes of PCVs
arrived with us. What we found, when we arrived, was a poorly organized program
that was still working out its purpose and processes.
It took the regional Cusco office several months to get
everyone assigned and settled. My roommate, an artist/ceramist had been told
that he would be helping to set-up a kiln in one of the native villages in
Cuzco. That never happened. He ended up working with local PC office. In those
days, we h had to learn to be flexible and adaptable.
I discovered that there was more than just the basic speaking skills to learning the language . This is what Textor described as his goal in
the formative days. There was also learning the “occupational or subject” vocabulary
of the language. This was especially true
if your assignment dealt with cultural differences in a specific skill set or
activity. To this day, much of my “agricultural” vocabulary and knowledge is in
a bastardized Spanish/Quechua based on a mixture of 16th century and
20th century agricultural culture.
In my assignment as a
liaison, I learned the “culture” of grantsmanship and program administration.
Each has its own language and English and Spanish vocabularies. In essence,
Textor was correct insisting that PCV’s know and speak the language of the
peoples they would be serving. I doubt, however, he thought of it in this other
sense.
There was a disconnect problem between language training and the country
and skills training components at US based facilities, and, in those early days, the uncertainty of
the in-country assignments., When Peace Corps later shifted to an in-country training
model, this problem was corrected.
Peace Corps was an adventure, especially for a young BA in
anthropology. It confirmed my interest in anthropology – working with village
leaders, other volunteers, government (Peruvian and American) officials
developing simple low-tech projects – as an applied field.
At the end of my tour, I was offered a contract to work with
the Lima USAID office. I turned it down and exercised my option to enroll in
the graduate program at the University of Arizona. I recommended a fellow
volunteer for the position, which he accepted.
In Arizona, I met Dr. Edward H.
Spicer and enrolled in the Community Development Seminar that he conducted with
Dr. Cortland Cleveland from the sociology department. There I was introduced to
Spicer’s case-book approach to training, Human
Problems in Technological Change and had an opportunity to put my personal
experience into perspective.
Peace Corps has been the training ground for many who have
since considered anthropology as a career. It carried forward a certain Boasian
quality even as academic anthropology was fragmenting in to narrower and
narrower specialties. It has also trained many in the more exotic languages
humans have developed over the history of the species. More important, Peace
Corp has helped to salvage may tongues that might have been otherwise lost in
the expansion of our global culture.
For me, reading about those very early
days, reawakened many fond memories.
Isn’t part of what the
Association of Senior Anthropologists mission is, is to document the traditions
of the profession?
[2] Chapter
2, Textor (1980:22),in Expanding American
Anthropology 1945-1980
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