When I began graduate school at the University of Arizona in 1974, I was set on becoming an archaeologist, and my major goal in life was to run my own excavation of an ancient Mayan city. But the graduate adviser at Arizona thought that my training was much too narrow; as an undergraduate at New York University I had taken many archaeology and physical anthropology courses but had managed to evade almost all cultural anthropology and linguistics. Arizona emphasized balanced training in all four fields of anthropology, so my first two years of graduate school were devoted almost entirely to making up for my deficiencies, starting me down a path from which I never returned.
I was fortunate to have some excellent and inspired teachers who gradually seduced me away from my romance with the ancient Maya. Eventually, I got over my fear of cultural anthropology, and in my third year I dared to take a notoriously difficult seminar with Robert Netting on cultural ecology. The course drew me in and involved me in a study of household organization, population pressure, and economic change that eventually turned into a dissertation topic and resulted in a year and one-half of fieldwork with Kekchi Maya communities in Belize (a country in Central America) and the start of a career.
Three years later, I was still looking for a permanent job teaching anthropology and was sitting in a hotel room facing a hostile group of professors, who had already interviewed a couple of dozen candidates that day. They were tired and made no effort to be nice; the first question was, "So what kind of anthropologist are you? How do you label yourself?"
I don't like to label myself. I felt that my real strength as a scholar was just that I didn't fit into any category and did all kinds of different work--but I needed the job, so I gave it a try. I groped for the right mixture of telling the truth and fitting the job description: "I guess I'm kind of a cultural ecologist," I said. "I'm interested in kinship and social organization and also economic development. I've started to do some applied work on agriculture and . . .
