Paul Durrenberger

American Fieldnotes: Collected Essays of an Existentialist Anthropologist Paul Durrenberger

These essays are a candid look into the mind of an anarchist, existentialist activist anthropologist. Collected here are writings that span 40 years of one of the most prolific modern-day anthropologists, essays and commentaries that rarely made it into professional curriculum vitae and never got counted in reviews for pay raises or promotion. Writing now as emeritus, E. Paul Durrenberger says these radio commentaries, essays and speeches are at least as important as his many formal ethnographic, theoretical and methodological contributions. Together they define an alternative outlook crucial in a culture dominated by the ideology of markets and saturated by so-called merit evaluations and the practically in-bred belief that that we deserve what we get and get what we deserve. Durrenberger challenges those assumptions. His experience as a person, as a professor and as an ethnographer tells him this ideology is inherently, intrinsically wrong. These essays draw the picture of a lifetime of egalitarian practice and existentialist living that defines activist anthropology.