Introduction

It is difficult to speak of Jim's theoretical influence without in the same breath speaking of personal influence-a feature that registers strongly in different voices in this volume. 1This influence meant Jim's ability to lead his students to see the possibility of a space for academic work in pursuits that are not strictly academic-poetry (Behar), painting (Pesmen), even cooking (Sutton), or for a dialogue between academic and artistic pursuits.Indeed, one could say that Jim's opus has been less engaged in sketching out theoretical territory imperial style, for his disciples to fill in, than in opening up imaginative spaces for others to further explore.As Behar puts it in her reflection, his is often work of well-chosen images "that has room for pauses and ways of saying things that have never been said before" (Behar, this issue: 185).Such is the power of his inspiration-a breath of fresh air-even if inspiration comes after ascending from the depths of the inchoate that lie waiting at the "dark at the bottom of the stairs" (Fernandez 1986:215).Is it surprising that someone whose coin is poetic tropes could also be resolutely down to earth, "The Spoon River Midwesterner with the Latin surname passed down to him from his Asturian (cattle keeping?) grandfather" (Behar, this issue:184)?A photo of Jim on the anthropology "departmental map" at the University of Chicago shows him hauling hay to remind students that fieldwork is "not a philosopher's holiday" (Fernandez, this issue: 189) but an engagement with the work-a-day world of material life as well.Unusual for the Chicago School in the 1980s and 1990s, Jim always steered students away from the theoretical antimonies of a choice between idealism and materialism.To think in tropes, you have to roll around in the dirt as well, with the shape-shifting animal metaphors such as the bull crashing in the cattle krall of the Bwiti cult or the hunting wolves and female donkeys of Asturian children's games (Fernandez 1986:21,33-34).Such a commitment is reflected in the ruefully mud-splattered self-recognition of Serbian Jeremiads (Zivkovic, this issue:121), the taste and aroma of basil (Sutton, this issue:171), the distinctive "smell of freedom" of gas and oil Trabi exhaust (Berdahl, this issue: 133), or repeated silty draughts of corn beer (Albro, this issue: 142).Each remind us what it means to be preoccupied with the everyday imponderabilia of Fernandez-style, "hard-hat" ethnography.Endeavoring "to escape the insular, peninsular, or the parochial bound up in imposing a paradigm" (Fernandez 1995:6), Jim's down-to-earth fieldwork has pursued instead the dynamic of identification-the constructive eclecticism of associative fields of often unexpected connections (as with Pesmen's connections between writing fiction, painting, and "post-Soviet disorder" in this issue)

Citation · Library science · Sociology · African history and culture analysis · Anthropology · Computer Science

• Persuasions and Performances

  James Fernandez, James W Fernandez•Persuasions and performances•1986

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• The principles of psychology

  James Williams, William James•The principles of psychology•1950

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• "Culture and transcendent humanization On the "dynamic of the categorical

  James W Fernandez•Ethnos•1994

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