A Conversation with Joel Sherzer

A Conversation with Joel Sherzer Anthony C. Woodbury On the Sunday morning before Thanksgiving of 1979, dazed from days of careering around a hotel somewhere at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, awkward in my suit and tie, bereft of job nibbles, suddenly, on reading my lapel label, someone says: “You’re Tony Woodbury. Joel Sherzer has been looking for you.” It was Dick Bauman. Then from another direction, speaking twice as fast: “You’re Tony Woodbury. I’ve been looking for you!” It was Joel. “Go to room ####, see you in fifteen minutes.” But then instead he walked with me, talking excitedly and animatedly about Edward Sapir and Franz Boas, like we’d known each other since forever. And the conversation never stopped. Two weeks later I’m in his car, dodging headlights and deer in then-exurban Westlake Hills, Texas, and we’re chattering away; then we’re at his house, meeting awesome Dina Sherzer and talking animatedly and excitedly about Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet; then I’m giving a talk for an anthropology job for which I was wholly unsuited (luckily they hired Greg Urban); and then, one sojourn in Alaska later, I’m again in Austin nattering animatedly and excitedly with Joel after a talk for a job for which (I hope) I was a little more suited. And so it went. Sometimes, our animated and excited talk launched from opposite ends of a long classroom with a giant table, Joel with his blackboard behind him and me with my blackboard behind me—we called it a class, “Speech Play and Verbal Art,” which Joel had started with Dick Bauman, and which he and I did, every four years, for maybe twenty years, and where, like metal filings, grad students would pull closer to Joel or closer to me along the giant table in proportion to the strength of their linguistic anthropological or anthropological linguistic affiliation. And it continued, through teaching, books, archives, conferences, and just sitting around, until October 2022, on a Sunday morning, when Pattie Epps and I visited Joel where he was staying, chattering animated and excitedly, in English with us, in his lovely Spanish with a staff person there, and with asides in French with Dina. I will so miss Joel. [End Page 379] Anthony C. Woodbury University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Indiana University

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