From Boy Scout to Hired Gun

From Boy Scout to Hired Gun:An Interview with J. Anthony Paredes Samuel R. Cook, co-editor In this issue we begin a series of interviews with anthropologists who have distinguished themselves as contributors to development of and dialogue concerning collaborative anthropological endeavors. Acknowledging that collaboration is not a new idea but an ever-evolving ideal, we thought it would be fitting to launch the series by interviewing an anthropologist whose long track record exemplifies the spirit of collaboration. J. Anthony Paredes, like so many American anthropologists, was drawn into the discipline by an interest in American Indians. And like so many of us, he has taken to heart the criticism that anthropologists have sustained from indigenous peoples and scholars worldwide. However, he has distinguished himself through his humility in the field and his professionalism on all fronts. Paredes has worked with the Poarch Band of Creeks in Alabama since the early 1970s, conducting research based on an ethic of service and a willingness to place community concerns before self-interested research agendas. His work with the Creeks is just one of many stellar examples from his long career as an anthropologist in the American South. He served most of his tenure at Florida State University, crowning it with innovative work in cultural resources management for the National Park Service in the Southeast region after attaining emeritus status from FSU. As past president of the Society for Applied Anthropology he stands as a model for anthropologists wishing to forge their careers in the steel of public engagement. In the interview that follows, Samuel R. Cook engages Paredes in a thoughtful dialogue concerning the relationship between anthropology and science, research and reality, and the future of our discipline in a global age. [End Page 155] Cook: To what extent did the applied aspect of anthropology influence your decision to become an anthropologist? Paredes: I'll get to that question but let me give you a little background first. For the longest time, I didn't know there was anything but applied anthropology, even though I didn't know it by that name. I came into anthropology by virtue of a very long-standing interest in American Indians. I don't know how it started, but it endured, and I never gave up. There were side-tracks. But I continued with that interest, which led me to the Boy Scouts, and ultimately meeting people who guided me to the Orlando public library and to things like the Bureau of American Ethnology reports. And thanks to that library, and thanks to the encouraging people in the Boy Scouts, I really got very deeply into the literature on American ethnology, and got to know indirectly about people like Kroeber, and Wissler, and Lowie and people like that. My reading took me into the modern times as well. I think particularly of a book that my mother's brother—fittingly enough—gave me when I was an early teenager, a book by Oliver La Farge, A Pictorial History of American Indians. It had an excellent section on modern Indians and their problems, and the Code Talkers, and all of that, of course. I didn't really get it as to what an anthropologist was, I don't think, other than those people who wrote those Bureau of American Ethnology reports. But in the tenth grade I read in English class a book called Two Hands and a Knife. It was about the son of an ethnologist—an occupation I had never heard of before—who is stranded on an island in Canada after a period of fieldwork with the Ojibwa. And he survives through his knowledge of Ojibwa woodcraft. At that point, I think the idea that one could make a living as an anthropologist entered into my brain, and I believe that's the only point when I thought of anthropology as anything other than applied. I think I thought of anthropologists as professional Indian experts, who provided information for all those Boy Scouts and hobbyists across the world. At some point after that I said, "This is not very practical." For one thing, how was I going to pay to go to college

Humility · Indigenous · Interview · Management · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Law

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