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...

For half a century I've walked like some storied vizier among the people of the planet, notebook in hand as an anthropologist to share briefly the lives of tribes people, peasants, farmers, fishers, and workers only to return to the abstracted realm of the irreal in a university, always feeling that, as the son of a working man, my feet belong on the ground. This is the story of those years and some of the people who have shared them with me. My upbringing in a Christian Science family disposed me to the abstracted intellectualism congenial to a life in academia as well as the sense of...