Uncovering Academic Mindsets In the Eighties

This chapter discusses Syrian physicist, Dr. Bizri's confirmation about science mindsets for his country after he read the author's “Barriers to Thinking New about Energy” piece. It cites Professor Clark Bullard, who wrote that the “Barriers” paper is useful in teaching engineering and George Wald, a well-known Harvard biologist, who spoke of changing attitudes in science since the beginning of the twentieth century. It also refers to Asher Peres, An Israeli physicist who conflated support for solar energy policies to ancient beliefs in “sun gods” and dismissed concern over nuclear energy safety. The chapter follows the author's letter to the economics Professor Roger Noll that followed attendance at a conference on regulation during the Reagan years. It analyses the four-page letter from the Wisconsin law professor Stewart Macaulay, which was a comprehensive argument for why a wide angle was important as reviewers lacked understanding of the private government.

Introduction

This chapter discusses a world of letters that reveals how a man on death row thinks, how scientists feel about their controversial workplaces, and how an anthropologist ponders issues of American survival. It elaborates how letters humanize life in a technologically driven world and connect academics to life outside the Ivory Tower. It also describes letters as a primary source for historians to document history in a culture where history is considered an absurdity. The chapter provides inside information about the growth and merging of an anthropologist's professional and public careers. It covers letters that illustrate how collegiality works, whether as constructive critique or supporting possibilities.

The Ivory Tower is no More in the Nineties

This chapter explains the 1990s as a time when Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) or the antilaw movement was being vigorously sold to the American people. It talks about Professor Kagan, who wrote about formal adversarial litigation and Stewart Macaulay, who weighed in on the arguments. It also includes that the San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on the author's theory of “coercive harmony” via Norman Larson, and George McGovern who wrote apologetically about the tort reform battle. The chapter analyses the publication of the author's Mintz lecture on Controlling Processes that came in 1996, which stimulated correspondence between her and psychologists who specialize in cults and the deprogramming of people. It explores letters that commented on disparate issues providing advice to younger anthropologists like David Price, who was dealing with the taboo subject of militarism and anthropology.

A Twenty-First-Century World

This chapter reviews letters from the twenty-first century. It explains how the letters covered a scattered number of familiar issues, such as mindsets in science, arguments over Alternative Dispute Resolution mediation, and the need to regulate family law mediators. It also discusses a short letter from an eighty-five-year old Californian farmer, George Woegell, on the male proclivity to go to war. The chapter analyzes letters on war and violence, such as the United States' prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It looks at other letters about the continued conflict in Israel and Palestine, jihadism, terrorism, anthropology and militarism, silencing, and the role of politics and its problems in a globalized world in search of “modernity.”

Reinventing Anthropology in the Seventies

This chapter talks about Dell Hymes, who put together a book of collected essays called Reinventing Anthropology at the invitation of Pantheon Books' “anti-text” series. It describes Reinventing Anthropology as a volume about racism, ecology, community and disciplinary censorship, which was not universally well received as noted by the Chicago anthropologist Fred Eggan. It also looks at the letter that was written in response to a query to the Columbia University sociologist Robert Merton about Thorstein Veblen and his use of the concept of trained incapacity. The chapter questions the role of sociology in understanding the way in which white-collar crime escaped the national crime index. It mentions the sociologist James Short, who wrote and document the paradigms used that allowed corporate criminals to escape crime statistics.

Epilogue

This chapter reviews letters about what have been happening in America over the past sixty years as the Ivory Tower slowly erodes. It elaborates the importance of language in the early 1960s for the understanding of kinship and court users in a bilingual town and for any sophisticated understanding of the style of court proceedings, which is later dubbed as “harmony ideology.” It also discusses the author's interest in Zapotec law that expanded to a comparative interest in dispute resolution movements worldwide after the demise of colonialism and the founding of new states. The chapter describes the movement in the United States to address the failings of the civil justice system. It talks about the push to change the civil justice system in the United States that is referred to as Alternative Dispute Resolution, which is a political movement against the social justice movements of the 1960s.

Getting Started in the Sixties

This chapter looks at letters that reflect the 1960s as a decade of concurrent movements, such as civil rights, Vietnam War protests, Native American and women's movements, consumer movements, and environmental movements. It focuses on the letter of E. R. Leach, who brought the concept of power into the ethnographic picture of highland Burma. It also refers to Leach's awareness of tensions between generations and of class variants and their impact on the sociology of knowledge. The chapter recounts the author's work with Shia Muslims in South Lebanon in the summer of 1961 to learn about dispute settlement in villages and examined whether it was secular or religious. It mentions exchanges of letters with Professor G. E. von Grunebaum from UCLA, who awarded the author a grant to go to Lebanon.