Rex I think I understand why you think Harris being forced to reinvent himself was tragic. After reading and listening to the stories of so many people; some who were amazing and famous, others ordinary and unknown I’m less sure what is a tragic life. So many people experience misfortune, even wealthy, admired people like Mozart, Muhammad Ali, Ted Kennedy, even folks who experience racism and misogyny despite that they might see their lives as tragic but maybe even satisfying. I really think life should not be so hard for people in this day and age of so much abundance along with automation yet here we all are struggling and striving.

Rex,
I know you didn’t mention that he died in poverty. Its just that your mentioning that his life after leaving the UN was tragic. I don’t know you but I liked your article and wish I could learn more about Harris. I was intrigued because my mother taught a class about Africanisms in American Culture and she cited Herskovitz fairly often. When I took that class I found it very informative. This is to explain where I am coming from when I read the article. To me when I hear someone’s life was tragic I expect misery, dissapointment, loss of friends, family. It’s clear Harris was experienced experienced sadness over not being able to continue his academic career. I think he deserved better but unlike other scholars who experienced the same thing he seemed to find other paths to satisfaction and happiness. I can’t speak for other people but a lot of the responses are showing many readers have a different understanding of tragedy than you do. Are you going to write more about him? Are there any books that you know of that cover more of Harris’ story?

Barbara, I did, did I not, mention my agreement that there are a wide range of possibilities between the extremes. I might have challenged your use of “continuum”, asking if the range of possibilities between any two points on it are infinite (the proper definition of “continuum” or if the range is a scatter plot with a finite number of points, stepping stones instead of continuous paths. I am glad that you mention usefully fuzzy. You are, I suspect, familiar with the following:

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book III-1

That does not, however, mean that it is improper to take a set of conditions (here long effort/disappointing results) and push the logic to see where it leads. Here that might be the question, closer to the bone, why Harris is considered tragic and an adjunct who has spent years slaving away at poverty level wages to find her academic dream forever out of reach is not entitled to see herself as a tragic heroine.

Or is she?

Literature is full of examples of figures who are both. J. P. Donleavy make his literary mark using characters, from Sebastian Dangerfield to Balthazar B. who are tragic and comic and incompetent, for example. Again, the line between simple ‘unwanted outcome’ and more serious ‘tragedy’ is usefully fuzzy, but to pose only the two extreme poles is not a helpful way to understand where that line, however indistinct, might be drawn.

I’ll let Rex take up John McCreery’s off-target question about “why having to reinvent yourself three times is a tragedy,” and will note only that the tragedy was not in reinventing himself, but in his loss of his first-choice career and his inability to regain it.

I take on board what Rex says about Harris. Now I wonder, however, why having to reinvent yourself three times is a tragedy. I recall recently reading that young people entering the labor force can now expect to change careers (not just jobs) three or more times during their lifetimes. On a personal note, I have been there, done that: leaving academia for advertising, then advertising for translation and writing services as co-owner of a small but flourishing business. Yes, it felt like tragedy when I didn’t get tenure. But in retrospect, it may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me. I see old friends still in academia stressed out, and the precarious lives not led by the untenured adjuncts who do more and more of tertiary teaching seem to me utterly unconscionable. In contrast, being able to pursue academic interests and teach a bit on the side as a self-supporting (grant application and committee work-free) independent scholar seems like a bit of heaven.

Moreover, my presentation of Harris’s self narration is in line with Harris’s own self-understanding. Harris’s became a UN staff member after the war, not a professor, And note that I did not mock or pity this decision. On the contrary, I think he is a great example of an anthropologist who fought for decolonization, which was a worthy goal — and one that he pursued outside of the academy. But he himself describes as disappointing his failure to return to the academy (and the United States) in his early years in Costa Rica. If you’d like to learn more about this, feel free to read Kelvin Yelvington’s 2008 interview with Harris in Critique of Anthropology.

Contrary to Banji’s comment, I never said that Harris died in poverty or sad and lonely. In fact, I explicitly stated he was a wealthy businessman, and thus not poor. In fact, as far as I can tell, he died a happy man with a loving family and the respect of his peers. But he achieved this only after two other of his main ambitions in life were blocked. It’s amazing to me that Harris was so successful in reinventing himself in life three different times in his life. I maintain its tragic that he had to do so.

S.D. Gottlieb also makes a good point about the ways in which we value academic positions, and our habit of viewing the failure to achieve an academic position as tragic. I’ll take Rex at his word that this was not his perspective when he described Harris’s failed search as tragic, but there is a caution here about conflating a discipline with its academic avatar and stacking kinds of professionals in a status hierarchy. Perhaps I am sensitive to this as a lawyer as well as an anthropologist, since it is arguable that in many areas of Law, the highest status practitioners work in prominent law firms, and full-time law school faculty are often lower status: clever thinkers, perhaps, but only so-so practitioners.