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struck a chord of passion in him.
    "Don't you think that you should pay more attention to your formal
studies?" he continued. "Rather than doing fieldwork, wouldn't
it be better for you to study linguistics? We have in the department
here one of the most prominent linguists in the world. If I were you, I'd be
sitting at his feet, catching any drift emanating from him.
    "We also have a superb authority in comparative religions. And
there are some exceptionally competent anthropologists here who
have done work on kinship systems in cultures all over the world,
from the point of view of linguistics and from the point of view of cognition.
You need a lot of preparation. To think that you could do fieldwork
now is a travesty. Plunge into your books, young man. That's my
advice."
    Stubbornly, I took my proposition to another professor, a younger one.
He wasn't in any way more helpful. He laughed at me openly.
He told me that the paper I wanted to write was a Mickey Mouse
paper, and that it wasn't anthropology by any stretch of the imagination.
    "Anthropologists nowadays," he said professorially, "are
concerned with issues that have relevance. Medical and pharmaceutical
scientists have done endless research on every possible medicinal
plant in the world. There's no longer any bone to chew on there. Your kind of
data collecting belongs to the turn of the nineteenth century. Now it's nearly
two hundred years later. There is such a thing as progress, you
know."
    He proceeded to give me, then, a definition and a justification of
progress and perfectibility as two issues of philosophical discourse,
which he said were most relevant to anthropology. "Anthropology is the
only discipline in existence," he continued, "which can clearly substantiate
the concept of perfectibility and progress. Thank God that there's still a ray
of hope in the midst of the cynicism of our times. Only anthropology
can show the actual development of culture and social organization. Only
anthropologists can prove to mankind beyond the shadow of a
doubt the progress of human knowledge. Culture evolves, and only
anthropologists can present samples of societies that fit definite
cubbyholes in a line of progress and perfectibility. That's anthropology
for you! Not some puny fieldwork, which is not fieldwork at all, but mere
masturbation."
    It was a blow on the head to me. As a last resort, I went to Arizona to talk to anthropologists who were actually doing field-work
there. By then, I was ready to give up on the whole idea. I understood what the
two professors were trying to tell me. I couldn't have agreed with them more. My
attempts at doing fieldwork were definitely simpleminded. Yet I wanted to get
my feet wet in the field; I didn't want to do only library research.
    In Arizona, I met with an extremely seasoned anthropologist who had
written copiously on the Yaqui Indians of Arizona as well
as those of Sonora, Mexico. He was extremely kind. He didn't run me
down, nor did he give me any advice. He only commented that the Indian
societies of the Southwest were extremely isolationist, and that
foreigners, especially those of Hispanic origin, were
distrusted, even abhorred, by those Indians
    A younger colleague of his, however, was more outspoken. He said that 1
was better off reading herbalists' books. He was an authority in
the field and his opinion was that anything to be known about medicinal plants
from the Southwest had already been classified and talked about in various
publications. He went as far as to say that the sources of any Indian curer of
the day were precisely those publications rather than any traditional
knowledge. He finished me off with the assertion that
if there still were any traditional curing practices, the Indians would not
divulge them to a stranger.
    "Do something worthwhile," he advised me. "Look into
urban anthropology. There's a lot of money for studies on alcoholism
among Indians in the big city, for example. Now that's something