Anthropologically Me

I grew up in Tucson, Az where I imprinted on the desert, hence a few scattered pictures here and there through out this website. Spanish was mandatory then, so it was natural that when I had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Guatemala inoculating residents of a small village against polio I would go. Shown here is the road to village where we stayed. This was the beginning of my first love, cultural anthropology.

My father was an astronomer and when I would ask for help in physics he would whip out his slide rule and give me the answer which did not help at all. It was all very emotional for us and so my mother decreed that I shouldn’t take the next science course. This was the end of my fledgling science career. I went back to my first love.

Later, I was at Antioch College which had a strong study abroad program. I chose to spend 1 year at the Universidad IberoAmericana studying cultural anthropology with a summer internship in San Francisco Tepango, Puebla, Mexico. I looked at economic decision making for small rural families while living with one. Pictured here is Dona Nicolasa (center) with her sister to the left and Don Pancho Baeza with whom I lived, their home at the time, and a pre-Columbian corn granary.

This was followed by a year in Bogota, Colombia at the Universidad de los Andes where I became interested in soil erosion and mudslides. From there to aspirations for the Peace Corps (never fulfilled) and training as a Soil Scientist (MS University of Arizona) and then as a Soil Chemist (PhD University of Illinois Urbana Champaign). I encountered Physical Chemistry during this course of studies and fell in love with its simplicity compared to the more complicated Cultural Anthropology.

The transition to academic chemistry is a story for Chemically Me.