Personal Statement:
Finding myself with about five years of an active professional career ahead of me, I have thought considerably about the shape and pattern it should take. My interest in teaching and research, and certainly in Maya archaeology, has not flagged. However, I have thought that perhaps archaeologists are like professional football players and should consider getting out when the knees begin to go. Indeed, recently I have been finding the field seasons more stressful than before what with large staffs and work forces to manage and care for. There are ways in which to compensate for these intimidations of decrepitude, and I have begun to practice some of them. However, they involve leaning more heavily on my graduate students and younger staff, and a time will come to leave the party while all are still enjoying it. In any case, like all archaeologists, I have an unfortunate backlog of things to write up and ideas to explore sufficient to keep me indefinitely busy and intellectually engaged in the field. In addition, my teaching brings me considerable satisfaction as always.
The things that matter more and more to me in teaching and research are the search for understanding, for connections, for insights, and the provision of conceptual tools and other ideas to students with which they can deal with life. Therefore, I find myself very interested in core courses, general cultural education, and the humanities. While, as an anthropologist I am interested in other cultures, it seems to me that we must inculcate and explain the values and traditions of our own culture, even though we may make comparisons with others. On the other hand, I am persuaded that for advanced students (upper classmen and graduate students) nothing is so stimulating as being able to pull together connections among the fields of knowledge. In other words, it is useful to offer the stimulation of pattern analysis, comparisons, cautious analogies, and of seasoned insight. On the one hand, academic ephemera should not be enshrined in departmental structures and fields. However, there is every reason to incorporate the sound learning, insights, and understanding from new knowledge and interests into regular departments in the form of revised or new courses.
As an anthropologist I admire McNeill or Braudel as comparative historians. On the other hand, it must be recognized that the equally admirable achievements of more traditional scholars are those that form the base for the syntheses for the above mentioned men. Research in whatever form, it also seems to me, should nearly inevitably be communicated not only to the cogniscenti of the specialized fields, but to students, and if possible to the public. Interaction of all kinds, between fields, among scholars, and especially with students at all stages is the name of the game. The encouragement of interaction through standard and possibly innovative ways would be one of the major features to encourage at the University. Not a lot is new under the sun, but a lot of understanding is startlingly new. The excitement, interest, absorption, and guidance of the intellectual life can be offered to students if we are so motivated.