September 14, 2023

Riall W. Nolan

A casual question from my advisor in the Spring of my senior year set me off on a trajectory I would never have imagined. I’d like to chat about how and why I “came to” anthropology, and what I’ve tried to do with it over the years. During my career, I learned a bit about the institutions we’ve created (as Mary Douglas pointed out to us) to do our thinking for us, and how they act to both enable and impede our efforts to address global challenges. I’ll finish the talk by discussing some of our efforts to create a professional arm for our discipline, why that’s increasingly important, and how senior anthropologists should support these efforts.

Riall W. Nolan is Professor Emeritus at Purdue University. He has a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Sussex. About his career, he writes: “In 1965, the Peace Corps sent me to Senegal, and my life changed forever. I spent the next twenty years living and working overseas, teaching, researching and managing international development projects. I lived for years in widely diverse places – Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Tunisia, and Sri Lanka. When I decided to come back to the US in the mid-80s, I managed international programs at several large US universities, where my goal was to get as many young Americans out of town as possible. This took up another twenty years of my life. In 2010, I finally rejoined the faculty full-time. A few years later, I began to split my time between my US university and the University of Cambridge in the UK. At Cambridge, I taught people how to incorporate anthropology into development work. In the US, I worked with students to help prepare them for non-academic careers. Anthropology has enormous potential to help us change how we relate to the world and the people in it. I have always worked, inside and outside the university, to help younger anthropologists realize this potential. It is a slow and sometimes frustrating process, but very worthwhile. I’m still at it.”