Emeritus status gives professor a portal to new worlds

If the word “emeritus” evokes images of professional fade-out in your mind, then you need a bracing dose of Herbert Lewis, who’s showing how magnificently manifold are the possibilities in the Land of Emeritus Living.

Lewis, 65, became an emeritus professor of anthropology in 1996 after serving on the UW–Madison faculty for 33 years. Since then he’s managed to unearth a treasure-trove of long-lost documents on Oneida Indian life, write a major journal article that’s stirred some controversy, begin work on a new book and attend lectures of all kinds.

What he’s not attending is important, too. “I certainly don’t miss faculty and committee meetings,” says Lewis with a smile. Even more time was freed up when his 38-year teaching career came to a close in December 1998, time he’s invested in research, writing and learning.

“I really want to learn,” he says, “and I enjoy this feeling that I choose what I do.” He has chosen, for instance, to attend a conference on the Iroquois this month in New York state, so he can learn more about the peoples of that ancient confederacy.

His interest in the Iroquois was piqued by his recent adventure involving the Oneida of Wisconsin, a branch of one of the five original Iroquois nations. Lewis uncovered a remarkable body of work written by members of the Oneida Nation in both English and the Oneida language.

A carton he discovered in the Department of Anthropology’s storage contained 167 notebooks filled with descriptions of Oneida life from the 1880s to 1940. The accounts were produced by more than a dozen Wisconsin Oneida Indians who wrote them in 1940-41 as part of the Federal Writers Project, funded by the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal.

Lewis believes that the notebooks were forgotten when the anthropologist in charge of them, H. Scudder Mekeel, died suddenly of a heart attack in 1947. Lewis and other UW–Madison representatives presented a copy of all the notebooks to the Oneida Nation last spring, with the originals going to the State Historical Society.

“Because the notebooks were written by the Oneida themselves on so many aspects of their history and culture and involved so many voices, there is no parallel to it in American Indian collections,” says Lewis.

Lewis did most of his own fieldwork in Ethiopia and Israel, but that doesn’t dull his curiosity about the Oneida. On the contrary, he says, “An anthropologist should know about comparative cultures and be comfortable in moving from one to another.”

The allure of other cultures took hold early in Lewis’ life. His mother took him one fateful Saturday to a film program for young people at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he was entranced by the Robert Flaherty films “Nanook of the North” and “Moana of the South Seas.”

“It seemed fascinating to me as a child – and it still seems fascinating – that there are so many different ways of being human,” says Lewis. “I began to see not only the variety of cultures, but also the common humanity. People from other cultures were not strange, exotic creatures, but fellow humans with alternative ways of looking at things.”

But it wasn’t until his junior year at Brandeis University that Lewis discovered there was a discipline that studied comparative cultures. “The minute I opened up my textbook for an introductory course on cultural anthropology, I knew I wanted to become an anthropologist,” he says.

He went on to earn his doctorate at Columbia University, a place of portentous intersections for Lewis and modern American anthropology. It was there that Franz Boas taught anthropology from 1896 until his death in 1942. Boas dominated American anthropology for decades through his scholarship and teaching. Among his many doctoral students were Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir.

And Boas still reverberates through Lewis’ career. Boas is mentioned frequently in an article by Lewis published in September 1998 by the American Anthropologist, the journal of the American Anthropological Association. Titled “The Misrepresentation of Anthropology,” the piece is a reasoned-but-passionate defense of earlier anthropologists such as Boas.

Lewis’ broadside – which he plans to expand into a book – was prompted by 30 years of attacks on “traditional” anthropology from several perspectives, especially Marxist and postmodernist. These critics said that anthropologists working before the 1970s “exoticized” other cultures and rendered them timeless by ignoring their histories and considering them in unrealistic isolation from each other.

These charges are not only untrue, says Lewis, they “delegitimize the field and discourage newcomers from benefiting from the many lessons it has to teach about the world.”

His current projects include research on the work and personality of Boas, using the archives at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. “I was reading history there,” says Lewis. “When I found letters, lectures and unpublished papers by Boas that contradicted received opinion, it was wonderful – it was discovery.

“The greatness of the man is striking. If I were younger, I would try to write his biography.”

Lewis has two more papers on Boas in process, plus a review article about dictionaries and encyclopedias of anthropology and cultural and critical studies soon to appear in the American Anthropologist.

Emeritus status also gives Lewis more time for island-hopping. He and his wife, Marcia Lewis, traveled recently to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he did fieldwork as a graduate student, and they hope to visit Martinique, another site from his work in the ’50s. And they have children to visit: Tamar, a lawyer and fundraiser for WGBH public television in Boston; Paula, a librarian in Silver Spring, Md.; and Josh, a comedian, actor and writer in New York City.

Lewis still sings in the UW–Madison Choral Union, loves the theatre (he’s appeared in three University Theatre productions) and would play more racquetball if he could find a partner. He also attends meetings in the United States of expatriate Oromos, the people he studied in Ethiopia.

No matter the setting – Oromo or Oneida or some other way of looking at life – Lewis carries with him an unslakeable anthropological curiosity that still serves him well as an emeritus.

“Wherever I am,” he says as he extends his arms palms-up, “I’m interested in the culture of the people who live there.”