William Roseberry (1950-2000): A Remembrance

The feared, expected, and no less shocking news arrived last August. Latin Americanists lost one of their most discerning and elegant practitioners as William "Bill" Roseberry was struck down in the prime of life, at age 50, after a tragically brief battle with cancer. In remembering the contributions of a dear friend and colleague, the circumstances of his passing cast a long shadow as those of us who had come to treasure his friendship still find it difficult to accept so premature an ending to a brilliant intellectual odyssey.

Bill Roseberry was perhaps best known for his historical materialist approaches to the study of Latin America, the history of peasantries, and the multitude of fruitful intersections of history and anthropology. In his own words, he was "interested in culture, history, and political economy in Latin America, . . . the formation of subjects at the conjunction of a variety of historical processes, . . . (from) the Venezuelan Andes in the nineteenth century, . . . to the comparative history of coffee producing regions in Latin America, . . . to the comparative history of domestic economies in early modern England and colonial Mexico." His fieldwork in Michoacán on this last topic had only just begun to bear fruit before his untimely passing.

Bill was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and received his undergraduate education at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He later studied with Scott Cook at the University of Connecticut, where he received the Ph.D. in anthropology in 1977. His doctoral dissertation entitled "Social Class and Social Process in the Venezuelan Andes" was based on two years of fieldwork in Venezuela. After a brief stint at the University of Iowa, he took up a position at the New School in New York where for many years he trained historians and anthropologists alike in the study of Latin America. His work was distinctive in its combination of not only these two disciplines but also in its culturally sophisticated historical materialism. His was the kind of historically informed analysis that fit very much in the tradition of Eric Wolf in anthropology, whose passing preceded Bill's by only a few months. Bill's admiration for and engagement with this brand of scholarship can best be seen in several comments and review essays he published on Wolf's work. An appointment as the senior Latin American historian at New York University in 1999 marked an even more formal association with historically grounded research and training, something social scientists familiar with his work had long admired. Regrettably, that brief tenure at NYU was not to produce the new generations of historians one might have hoped for. A memorial service for Bill was held by the Department of History at NYU on 7 October 2000 at which many family members, friends, and colleagues spoke eloquently of his life and work.

Bill, Mario Samper, and I worked together around two conferences that focused on coffee; the first was held in Costa Rica in 1986 and the second in Colombia in 1998, from whence came our coedited book. But my own collaboration with Bill was grounded in a friendship traceable to a brief encounter at a conference at the University of Florida in 1982. Bill presented something akin to a keynote address at the gathering on peasant movements in Latin American history, characteristically casting the works and approaches considered in the broadest possible theoretical context. Later that evening, amid the din of a particularly loud jazz club in Gainesville, he persisted in questioning his much less theoretically ambitious colleague as to the details on those rebellious Costa Rican peasants noting parallels to his own Venezuelan research experiences, long past the point at which neither of us could hear much of anything or, given the spiraling tally of drinks, remember any of it.

Our friendship deepened over the years as we shared views on politics and ideas, careers and personalities, families and children's college choices, all things from the celestial to the parochial included. We wondered...