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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s Gerontologists distinguish cohort effects on historically specific generations —in my case, I am part of a cohort that entered anthropology and adulthood in the 1960s.1 They also identify life-cycle influences—for me, notably, fieldwork in Brazil when I was nineteen, Ghana in my middle and late twenties, Gray Panther experiences in my early thirties to early forties, Elmhurst-Corona through my forties and into my fifties, and Gray Panthers again in my sixties. How differently, I have wondered, might I see the world, and anthropology’s world, had these fieldwork engagements been shuffled in different order or occurred in different decades? How then might I have understood and written about these places, people, and issues? The ‘‘color full before color blind’’ thread of this book, the focus on race in my work across five decades, combines cohort and life cycle impacts: my interests as a young reader; Anne Schwerner and the 1950s–1960s civil rights movement; Marvin Harris; people I met in Brazil, then Ghana, then Berkeley, then Queens; and reengaging in the 2000s with writings on ‘‘anatomically modern human’’ global dispersals. The feminist movement emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s deeply affected Lani Sanjek and me, then in our later twenties (cohort and lifecycle effects intersecting here again). As mentioned in the Preface, it undoubtedly contributed to foregrounding women as much as men in my fieldwork and writings about Ghana and Queens and with the Gray Panthers . Yet how could it have been otherwise? These were very impressive women I met in each place, certainly as much as the men, frequently more so than the men. My work in the 1970s with other colleagues, mainly women, on the AAA Committee on the Status of Women and then in pressing the AAA to enforce its adopted position on gender equity in employment —including Carol Kramer, Carole Vance, Rayna Rapp, Louise Lamphere, Naomi Quinn—translated feminist consciousness into action.2 290 Acknowledgments Coediting and writing overview sections with Shellee Colen for At Work in Homes: Household Workers in World Perspective in the later 1980s also deepened my feminist, as well as political economic, orientations.3 These personal, fieldwork, and professional life episodes no doubt led me to view other theoretical ‘‘movements’’ between the 1960s and now as less momentous or compelling. Yet working alongside or even countering this were the wide-ranging theoretical and ethnographic interests of the scores of anthropologists I worked closely with as authors in the Anthropology of Contemporary Issues series during the 1980s and 1990s, as Queens fieldwork team members, and as contributors to Fieldnotes, At Work in Homes, and Race. Often their ideas and work challenged me to read more widely, to engage other and new theoretical perspectives. They provided me with ‘‘continuing education’’ in a welcome way at the time, and I have enjoyed following later work by many of these colleagues. While Brazilian, Ghanaian, and Elmhurst-Corona fieldwork informants and friends left indelible traces on me, my most profound acknowledgment is to the Gray Panthers and Over 60 Clinic clients and volunteers in Berkeley , California, whom I met during 1976–1978.4 Then in my early thirties, I became a political compatriot and friend to people in their sixties, seventies , and eighties, many of them veterans of the struggles of the 1930s. They gave me a new and unexpected outlook on what the human life cycle could be—indeed, on what I could be. I thank Lani for pulling me, a novice applied and advocacy anthropologist, into this and for its impact thereafter on my research and writing and on our lives together. We became old young, something we were privileged to share with a cohort of other young Gray Panthers. Now in our sixties ourselves, we understand and benefit from this even more. Lani has also read and helped improve each of the essays in this book over the years, as well as the preface and acknowledgments . In revising the essays for this volume, I have updated, streamlined, clari- fied, and eliminated some redundant or unneeded passages and phrases. In this effort, I have heeded advice from Queens College students, including that I remove strings of references from the text and transfer points I think important from endnotes into the body of the chapters. (‘‘We don’t read endnotes,’’ they let me know.) They also provided a sounding board about which...

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