Paper Trails

My Letters, My Mother, My Anthropology

Abstract

During doctoral research in India, between June 1979 and March 1981, I wrote, often twice a week, to my mother, Ruth M. Grodzins, in Chicago. She saved these letters more or less in chronological order by attaching each one to a sheet of notebook paper in a bulging three-ring binder. Approximately forty years later I peruse them gingerly, with mixed feelings. Some of the letters’ content is nearly identical with the ethnographic writing that emerged from my first fieldwork and holds no surprises. Some of them recall fraught interpersonal hassles in all their immediate anguish. These later resolved themselves so thoroughly I totally forgot all about the incidents that, at the time, as evidenced in my letters and daily diary, had consumed me. However, to a retired anthropologist looking back on her first fieldwork, the best parts of these letters are their evocations of intensely experienced discoveries as well as of everyday pleasures, preoccupations and relationships.