"Drinking is one of the hardest parts of fieldwork,” groaned Professor George Collier, still awake at this point. We were in a Mayan village in highland Chiapas, the region of Mexico where he had worked as an anthropologist since his undergraduate days at Harvard in the early 1960s. It was 1989, the year I was to graduate in Latin American studies.
We had come to participate in a planting-season day of worship, ritual and divination. I had never been out here before: these rough tropics, old volcanic hills of green and mist. My only previous fieldwork was a citified, slacks-and-dress-shirt affair in Mexico City observing the presidential election. Professor Collier had brought me just because he had some room in his current research grant. My classes had been in political science and history; I had not taken a single anthropology class. Kinship systems? Phratry? Field notes? He knew I would not be of much help to him. He gave me an assignment on politics anyway.
Here I was, worlds away from Palo Alto and suburban Chicago, my only terrae cognitae at that point. George (as every student eventually called him) had brought me to an all-night ceremony that involved incense and prayer, the counting of coins and corn kernels, and frequent rounds of pox, a corn liquor. After four years on the Farm, I was in shape for a late night or two.
George’s most recent research had documented the prospering truckers in Zinacantán. The nearby flower growers were doing okay, too. But I was frequently asked by young men, over cigarettes, whether there was work in California. I always told them I didn’t know. Some market successes notwithstanding, this was an overwhelmingly poor place, a subsistence corn economy where infant mortality and poverty were among the worst in Mexico.
An incredibly gentle man, George was a 6-foot, white-haired teddy bear most comfortable wearing turtlenecks. During 2 1⁄2 decades, he had become part of these communities. He was so obviously loved here—I’ll never forget the warmth in one grandmother’s “Jorge,” as she greeted him with a smile a hemisphere wide.
This afternoon he had brought photographs from his last visit. George was a compadre, a godparent, to this family of proud people of the corn, their gravitas poignantly reflected in the portraits they had asked him to snap. His gifts spanned worlds as surely as a bridge spans a river. Over the years he had researched and written on this culture so that non-Indians might better understand Indians. To the Zincantecos, he tried to be a different type of non-Indian than those with whom the Zincantecos usually dealt—exploitive plantation owners and labor bosses. His was a depth of connection to one’s work that I had never seen before. Over the years as I’ve made my life decisions, the image of George Collier as Prince of the In-Between has meant everything to me.
As we left the priest’s thatched-roof, mud-floor hut after a much-needed meal at daybreak, George’s burly eyebrows raised playfully. “We’re the only two gringos to have ever seen this.” And he had brought me.
- LUKE GARROTT, '89
