In 1965, the Peace Corps sent me to Senegal, and my life changed forever. I spent the next twenty years living and working overseas, teaching, researching and managing international development projects. I lived for years in widely diverse places – Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Tunisia, and Sri Lanka. Later on, I spent quite a bit of time in places like Somalia and Western Siberia, as well as doing short-term work across most of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. I began my development work at the grass roots, living in a thatched hut and riding a bicycle. Twenty years later, I was doing policy analysis out of an office in Washington. In between, I’d gotten involved with nearly every aspect of development work, and with a wide variety of development organizations, from small NGOs to large bilateral and multilateral agencies, and national governments.

When I decided to come back to the US in the mid-80s, I found what was going on in most university anthropology departments irritating and boring, so I went over to the Dark Side: I joined the administration. As a director, dean and associate provost for international programs at several large US universities, my goal was to get as many young Americans out of town as possible. This took up another twenty years of my life, and along the way, involved me in projects and partnerships across the globe. When I finally rejoined the faculty full-time in 2010, it was with some regret.