Current projects are all left over from a lifetime of partially finished projects; alas many of them are destined to remain unfinished!  Here I present a general overview of the most important; more detailed material can be found by clicking on the links at the top of this page.

Comparative Kinship Project

Among the most important unfinished projects is the analysis of a considerable body of interview material collected from low-income families in the city of Chicago. Beginning in 1968, in collaboration with the late David M. Schneider, and continuing through 1989 as part of the University of Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Project, the object was to dispel the totally false image of the kinship system of poor people that has been generated as an integral part of the culture of class relations and continually fortified by the misleading conclusions drawn—by sociologists and policy analysts mainly—from aggregate statistics on household composition. Of course it is unlikely that documentation of the complex and extensive networks of kin in which so-called "ghetto" dwellers are embedded will in any way alter the images that are called forth as justification for the social arrangements that constitute a society of gross inequalities in resources and in status, but it is the task of anthropology to understand both the genesis of images and the nature of social practice.  Go to Poverty Project

Population Dynamics: Rural Guyana

Another piece of work in progress, using the new techniques of computer analysis, involves the reanalysis of material collected in another time and another place. In 1975 a restudy was made of two rural communities in what is now Guyana; one an Afro-Guyanese community first studied in 1951-52 and the other an Indo-Guyanese community first studied in 1956. In both communities detailed information was collected on household structure, child bearing, occupations and land holding. These records were updated in 1975 and information collected where possible on the movement of individuals during the intervening approximately twenty years. Analysis of those quantitative data proved quite difficult in the late 1970s using mainframe SPSS techniques, but the coded materials for one of the communities still exist on tape and have been transferred to disk. One of the major facilities installed in the new Department of Anthropology Computer Research Laboratory is a suite of Geographic Information Systems software capable of linking changes in a complex of spatial and social factors over time—precisely what is needed to illuminate the relations among kinship dynamics, household structure, land tenure and migratory patterns in the Guyanese communities with which the studies are concerned. Although these data are quite dated by now they constitute a benchmark from which much more complex research can depart, including the transnational migrations that have been so crucial in the recent history of Guyana, and the establishment of transnational kinship networks that has accompanied those migrations.

Before embarking on that kind of analysis I shall be posting the complete text of the first book dealing with kinship, marriage and the family in three villages in what was then British Guiana.  As that work progresses I shall insert hyperlinks to the later data, analyses, and discussions of theoretical issues.

Guyanese History and Politics

My interest in Guyanese history and politics began the day I arrived in the Caribbean in 1951.  Among the very first people I met in what was then British Guiana were two men destined to become the major players in Guyanese politics for the next forty years and more, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan.  Documentary sources on the British and United States decisions that had such tragic results have recently become available and some discussion of those sources, supplementing the analysis I made in a 1962 book, British Guiana, will be found on the page entitled Guyanese Politics.

Community Histories: Guyana