The only reason Connie let me into her Transnational Processes seminar in the fall 1992 semester is because I was a dancer. I had arrived to graduate school a week late, having wanted to finish up a tour with the Urban Bush Women, the dance-theatre company I performed with for five years. We were planning for a site-specific performance in the Sacred Groves of Oshun in Oshogbo, Nigeria, and I didn’t want to pass that up. When we met after my return, Connie was not convinced I could handle the course since I was a first-year student in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, rather than an advanced student in the Anthropology Department. Finally, she asked me why I was late, and I explained. Immediately, she exclaimed “You’re a dancer?! I always wanted to be a dancer!” And it was this – not the year of research I did in Brazil, not my experience with research-to-performance methodologies, and not my general eagerness – that made her want to take a chance on me. The class was an epiphany for me! I had no idea there was an academic language for the kinds of things I had been doing all along – learning by participating with others, immersion in community life, collaborative analysis. Nor had I realized that the kinds of experiences I had taken for granted as “family stories” were topics worthy of serious research. I was hooked, but Connie was right. I did not, in fact, know anything about how to read and think like an anthropologist. Luckily, Connie was very patient, and took the time (a year at least!) to teach me how to write a “think sheet,” and how to capture an argument. It is her commitment to passionate teaching and mentorship, and her insistence that anthropology must be relevant in and to the world, that led me down the paths I walk now. There is not a day that goes by that I am not grateful to her for taking that chance, for spending that time, and for trusting me with her considerable efforts. And there’s also not a day that goes by that I don’t remember, with a smile, her dancing…
Deborah A. Thomas, University of Pennsylvania