Remembering Constance Rita Sutton (29 January 1926-23 August 2018)
Drexel G. Woodson, Ph.D., Associate Research Anthropologist
& Associate Professor (Retired June 2018)
University of Arizona, School of Anthropology,
The Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA)
Tucson, AZ 85741 USA
EMAIL: dwoodson@email.arizona.edu [University]
negfiladelfi@gmail.com [Personal]
1 September 2018
I first met and briefly chatted with Connie (she never tolerated anyone but her parents calling her Constance) toward the mid-1970s. Our encounter certainly occurred in New York’s Borough of Manhattan, possibly at an American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. I don’t recall who introduced us, but I had heard about Connie and her Barbados work from several Yale University undergraduate professors. Heading the list was Connie’s close friend, Simón—Black Panamanian sociologist, and astute student of immigration, Roy Simón Bryce-Laporte (7 September 1933-30 July 2012).
Connie and I talked again many times, most frequently and intensively from 1989 to 2017. She regaled me with stories about her youth in Chicago as well as her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where I earned my doctorate; about her New York City experiences “back in the day” (the 1950s) with Margaret Mead and Eleanor “Happy” Leacock; about her three marriages; and about her second husband, their son David, and her grandchildren. Through Connie, I became friends with Antonio Lauria-Perricelli, Boricua, her third husband and my self-dubbed “Italorican” compadre—an insightful, opinionated interlocutor in memorable conversations without number about anthropology, Marxism, and politics. Wishing Antonio courage to face life without Connie is a meager token of friendship from far away.
I have gotten to know several of Connie’s graduate students, along with scholars, researchers, and activists influenced by her ideas and benefitting from her encouragement. There are too many to list here, but I offer them sympathy, collectively, for the loss of a woman who meant so much to them and was the lead player in a seemingly endless stream of remarkable stories.
Connie was never my teacher, advisor, or mentor. Nevertheless, our conversations (and arguments!) taught me more than words can say about an amazing range of topics: Bajans and other Caribbean peoples at home or abroad; cultural/social anthropology in the Caribbean Region and elsewhere; feminism’s “waves” and their contrasts with womanism; the necessity and inadequacy of nationalism, and Marxist or Marxian Socialism’s promises and disappointments. Given Connie’s abiding commitment to scholarship/activism, her tales of an American Jewish woman of Russian ancestry’s adventures as a fellow-traveler of the Black Power Movement in New York City were especially instructive for a Black man from North Philadelphia. Connie situated all such lessons in an overarching context: diverse human worlds closely knitted together by a global capitalist political-economy and enduring struggles against oppressive conditions spawned by it.
“Engagement,” a buzzword in many quarters these days, is echoed without reflection often enough to make it a cliché. Connie thought about the word’s meanings and put them into practice for decades. Her carefully-crafted combination of serious scholarship, steadfast ethics, and progressive Leftist politics was an example I learned to admire, even though I might never emulate it. Life silenced our conversations for the last nine months of Connie’s time on the planet. Coping with the ordeals of aging and illness for Connie and coping sundry personal troubles for me kept us away from phones and computer keyboards. Even so, I often recalled Connie’s gentle voice, inviting smile, playful sense of humor, and optimism rooted in experience-near and experience-distant understanding of peoples, places, and things of this world.
Rest in peace, Connie! I’ll miss you! If I’m lucky, though, vivid memories of our relationship will help me face trying times in a world hell-bent on moving in directions contrary to those you would want.