We write these reflections on Jim Ferguson as three members of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where Jim taught for many years. Jim chaired the department from 1999 to 2003, when we (hired between 1996 and 2002) were all junior faculty. The contributions of Jim’s scholarship are well known; we could easily relate how our own intellectual trajectories have been profoundly shaped by his work. Here, we have chosen to foreground aspects of his leadership as a colleague—specifically, his intervention in the PhD curriculum at UC Irvine, which has had a lasting legacy on us as well as many of our students. This dimension of Jim’s work is less visible beyond institutional boundaries, and indeed is in danger of being lost to history. However, it has had lasting impact—and, furthermore, is of a piece with his intellectual vision.

At the time we were hired, the graduate curriculum was anchored by “Prosem,” a three-quarter sequence of proseminars required of all first-year PhD students. The department was in a delicate balance between faculty members who used advanced quantitative methods to study culture, often comparatively, and a new cohort of faculty members who were more invested in ethnographic methods, critical theory, and political economy, including Jim. The department was not as divided as many anthropology departments had been in the 1990s over questions of method and theory (at our own alma mater, Stanford, the department famously split into two, before being reunified in 2007). And the department’s plurality of orientation to the field was not strictly generational. Art Rubel, the medical anthropologist famous for his ethnography of culture-bound syndromes, was a senior member of the department; Frank Cancian, who maintained a commitment to ethnographic fieldwork in Chiapas and Italy for decades, was a former chair and peacekeeper. It was a very comfortable place to begin one’s career in anthropology, and some of the fights were more within the different “sides” of the department than between them. But Jim had ambitions to elevate the department’s standing in the field. Prosem was key to his plans.

Prosem had evolved over the years to maintain a balance of perspectives. The first quarter was titled “Proseminar A: The History of Anthropological Theory.” The second quarter was titled “Proseminar B: Classical Ethnography.” The third, “Proseminar C: Contemporary Ethnography.” There was broad agreement in the department on the content of the first quarter. Most members of the department had received their training at institutions that required a similar class, generally relating the rise and consolidation of the discipline from the late nineteenth century, through the Malinowskian and Boasian revolutions, to the cultural evolutionists, materialists, and psychologists of the 1960s and 1970s, to Geertz. The department was the home of A. Kimball Romney, whose theories of culture as shared cognitive structures were directly opposed to Geertz’s theory of culture as composed of external symbols that “does not exist in someone’s head” (Reference Geertz1973, 10). So, around the time Maurer was hired, things in Prosem A kind of stopped with Geertz.

Proseminar B: Classical Ethnography was a greatest hits reading list of, well, classical ethnographies, read in toto, even when pushing against the received canon, something that our senior colleague Mike Burton really pioneered. The list included Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, but also Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, and Audrey Richards’s Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia. Proseminar C: Contemporary Ethnography was generally a grab-bag of whatever the professor wanted to read at the time. There was the least consistency year-to-year with that quarter.

When Jim became chair he wanted to modernize the curriculum. He was especially interested, given the post-reflexive moment in the field at the time, in pushing students to think beyond “culture” and toward social structures and systems of inequality. This orientation derived from his Africanist training and, dare we say, Gluckmanian sensibilities. It was also borne of his own ethnographic research in Lesotho and Zambia. But he didn’t want to do so in a way that would upset the department’s generally collegial nature. There were, after all, quantitative cultural anthropologists, and “cultural” cultural anthropologists, and changing core courses is always a political exercise. Jim asked the three of us to rethink the sequence, but in a way that would honor our colleagues’ intellectual diversity and their attachment to some of the older conversations. There was also a culture at the time, very much cultivated by Jim and his life partner, Liisa Malkki, of gatherings in faculty members’ homes to talk anthropology. We took advantage of that culture. What we did was to propose, first, a new framework for teaching the discipline, with Jim’s guidance; and second, a new organizational structure. Note the emphasis on using “social relations” to reshape the “culture.”

In a July 2002 email to us, after we had shared our first proposal, Jim noted:

For our new framework: we kept the titles of the courses. But we added subtitles. Prosem A became “The History of Anthropological Theory: Society, Culture and Disciplinarity.” Prosem B became “Classical Ethnography: Society and Power.” Prosem C became “Contemporary Ethnography: Knowledge and Reflexivity.” Jim was very interested in this, as he noted in his email to us:

Jim was happy with our final subtitles, but cleverly renamed the courses in the official catalog and schedule of classes simply, “Proseminar A, B, and C”—no title or subtitle. For Prosem A, we explored the formation of anthropology as a discipline with society and culture its focus. For Prosem B, we explored the critical tradition, looping back in time to the beginning, and starting essentially with Marx. For Prosem C, we explored what we called the reflexive tradition, starting, the first time Zhan taught it, with Freud and Simmel.

In terms of the organizational structure, Jim felt it was important to ensure we were still covering “the classics.” So did our senior colleagues. He emphasized in his email that:

The way we accomplished this was to add “Friday Seminars,” later renamed salons, which would be held three or four times each quarter, rotating among the homes of the three faculty members teaching Prosem that year, over a potluck dinner, with student-led discussions of one ethnography. Prosem instructors from other quarters often attended these salons, so that students could begin to get to know them before they had them in their respective classes. It created the kind of cohort experience we had all had as graduate students, and it consolidated that sense of colleagueship Jim had instilled in the emergent anthropological community of the late 1990s.

He (and we) did more than just “covering” the classics. And we don’t think he was that worried about appeasing senior colleagues. It was a genuine collective effort to actually reengage the classics, not because they have to remain foundational texts for conceptual and/or sentimental values, but rather because we all saw the value and importance of reanimating theoretical discussions through something alive and down to the ground (that is, through ethnography). This shaped how we approached and taught the texts. It brought them within the fold of contemporary concerns in anthropology while resolutely holding on to an approach that was historicist in nature, that is, reading them also in light of their own concerns. This remains a difficult challenge: students (and everyone else) want theory to be responsive to current demands, but the importance of a class like Prosem, Jim thought, was to teach students to read texts historically, simultaneously taking seriously the ethnographic project behind them, so that students could learn how ethnographic practice articulates to theory-building and vice versa.

The current proseminar sequence at Irvine still bears the imprint of this framework, though as one would expect it has continued to evolve with the department and discipline. What we seek to highlight here is Jim’s profound understanding that intellectual transformation is not simply the articulation of new ideas, nor even conveying those ideas through mentorship and teaching, but the institutional work of building those ideas into frameworks of curriculum and collegiality, and putting those frameworks into practice—much as he emphasized theory being put into practice in ethnographic writing. That means, of course, that the ideas in question must be delegated and shared, discussed and refined and tested, with others, in relations. Jim also explicitly chose to put this goal—the redesign of the core pedagogical sequence of our graduate program—into the hands of three junior faculty. This was not just a sign of faith in our individual capabilities: it was a statement and intervention into the politics of knowledge production and the power hierarchies of a department and discipline.