In this chapter, I spin ‘webs of significance’ — to use Geertz's well-known rendition of Max Weber's phrase — about a past of which I was and still am an active participant. I came to the Department of Anthropology in 1975 as a Tutor and will retire as Professor at the end of 2012. The account of the past I present is interpretive in a number of ways. First, it is constructed. I received several suggestions about how to periodise flow of events that took place from the establishment of the Department in 1973 to the present. Many proposed I do so around the three occupants of the Chair of Anthropology — Bruce Kapferer (1973–1985), James Weiner (1994–1999) and myself (2003—present) — on the presumption that it is the leadership of an individual that is most important in understanding the events and evolution of historical processes. My rejection of this approach was guided by Foucault's scepticism of the modern era's presupposition of the ‘sovereign subject’ whose actions provide the principal dynamic of history. Still, I include some of Kapferer's vision because it provided the starting point for the Department and consequently for my account of it. In reflecting back on the nearly forty years since the Department was established, I analyse and name one of the periods that I identify, well known within the University community, around Turner's conception of ‘social drama’, which he described as ‘a way of understanding a sequence of social events which, seen retrospectively by an observer, can be shown to have a [processual] structure’.