title: The Essence of Anthropology
author: William A. Haviland
description: Dr. William A. Haviland is Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he founded the Department of Anthropology and taught for thirty-two years. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He has carried out original research in archaeology in Guatemala and Vermont, ethnography in Maine and Vermont, and physical anthropology in Guatemala. This work has been the basis of numerous publications in various national and international books and journals, as well as in media intended for the general public. His books include THE ORIGINAL VERMONTERS, co-authored with Marjorie Power, and a technical monograph on ancient Maya settlement. He also served as consultant for the award-winning telecourse, Faces of Culture, and is co-editor of the series Tikal Reports, published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Besides his teaching and writing, Dr. Haviland has lectured to numerous professional as well as non-professional audiences in Canada, Mexico, Lesotho, South Africa, and Spain, as well as in the United States. A staunch supporter of indigenous rights, he served as expert witness for the Missisquoi Abenakis of Vermont in an important court case over aboriginal fishing rights. Awards received by Dr. Haviland include being named University Scholar by the Graduate School of the University of Vermont in 1990; a Certificate of Appreciation from the Sovereign Republic of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, St. Francis/Sokoki Band in 1996; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Research on Vermont in 2006. Now retired from teaching, he continues his research, writing, and lecturing from the coast of Maine. His most recent book is AT THE PLACE OF THE LOBSTERS AND CRABS (2009).
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  Ghassan Hage’s provocative new book urges us to rethink positions within
  disciplinary debates and to seek inspiration for a politics of transformation
  in projects of critical anthropology. It compels us to consider, with renewed
  seriousness, the utopian maxim, ‘another world is possible’.
  
  
  _Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita,  
  History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies,  
  University of California, Santa Cruz_
  
  
  With passion, clarity and, above all, utter relevance, Ghassan Hage offers
  here an illustration of an anthropology that transforms radical cultural
  alterity into a source of political insight and an opening towards possible
  futures. It is an anthropology that moves beyond opposition to the actual in
  order to become an internal capability of ‘otherwiseness’. Permanent
  decolonisation of thought begins at home. And home is wherever thought
  _becomes_ action.
  
  
  _Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Professor of  
  Anthropology at the National Museum of the  
  F