Issue of
November 11, 1998

What matters to Clifford Barnett

BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

An earthquake triggered a glacier slide that caused a lake to overflow and collapse a new hydroelectric dam. Clifford Barnett and other anthropology graduate students who were supposed to study how people adapted to the dam's influence on their lives suddenly found themselves instead growing potatoes at 12,000 feet in the Andes.

Barnett, who is now a professor of anthropology at Stanford, was part of the controversial Vicos, Peru, project in 1953, the first in which anthropologists, usually sideline observers, assumed the power position, running a mountain valley hacienda upon which 2,300 villagers depended. Barnett told of the experience and its subsequent influence on him at an Oct. 28 talk in Memorial Church. The event was one in the "What Matters to Me and Why" series, in which faculty members and others invited by a student committee discuss the more personal side of their academic lives.

Raised in a tough industrial section of Queens, Barnett studied anthropology at City University of New York and later at Cornell. The Vicos project began after the dam collapsed, he said, when students working with Professor Alan Holmberg needed something to study. They assumed the lease of a bankrupt hacienda, one that ran very much like its medieval counterparts with all the men in the village required to work in the padrone's fields three days a week in return for keeping their own small plots on the steepest part of the slopes. "Our goal was to develop the hacienda into a self-governing community, something we never expected would take us 10 years to accomplish."

The academic landlords insisted the villagers spend one day a week building a school for their children, rather than working the landlord's fields, a requirement regarded with total suspicion until books arrived for the school. His Vicos experience, as well as others working in the Bay Area and on southwestern Indian reservations, taught Barnett that power is always suspect, he said, and that "self-determination is critical. You can help people by providing them with information, but ultimately it must be their doing, and they won't always decide what you like."

Barnett came to Stanford in 1964 as a professor of anthropology with a part-time appointment in pediatrics at Stanford Medical Center. "I love kids and wore bow ties like the pediatricians," he said with a laugh. His mission was to help medically trained personnel adapt their technology to the needs of their patients, something he already had done by introducing the first paramedics to a sparsely populated Navajo reservation in New Mexico. The paramedics often worked alongside chanters, traditional Navajo healers.

Physicians sometimes think he is urging them not to try to change any of the behaviors or beliefs of their patients, even ones that the physicians believe are harmful to their patients' health, he said. "That doesn't fit with my view of cultural relativity."

Instead, he said, he believes that people can adapt valuable practices and beliefs from other cultures but "they must have the freedom to choose, to decide for themselves what they will accept or what they reject. I value self-determination, even if, from my vantage point, people will learn by making mistakes."

Barnett said he never intended to become an academic and that he tries to choose his projects so that they provide both theoretical insights into the human condition and some practical benefits to the people involved, such as a study in which he found that allowing parents into natal intensive care units was beneficial for the babies. "You can have your cake and eat it too," he said. He also does public service work, such as teaching high school students on a Hopi reservation. An anthropologist adjusts, he said, to being a person "on the margins" of the cultures he or she works with.

He advised students not to make potential future earnings the basis for choosing their careers. Every job has "scut work," he said, which is difficult to do unless you get pleasure from the work overall. When he began, not even the government considered anthropology a valuable skill, he said, but he has managed to live comfortably while loving his work. SR