Anthropologist and Writer
About this episode
Jay Nordlinger interviews Conrad Kottak, a leading cultural anthropologist and writer.
One of my favorite writers—one of my favorite commenters on social affairs—is Conrad Kottak. He writes at The Anthropocene Anthropologist: Reflections on Bizarroland . Maybe I could quote from the introduction of this new Q&A : … our guest today is Conrad Kottak, one of the leading anthropologists in the world. He is a cultural anthropologist—rather than an archeologist, say, or a primatologist—but he has his fingers in many pies. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1968. I myself had the privilege of taking one of his classes. He has done extensive fieldwork in Madagascar and Brazil. He is the author of several textbooks in wide use. In this Q&A , he tells me something interesting—well, many things that are interesting, but I am now thinking of this: He has been writing all his life, since he was a little boy. He always wanted to be a writer, and the writing came before the anthropology. For all these years, he has been writing as an anthropologist. He went to Columbia University, home of anthropology. Is that what introduced him to the field? Got him hooked on it? “Well,” he says, “I had a fourth-grade teacher who did a…
More episodes of Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger podcast page.