[FRIAM] Mike Agar: The Professional Stranger 1945-2017

[Stephen Guerin]

FRIAM has lost a great friend. Mike Agar, a great mentor to me, passed away
on Saturday after a battle with ALS. A few of us had the special privilege
of watching him work in the field on a few projects. He taught me, a
novice, how ethnography is done as an old master. I will miss his insight,
his wry humor and his warm friendship. Mike wrote his own obituary below.
It's some comfort to read it and imagine his voice. And of course, as
always, Mike gets the last word.

[image: Inline image 1]

from http://www.redfish.com/mikeAgar.html

The Professional Stranger

*in his own words:*

Michael H. Agar was born in Chicago right around the time of the German
surrender at the end of WWII in 1945. After an uneventful childhood of dirt
clod wars at housing construction sites and memorized recitations of the
Baltimore catechism, he was forcibly relocated to Livermore, California, in
1956, when his father took a job at the new Lawrence Radiation Lab. He
always considered it his hometown, strange mix of cowboys and science that
it was. Since he was particularly good at multiple-choice tests, he was
able to attend Stanford, courtesy of the then abundant – and now endangered
– concept of financial aid, graduating with a degree in anthropology in
1967. While there he arranged his own year abroad program with the help of
a crypto-anarchist dean and anthropology professor Alan Beals. Mike worked
in a small village in South India and then returned to enjoy the shift from
beer to marijuana that had occurred in his absence. He had turned into an
internationalist – and, therefore, in the eyes of many of his friends'
parents, a communist – with his experiences during high school as an
exchange student in Austria and as a fieldworker in South India. Off he
went to grad school at the Language Behavior Research Lab at Berkeley,
leaving with a PhD in 1971. Life changed with the Vietnam War when he
gratefully accepted a commission in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S.
Public Health Service during graduate school. Instead of becoming a South
Asianist, with the help of his graduate advisor, Paul Kay, he turned into a
lifelong drug expert, an ironic career for a 60’s Berkeley student. He
taught at several universities, foreign and domestic, the most noteworthy
of the foreign gigs being two stints in linguistics at the University of
Vienna and several at the Intercultural Management Institute at the Kepler
University in Linz. His most extensive domestic position was in the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland where he helped
develop and run a program to train practitioners, rather than academic
researchers. By the mid-90’s he set off on his own as Ethknoworks, and, in
fact, will be available as a ghost for a while on the home page
ethknoworks.com.

He wrote a lot – son of a journalist and a photographer – and considered
himself a craftsman who worked with ideas rather than materials. His main
reward was when a student came up after a talk and thanked him for help in
solving a problem in the student’s own work. His concept of
"languaculture," modified from Friedrich's original "linguaculture," had a
major impact in applied linguistics, and his article on the crack cocaine
epidemic helped change discriminatory drug laws. His first book, Ripping
and Running
<https://www.amazon.com/Ripping-Running-Formal-Ethnography-Addicts/dp/0127850201/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495521345&sr=8-1&keywords=+Ripping+and+Running>,
opened new directions in ethnography and helped start the field of
cognitive science. The Professional Stranger
<https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Stranger-Informal-Introduction-Ethnography/dp/0120444704/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495521120&sr=8-1&keywords=professional+stranger>
served
as a resource for many students embarking on their first fieldwork. There
were other books – Independents Declared
<https://www.amazon.com/INDEPENDENTS-DECLARED-Smithsonian-Ethnographic-Inquiry/dp/0874742501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495521191&sr=8-1&keywords=independents+declared>
, Speaking of Ethnography
<https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Ethnography-Qualitative-Research-Methods/dp/0803924925/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495521273&sr=8-1&keywords=Speaking+of+Ethnography>,
and Dope Double Agent
<https://www.amazon.com/Dope-Double-Agent-Naked-Emperor/dp/1411681037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495521303&sr=8-1&keywords=Dope+Double+Agent>,
to name a few. His last was a book called The Lively Science
<https://www.amazon.com/Lively-Science-Remodeling-Social-Research/dp/1626521026/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495521470&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lively+science>,
an attempt to show how human social research was a different kind of
science. Mike also left behind a draft manuscript behind called Culture:
How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids. He received an award here and
there, but those never mattered much to him, except for the Career Award
from the National Institutes for Health (NIH), which bought cash to free
him from faculty meetings for several years. He sought work that passed the
"trinity test" – intellectually interesting, with moral value, which paid
the rent. He was grateful that so much of life was filled with work that
met those conditions.

Mike will miss his life partner of many years, who recently became his
wife, Ellen Taylor, his sister, Mary, and brother, Tom, and their kids and
grandkids, a few friends who endured over the years, and the birds and
animals who still drop by the acre of New Mexican desert that he and Ellen
called home, for food and water.

Mike died peacefully in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on May 20, 2017. He would be
honored by any donations in his memory to Somos Un Pueblo Unido
<http://www.somosunpueblounido.org/>, La Familia Medical Center
<http://www.lafamiliasf.org/>, or any Santa Fe-based animal rights
organization or sanctuary.
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