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

Tue May 23 12:48:51 EDT 2017

I met Mike about a dozen years ago and was immediately taken with his
enthusiasm, unfailing good nature and sense of humor, and ability to make
sense of things. Where I might make an observation, Mike would get an
insight, and then he'd fit it into a broader context to test its relevance.
I found his book, *Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of
Conversation*, to be bang-on relevant to the work our consulting company
was doing then on adaptation in organizations. He wrote: “Start a
conversation.  If you have trouble, you’ve hit your first rich point.”  He
meant that rich points emerge when the conversation produces concepts or
opinions that conflict with the expectations you brought to the
discussion.  So he wrote, “once you trip over a rich point [you must]
figure out what the difference means.  [But] that’s not enough; you only
wind up with  a long list of differences.  Instead, what you do is *compare*
the difference you’ve just figured out with other differences, other rich
points that come up.”  The goal, he wrote, is *coherence*, “finding
connections among different rich points at different levels, in different
places at different times with different people.  The emphasis is on
finding a *story*, the story that pulls the rich points together into an
understanding of how they all *cohere*.”  Do that for a client and you're
well on the well to improving an organization.

I hadn't seen Mike in some years, maybe the last time at a long-ago FRIAM
meeting, so I didn't know he was ill. I suppose it's a sign of a useful
life if others remember your ideas after many years . . . and they still
hold the power to inspire.

Bruce Abell

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 11:57 AM, Pamela McCorduck <pamela at well.com> wrote:

> We’ve all lost a great friend in Mike. He came to dinner one night here in
> New York City while he was doing fieldwork commissioned by Sloan Kettering,
> trying to figure out a better relationship among patients, institution, and
> physicians. On that particular project he was as full of great ideas as he
> had been about drug reform. I remember that night as stimulating, warm, and
> full of laughter. Ten or so years later, when I visited a patient at Sloan
> Kettering, I could see the hospital had certainly taken some of Mike’s
> suggestions to heart.
>
> Goodbye, dear Michael.
>
>
> On May 23, 2017, at 12:59 AM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> <MikeAgar960.jpg>
>
> 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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>
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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-- 
Bruce Abell
7 Morning Glory
Santa Fe, NM  87506
Tel: 505 986 9039
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