Message from John Dougherty, 6.21.2005:

I'm DONE! Now I am a wandering scholar with a BA in Anthropology. And now its off to Berkeley, California, to begin my seven-year odyssey toward a PhD.  If you are curious as to what I am interested in studying, read my Statement of Intent. To all my former students, fellow classmates, and my mentors in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University (specifically Tom Biolsi and Ken Ames), thank you!

Instead of going to graduation, I went to the Bay Area:

Sproul Plaza, center of the UC Berkeley campus

Kate and I trying to find shade on the campus

Looking over San Francisco from Buena Vista Park (right above the Haight-Ashbury intersection)

Waiting for BART to remove us from the Oakland ghetto

The picture below is of myself holding a device inspired by an afternoon of beer-drinking, a Nahua atlatl. This ancient weapon was used by "paleoindian" populations to hunt large North American megafauna (ex: mammoth) around 11kya. It would be later used by the Aztecs to combat Spanish armor. Needless to say, it packs a hell of a punch; enough so to bring down a mammoth and puncture steel-plated shields. It consists of a throwing hammer, which serves as an extension of your forearm, and a ~6ft. spear which rests on top. The purpose of the atlatl is to significantly increase the throw-power of a spear. 

  Professor Thomas Biolsi, who has been an incredibly influential mentor to me, recently included some of my work in A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians (click here for Powell’s Books description). It was a great honor.

 I will end this message with my favorite quote of last several months. Recently I have been reading about the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley during the early 1960s. One of the leaders of the student-based movement was Mario Savio, and he delivered a speech in which he describes the university system as a “machine”, whose primary motivation is producing knowledge as raw material (in the form of students). But the “machine” is a metaphor, and can be applied to any system of formalized and structural inequality, in which those who are disempowered by the system have roles in maintaining the functions of the “machine”:  

There is a time, when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can’t even passively take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Any questions or comments, please e-mail me at: doughert@pdx.edu