Confessions of a Recovering Anthropologist: Part 1
Parts of this essay are based on a September 26, 2024, interview with Çiğdem Akbay. I appreciate her feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. Mark Hoffman’s editing of this essay greatly enhanced its clarity and helped me include subtle nuances of meaning I might have otherwise overlooked. I feel relieved now that I am finally sharing memories I had kept suppressed for years, and I am very grateful to Akbay and Hoffman for their support during the sometimes challenging process of preparing these documents for publication.
INTRODUCTION
I received the nickname of “Recovering Anthropologist” at the first Native American Church (NAC) meeting I attended in Winnebago, NE, in July of 1990 (Fikes 1996: 29). I don’t remember if it was Reuben Snake or his lawyer, James Botsford, who gave me that nickname. I soon realized that both of them and other members of the NAC sensed that “recovery” connoted humility and humor, especially because Reuben Snake and many other NAC members were recovering alcoholics. It was an appropriate nickname for me because, although they distrusted anthropologists, they perceived that I appreciated their reverent use of peyote and was committed to helping to secure religious freedom for them to continue ingesting peyote during their all-night religious rituals. Their trust in my dedication to help enact legislation to ensure their religious freedom was justified because in 1990 I was a registered lobbyist, employed by the Friends Committee on National Legislation to work on Native American legislative issues (Fikes 1996).
I embraced my nickname because I felt honored. I have reason to believe that they recognized I had internalized their view that peyote is a plant containing a spiritual teacher. My ingestion of peyote during my first NAC meeting, followed by my words of praise for “it,” i.e., my Elder Brother incarnate in peyote, occurred after several years of participating in and learning about Huichol rituals and ritual practitioners (shamans). In 1991, after Peter Furst began obstructing the publication of my book (Fikes 1993), I was comforted by the fact that NAC members accepted and respected me, even praying that my book would be published, while an increasing number of American anthropologists were abandoning me. Events leading up to this positive and proactive part of my “recovery” are explained in this essay, Part 1 of Confessions of a Recovering Anthropologist, on my website www.jayfikes.com and in other publications (Fikes 2002, 2011a, 2021a, 2021b).
The other reason I felt compelled to become a "recovering anthropologist" was that two University of Michigan professors penalized me for being truthful about Huichol society. Professor Joyce Marcus did not tell me she was a friend of Peter Furst in 1982, when she first warned me not to be so critical of Furst’s version of Huichol society (Fikes 2002: 85). In her letter to Furst, dated Jan. 28, 1988 she was answering Furst’s Jan. 18, 1988 letter to her. Instead of defending me, by pointing out that my 1985 dissertation provided precise refutations of some of Furst’s false claims about Huichol society, she echoed Furst’s unsupported allegation that I was chasing “imaginary academic conspiracies”… by stating that she was not my psychiatrist (reminding me of Joseph Stalin’s abuse of psychiatry to suppress dissent), and had no control over my “very non-professional, weird and unacceptable behavior.” She then pledged allegiance to Furst: “Know that I am on your side and value your friendship. There were many times your generosity and advice helped me out—I remember all of those times” (Marcus Jan. 28, 1988 letter). If my correcting the ethnographic record about Huichol shamanism and ritual is “non-professional” and “weird” then it is time to become a recovering anthropologist. I was shocked when Professor Roy Rappaport ceased supporting my academic career by naively accepting Furst’s false claims, made in his unsolicited August 19, 1989 letter to Rappaport. Rappaport never gave me any opportunity to refute Furst’s defamatory allegations about me. He steadfastly refused to let me read Furst’s August 19, 1989, letter. I used the word “steadfastly” because Rappaport refused four consecutive letters from me asking him to provide me with a copy of Furst’s letter. This lack of professional support from Marcus and Rappaport contributed to my becoming a recovering anthropologist, especially after my contract with the Friends Committee on National Legislation was not renewed. I secured a research grant to study at the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, but once that grant concluded, I needed to find academic employment. After more than a hundred of my academic job applications were rejected, I had to admit that my career in academic anthropology in the U.S.A. was over. In 1999, my wife and I began teaching at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, where I continued teaching until June 2016.
In Part 2 of this essay, forthcoming soon, I document the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Ethics Committee’s failure to investigate and adjudicate allegations of ethical misconduct made against Peter Furst by me, Professor Phil Weigand, and Juan Negrín. Censuring Furst then (in 1992) might have rekindled my academic career, but the AAA preferred providing Furst with immunity from investigation of our complaints. In a future publication, Mark Hoffman and I will provide details about Peter T. Furst, including specifics about his campaign to defame me and thereby sabotage my academic career in the United States.
Some people who read this know me as a critic of Carlos Castaneda and his academic allies (Fikes 1993, 2008a, 2021c). Others know me as a lifelong student of Wixarika (Huichol) shamanism (Fikes 1985, 2011a, 2021a, 2021b, 2024). This autobiographical essay examines what sparked each of these passions, clarifying the events that led me, the son of two “mainstream” Anglo-American teachers, to embark on my lifelong research into Huichol shamanism and ritual. To do so, I will candidly discuss a few momentous childhood events, such as getting caught for cheating in a high school biology class and killing a large rattlesnake, whose spirit prompted me to take its skin back to the exact spot where I shot it. Such ‘confessions’ should enable readers to see how certain crucial events ultimately led me to my four Huichol shaman mentors.
My commitment to exposing Carlos Castaneda’s fraudulent anthropology began when my parents’ fell victim to a real estate scam in 1974. On behalf of my parents, I won a lawsuit against Diego Delgado, who had defrauded my parents and several other investors in a Guadalajara condominium that Delgado never built. The documents left behind when Delgado, a Mexican architect and U.C.L.A. anthropology colleague of Peter Furst and Carlos Castaneda, escaped arrest by fleeing to the United States. When the judge ruled that the Guadalajara house he abandoned was my parents’ property, I gained access to Delgado’s books and documents. Among those documents were some claims that Delgado made about having been Castaneda’s mentor (Fikes 1993). Other documents exposed Delgado’s adventures in illegal archaeology, including aiding Peter Furst in excavating a shaft tomb in Mexico without a legal permit.
CRUCIAL CHILDHOOD EVENTS SEEN AS STEPPING-STONES TO THE HUICHOL
My family home and my elementary school were about a mile away from the Orange County, California, airport (aka John Wayne Airport). After school and on weekends, I often played softball with friends on our calm residential street, or walked around the Upper Newport Bay, which we locals affectionately called the Back Bay. Because both sides of the Back Bay were relatively undeveloped circa 1956, it was a wonderful place to observe plants and animals. As a child, I was especially interested in snakes, how some species laid eggs while others bore live young… how they were able to capture their prey, shed their skins, and hibernate. My mother and grandmother allowed me to keep California King snakes (and other non-venomous snakes), lizards, frogs, turtles, Congo eels, and salamanders for pets. I came across many of these creatures during my hikes around the Back Bay, and other animals were supplied by Dr. Burt.
Read full biography
