When I was a senior in college, I asked my mentor (the only member of the nascent anthropology program at the small liberal-arts college I attended) to sign my copy of his newly published book. His autograph read, "for Bonnie, from time to time an anthropologist." Since I had begun a love affair with the discipline in my freshman year, and since I planned to go to graduate school to be a "real" anthropologist someday, that autograph seemed a bit odd. I wondered what he meant by it and pondered what hidden message it might contain on many occasions over the next several years. Meanwhile, I pursued other interests, in addition to anthropology, and found myself pulled in many directions, lamenting, more than occasionally, my lack of “focus” and “drive” for any one field of study. After college, I married, moved to California, explored a variety of work environments, and only eventually came back to the discipline, beginning a PhD program in Anthropology at UCLA three years later. In graduate school, I also took what some consider to be the "long way around" to get my degree, graduating a full ten years after I began.

Midway through my dissertation fieldwork, my primary informant, a curandera named Isabel, helped me to look at my studies and my life in a new way-in a way that validated my somewhat "unfocused" trajectory as an indication of success rather than as failure. Her insights helped me realize that, at least for me, anthropology is more than a set of canons or a collection of facts. It is also a code for living that embraces tolerance, that resists reductionistic explanations for human similarities and difference, and-most importantly-that integrates rather than compartmentalizes the "intellectual" and the "every-day."

This is the message I try to pass-on to the students in my classes and, even if they never take another class in anthropology, I challenge them to apply this precept to their lives. In the classroom, I emphasize teaching strategies that encourage students to find their own voice, challenging them to critically evaluate and apply "abstract" concepts learned in the classroom to the solving of real world problems, and to make sense of what they're learning in terms of their own life experience. Outside the classroom I try to similarly engage the students I advise (whether undergraduate majors, Masters or Doctoral students upon whose committees I serve, undergraduate teaching assistants, or students from my classes who "just want to talk").

That I learned from a woman to value this integrative approach to anthropology and life is, perhaps, not surprising. That it seems to make the most sense to those "non-traditional" women students I mentor is, perhaps, not surprising either. But, in retrospect, I wonder if that male mentor didn't also know this lesson when he penned those words to me in my senior year of college. It is a lesson whose value goes well beyond the sometimes divisive lines of gender. And now, of all the autographs and signed book copies on my shelf, that is the one of which I am most proud.