I INTRODUCED MYSELF TO KARL after the third class—as someone thinking of applying to graduate school for ethnographic studies, which was true, if only a fraction of the story. “You don’t need much background to be a superstar in anthropology,” he told me. We bantered for a bit about what it takes to be a great ethnographer—give people time to open up and be reasonable—before I asked permission to audit his class for the semester. “Sure,” he said, “if you want that kind of punishment.”
After Karl’s fourth class, I noticed a poster in the hallway for “Social Anthropology Day.” Though social anthro was housed in the same department as archaeology, I had already come to learn that archaeology and social anthropology could not be further from each other. There was almost an animosity that came from being forced to inhabit the same department despite all the obvious differences. But, I reasoned, since it was being billed in part as an introduction to the department for prospective students, important characters in anthropology—and therefore in Jane’s story—might be there.
In particular, I hoped to run into someone named Richard Meadow. Richard lurked everywhere in the periphery of Jane’s story. He took that 1968 expedition photograph in Iran. He had been Jim Humphries’s roommate at the time of Jane’s death. Karl had been his dissertation adviser. And, like Karl, he had stayed at Harvard all these years; Richard had been the director of the Peabody’s Zooarchaeology Laboratory and a senior lecturer in the department for decades now.
James Ronan, the first person who advised me to speak with Richard, warned me that getting him to talk wouldn’t be easy. He was a diligent scholar and notoriously tight-lipped. But James suspected Richard just might dislike Karl enough to make an exception. “They just kind of avoided each other. Even as recently as a few years ago.” The rumor was the rift had started because Richard was the one who had told police that Karl had been having an extramarital affair with Jane—a line of questioning to which Karl reportedly responded, evoking Paul Newman: “Why would I have a hamburger when I have steak at home?”
* * *
It was a packed house in William James Hall. People were sitting on the floor. I scanned the room, eventually spotting someone who looked similar enough to a 1970s picture of Richard Meadow to plausibly be him: glasses, mustache, sloped shoulders. I spent most of that afternoon’s lecture watching him.
Gary Urton, the head of the Anthropology department, whose limp mop of hair resembled the knotted cords he studied, was up on the stage, introducing the five lecturers. The first speaker talked about her archaeological work in Mexico. The second discussed his work in Kyrgyzstan studying human settlement patterns. He said that the Kyrgyzstani regional government was extremely helpful to his expedition. “They’re under the illusion—which I’m not going to dispel—that there’s only one university in the United States, and that is Harvard.” It got a big laugh.
And then it was Kimberly Theidon’s turn. “She’s just returning to us after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and she’s teaching this semester—memory politics…Her talk today is ‘Speaking of Silences: Gender, Violence and Redress in Peru,’” Professor Urton said, and ceded the floor to her.
She was astonishing to watch, wrapped in a purple scarf, sinewy, her neck muscles like the sides of a rope ladder climbing up her throat.
“Thank you. It’s actually nice to be back in certain ways.” The room tittered with nervous laughter. “I say that with sincerity. I look you in the eyes when I say that. Anyway, thanks and thanks to all of you for being here. So let me begin.”
Kimberly’s work had brought her down to Peru to follow a truth commission in its effort to collect women’s stories about violence suffered during the armed conflict in the 1980s and ’90s. Kimberly began her lecture by discussing a death that happened before her arrival.
“There are two versions people tell of how this young woman died,” Kimberly said. “Some told she had fallen, and some said she killed herself.”
Kimberly learned that the woman was mute, and that she lived in a hillside village. At night, the soldiers who lived at the nearby base would come into the house she shared with her grandmother. “The women in the village could hear her at night. Muffled guttural sounds.” These women would later confess, “‘We knew by the sound. We knew what the soldiers were doing, but we couldn’t say anything.’”
Kimberly broke into the present tense: “It’s impossible to erase the image of this young woman screaming with all her might, but unable to say anything.”
Silence, Kimberly explained, plays a huge role in her work on gender violence. “What do you do with these silences?” she asked. “How do you listen to them? How do you interpret them? When are they oppressive? And when might they constitute a form of agency? How do you understand silences as they enter and contour the archives?”
* * *
By the end of the last talk, the Richard Meadow–like man had fallen asleep. He nodded awake and chewed on the back of his hand as if to help himself stay alert. Gary Urton walked on stage one last time. He thanked the speakers for being indicative of the variety and quality of the teaching in the Harvard Anthropology department and invited everyone to a reception upstairs.
The fifteenth floor of William James Hall was laden with catered food. Sushi. Shrimp and cocktail sauce. Ribs. Artichoke hearts, a cheese plate, and an open bar. I had forgotten how free food abounded at Harvard events.
I headed to the wine table first. The man I was pretty sure was Richard Meadow was there, and so was the food archaeology grad student in Karl’s class. I thought about approaching the professor, but it felt too soon to talk to someone so close to the center of the story. I didn’t yet understand the dynamics within the department, and I worried about the conversation getting repeated and not being able to control to whom.
When maybe-Richard left, I introduced myself to the grad student. Her name was Sadie Weber. I learned she was also auditing Karl’s class. She needed to prepare for next year’s Generals. Sadie told me Karl had been wrong a couple of times in class, and she disagreed with his theory of agricultural development.
“You should correct him,” I said.
“I don’t know. I’m just a first-year. He’s so much older than me.”
I played dumb: “How long has he been teaching here?”
“Ha. I don’t know. Like, forever. He must’ve started in the ’60s. Like that guy”—she pointed to maybe-Richard—“was one of his students.”