Joel Halpern, Cultural Anthropologist
Conducted Pioneering Fieldwork in Balkans, Southeast Asia
My father, Joel Halpern, was a cultural anthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, who conducted pioneering fieldwork in the Balkans and Southeast Asia. He passed away earlier this year at the age of 90.
Joel was an adventurer and a keen observer who from an early age set his own path. As a youth, he rejected his father’s advice that he study chemistry, and instead earned a BA in history from the University of Michigan and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. More interested in people than particles, he explored the North American and Scandanavian arctic, living with indigenous peoples and learning about their cultures. Throughout his long career, he conducted ethnographic research in regions ranging from Lapland to Laos, and is best known for his studies of the effects of modernization in the Balkans, particularly the work he and my mother, anthropologist Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, performed in the Serbian village of Orašac, which spanned six decades. There, my parents, eventually with all three of their children — my two sisters and me — lived with a local family in a multi-generational household, speaking Serbian and chronicling the rhythms of village life along with the introduction of electricity and indoor plumbing and demographic changes that saw young people moving away from the village to cities and towns. He also engaged in fieldwork in Bulgaria, Canada, Greece, India, Israel, the former Soviet Union, Sweden, Thailand, the United States, and Vietnam.
Joel began his career in Orašac in 1952. His PhD dissertation on the village community received the Clarke F. Ansley Award from Columbia University Press and was published in 1956 as A Serbian Village. Three decades later, a Belgrade film crew made a documentary, Halpernovi u Orašcu (the Halperns in Orašac, 1986), in which he and Barbara reminisced with villagers about changes that had taken place over the intervening years. The film was shown to school children in Serbia to help them learn about their heritage. Joel’s work in Southeast Asia began in Laos in the late 1950s, where he conducted some of the first American scholarship of the region as a junior foreign service officer (1956–1958) and a consultant to the Rand Corporation (1959–1961). He returned to the region in 1969 as chair of the South East Asia Development Advisory Group, which studied the impact of dams along the Mekong River. His multiple volumes of Laos Project Papers (1958–1966) covered a wide range of issues, from health, education, and agriculture to the role of the Chinese in Lao society and U.S. policy in Laos. Joel’s teaching career began at the University of California — Los Angeles (1958–1963), continued at Brandeis University (1963–1965) and the Russian Research Center at Harvard (1965–1967), and flourished at the University of Massachusetts — Amherst (1967 until his retirement in 1993).
Joel was a prolific writer, authoring and co-authoring with Barbara hundreds of articles as well as chapters in a series of elementary school social studies textbooks on families, communities and cultures. Aside from A Serbian Village, his most well-known books include The Changing Village Community (1967) and A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective (1972), both of which focused on the modernization of traditional societies. His detailed presentations of rituals and daily life pull the reader into the communities he described. He was also an avid photographer, and would often use the right angle of a building crane looming over a field or a developing urban landscape to frame a message of transformation. Later in his career, he studied southeast Asian populations in New England and co-authored a book with his UMass colleague Lucy Nguyen, Far East Comes Near (1989), which presented personal accounts of college students who were refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. He donated his vast collection of writings and digitized photos to universities and research institutions across the country for all to access. His books and articles have been published in multiple languages, including Croatian, French, German, Japanese, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Spanish.
Joel also explored his own ethnic (Jewish) background, conducting fieldwork in Israel and Jewish communities in the U.S., and was actively involved in the Judaic Studies Department at UMass. As a young couple in the early 1950s living with the family of the village headman in Orašac, where Serbian Orthodox rituals were an integral part of village life, he and Barbara were once asked what religion they practiced in America. Aware of the anti-Semitism faced by their grandparents and great grandparents who had immigrated from Russia and eastern Europe, Joel and Barbara hesitated to answer, even though their lives were largely secular. When they replied that they were Jewish, Žarko, the headman, told them how, during the Second World War, his parents had sheltered a Jewish family from Belgrade fleeing the Nazis. Žarko described how they had disguised the family as peasants like themselves by giving them new names, putting dirt under their fingernails, and scuffing their palms to make callouses. Many years later, Joel and Barbara visited the family at their home in Israel.
As he neared the end of his long and productive life, Joel’s sharp mind and intellectual curiosity never wavered. His apartment was lined with books on multiple subjects, many recently acquired, dog-eared, with comments on note paper inserted like bookmarks. In a small notebook on his desk, he had jotted thoughts for a book: “tentative title: Through a Glass Darkly — Some Reflections on Lives of Modest Privilege…what can 2 octogenarians possibly add to the torrents of writings confronting a truly inquiring person seeking some measure of perspective on our current dilemmas, which to so many of us seem unprecedented?”
In addition to his intellect, my sisters and I and our children — his grandchildren — will always remember his playful wit, the imaginative stories he would weave to entertain us, and his self-deprecating humor. His greatest legacy was that he was a giver — of love and affection, of passion and curiosity.
Joining me in remembering my dad are my sisters, Susannah Halpern and Carla Halpern; my sons, Ari and Nathan Rickman; my nephews, Ben and Jordan Cargill and Gareth Gordon-Halpern; my nieces, Elina and Sonya Gordon-Halpern; my mom, Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern; June Guild, his devoted partner later in life; and his sister and brother-in-law, Helen and Bob Lerner.
For anyone wishing to make a donation in my dad’s honor, please consider donating books or funds to www.readertoreader.org .
— Kay Halpern
