There are two answers to this question.

 
Who am I and what do I stand for? Or who am I, what have I done, and what am I still called to do? I will try to answer the second question here. I suspect discerning readers will be able to read between the lines and figure out answers to the first question.

I call myself an “anthropologist at large.” I take people on trips or journeys of discovery, here and there, with that in mind. That is because when I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, one of my professors recommended that I read a book called Mirror for Man.

This book was and is a layperson’s introduction to American anthropology, written by the then head of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, a man called Clyde Cluckhohn.

Kluckhohn explained that anthropologists study the relations amongst the biology, evolution, archaeology, prehistory, ethnography, history, and psychology of distinct people (largely but not exclusively preindustrial), in the hope of eliciting the culture and social organization of a people studied by an anthropologist through long-term residence.

He explained that anthropologists spend long times living among foreign peoples in order to elicit the social organization and culture that is often the invisible software of daily life, the things that everyone in a distinct society know to be true and that they abide by, but are often unable to articulate and externalize.

Good research, based on this kind of investigation, written up in reports called ethnographies, is supposed to explain how societies and their various institutions work, all within a framework of holistic analysis, an extremely challenging but rewarding task when it is successful.

Yes, there are American, British, French, Dutch, German, and Belgian schools of anthropology, but they are all minor variations on the quest to understand culture and human nature.

Since then, the concept of culture as an unwritten, unconscious but powerfully agreed upon code of conduct in any one social group, has informed sociology, politics, management, and government, suggesting that anthropologists are not just lovers of non-Western cultures and their often hard-to-understand world views and rituals.

Culture and social organization are real. Anthropologists have been studying it for more than a century. And so I see life in cultural terms. My trips reflect this, as do my commentary and presentations when travelling. I try to tell the story behind the story.

 

Culture and social organization have always informed my research, from dense and detailed ethnographic studies to journalistic deep dives and essays on history and ethnography, which I have published in more than fifteen major magazines and newspapers during the last two decades.

 

Yet, I admit that I always wanted to be an explorer. As a young boy, I read stories about the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadores who “explored” the Americas and took over the spice trade of the Indies. Later, as an undergraduate, I discovered that they mostly discovered things and peoples to conquer them.

But then there were the 19th-century explorers of Africa, who often did not have the support of their national governments and risked life and limb to bring knowledge of Africa’s geography and peoples to the West, men like Livingstone, Burton, and Speke who revealed to the West the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria.

 

By the middle of the 20th century, the world had been mapped, and many non-industrial peoples had been contacted and studied by anthropologists, but not all and not in all aspects.

 

It was the talented, insightful, and paradoxical French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who once declared that the new explorers of the 20th century would be men and women who spend time in foreign, and often pre-industrial cultures as cultural explorers. This was and for a while will remain one of humankind’s great frontiers of exploration. I would like to think I have been one of these men.

 

And so, I have lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America as an anthropologist in different capacities. I have had the opportunity to spend quality research time, sometimes lasting years, in Morocco, Sinai, Israel, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nepal, India, Guatemala, and Guyana. And so I take out at least one or two Safaris a year to show and explain the wonders, wildlife and peoples of East Africa to travelers, for that part of the world was my home for just under twenty years.

 

I discovered anthropology after I was an almost fully formed citizen of an English-speaking democracy that still saw itself as living within a Judeo-Christian moral framework. This framework was both supported by and modified by an educational system of the Great Books of Western Civilization, which once provided the bedrock of undergraduate degrees that were dedicated to Liberal Education.

 

I was part of the last demographic where that worldview informed the colleges and universities of the post war West. And so I still look to both Athens and Jerusalem to understand the world. And, to the two cultures of the West, the humanistic and the scientific.

 

But I have another side, which emerged long before I came to understand anthropology. I am a musician. I write and record songs in the Anglo and African American tradition, and these have coalesced into one-man shows with music that I have yet to take to the road, or better still, find younger musicians who want to do so. And so I put my songs on my other website, Geoffrey's Journals and on my YouTube channel, The Sound Traveller. They are not yet all there, but they will be.

I did not start out as a musician of what is now called Americana. I was trained as a classical singer at the Royal Conservatory of Music. After WWII  the Anglo Canadian cultural elite were focused on creating a unique Canadian culture and so I was swept into the Children’s Chorus of the Canadian National Opera and from there got into radio, film, and theatre. It ended after successfully auditioning for a role in the British musical Oliver that was on its way to Manhattan for three years. My parents decided three years alone in New York City as a teenager was not good for my soul. I now agree. I stayed home.

 

And so I became a rock and roller, a folkie, a folk rocker and slowly slowly an oud and baglama player in Greek town in Toronto playing Middle Eastern cabaret music. This eventually led to ethnomusicological research among Sinai Bedouin, long term music research in East Africa and then a near permanent move to a role as a consulting development anthropologist whose goal was to explain, yes, the culture and social organization of the people our international development tax dollars go to for school building, health and clean water. I then got kicked up the international development hierarchy and was sometimes asked to write about ‘development policy,’ a field that seems more like medieval theology than rational planning.

 

Recently I have begun to produce films for I am aware that there is a whole generation who downplays the power of print, and I want to make films that will…inspire them to read!

 

So at the end of the day why is my sight called Geoffrey’s Journeys? Simply put, we all choose our paths in the larger journey of life. My life has and continues to constitute a discrete but related set of journeys, both inwards and outwards. During these journeys I have often taken photos of what I am doing and seeing and, increasingly I am sharing them on my web site.

 

My web site is an invitation to you to join me on  one of my many journeys, in the present, past or future, actual or virtual.

 

You are most welcome.

 

Geoffrey Clarfield

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