Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Prologue -- My Life under Surveillance -- Documenting Surveillance -- 1. Autobiographical Recollections -- From the Lincoln School to Harvard College -- Pascal's Wager and Communist Politics at Harvard -- Divergent Family Histories within a WASP Tradition -- Imagining a Future with Wilhelmina Davis -- Life in the Working Class during the McCarthy Era -- American Civilization and Postivist Historiography at the University of Pennsylvania -- Political Disillusion and Historiographical Assumption -- Social History and Historiography at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement Years -- The Berkeley Experience: Divorce, Family Breakup, and Consciousness Raising -- Tenure without a Book: Essays toward a New History of Anthropology -- From History to Anthropology at the University of Chicago -- Multicultural Travels with Carol Bowman: From Srpski Itebej to King's High Table across Boundaries in Time and Class -- From Huey Newton's Poster to the Harvard Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report: Settling in to a Cautious and Ambivalent Historicism -- Blocked Projects, False Starts, and Miscast Roles: The Travails of an Interdisciplinary Hybrid -- Disciplinary Marginality as a Condition of Productive Scholarship -- From Academic Striver to Disciplinary Doyen -- Conversations across a Widening Generation Gap -- Biography in an Autobiographical Context -- 2. Historiographical Reflections -- Inside an Historian's Study: The "Micro-technology" of a "Bottom-up" Historicism -- Intellectual Topographies, Concentric Models, Enduring Biases: Some Limitations of a Professed Historicism -- Interesting Questions and Blocked Researches: Notes on Anxiety and Method in My Historiography of Anthropology -- Revelatory Moments Unexplored: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and the Amplification of Anxiety in Present History.

From the Big Picture to the Biographical Vignette: The Ulterior Historiographical Motives of an Aging Old Historicist -- The Problematic Character of Influence: The "Gatekeeper" and a "New" History of Anthropology -- Doing "Good Work" : Thoughts on the Craft of One Historian -- 3. Octogenarian Afterthoughts: "Fragments Shored against My Ruins" -- Further Steps down a Pyramid of Deterioration -- Conjuring a Readership: Yet Another Try at Influence -- Reconceptualizing Historicism: "Handling the Rich Complexities of the Lives of Others" -- Office in a Storeroom: Trashing the Icons of a Scholarly Life -- Becoming an Octogenarian and Accentuating the Positive -- The Audacity of Hope and the Politics of Mr. In-between -- Notes from the Edge of the Abyss: The Serenity Prayer and Pascal's Wager -- Epilogue -- Penelope's Shroud, Zeno's Paradox, and the Closure of the Black Box -- Striving for Perfection and Accepting the Terminal Realities of Life: Final Notes on the Making and Completion of This Book -- Acknowledgments -- References Cited -- Index.