Lloyd Farley G2 Interviews Anthropologist Glenn Shepard '87 (Goeldi Museum, Brazil)

LF. Dr. Shepard, your distinguished career is defined by your boundary-defying work regarding the media you engage with and your expertise that spans multiple disciplines. Take us back to your initial time at Princeton as an undergraduate; how did you begin to cultivate your ethnographic and interdisciplinary sensibilities? 

GS: Both of my parents came from poor farming families in North Carolina but were able to attend college in Virginia through various scholarship programs. My father went on to be a doctor and my mother a registered nurse. There was a clear expectation in my family that I would go into medicine as well. I entered as a pre-med at Princeton, taking nearly all the required courses and even my MCATs. I enjoyed organic and inorganic chemistry, took an especially memorable neuropharmacology course with Barry Jacobs, and worked as a student assistant in the lab of renowned molecular biologist Austin Newton.

But along the way, I discovered a natural knack for picking up languages and an interest in comparative literature. I also took two remarkable courses with a legendary and inspiring professor in the Religion department, Victor Preller. I was looking for ways to combine these multiple and apparently contradictory interests. As a teenager, I was fascinated by Jacques Cousteau documentaries, and so I began exploring archeology classes in the anthropology department as a possibility. In one archeology class, I wrote a short paper about trepanation, an ancient form of skull surgery in Peru, and discovered the fields of ethnobotany and medical anthropology. I participated in several archeology digs over summer vacations, but found I was more interested in speaking with living people than digging up the artifacts of the dead.

I’ll never forget the exact moment when I finally decided to give up my plans for medical school and devote myself to anthropology. Hoyt Alverson came as a visiting professor from Dartmouth to give a class on African anthropology. He gave the example of a tribal language in Botswana in which the concept of the past was treated as being physically located “in front,” because it was known and hence ‘visible,’ while the future is physically located “behind” because it is unseeable and unknown. This fascinating example of linguistic and cultural relativity set my mind on fire and led me to expand coursework in anthropology.

I eventually developed an Independent Major in Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology (there was no medical anthropology track then) as a way of working across these various disciplines of interest and ended up doing summer fieldwork on the traditional medical practices of a Bedouin tribe of Jordan for my first Junior Paper. I had taken two years of classical Arabic with Prof. Mansour Ajami at Princeton, and the T.A. for the course, a British Ph.D. student named Ewan MacMillan, had done linguistic fieldwork with a Bedouin tribe in Jordan. He was able to set me up with a letter of invitation to the tribe for my summer fieldwork project, which I was able to fund through various on-campus summer research funds.

I ended up doing senior thesis research in the Peruvian Amazon, again on traditional medical systems and ethnobotany. After I graduated, I received a Labouisse Prize Fellowship to spend an extra year in the Peruvian Amazon studying indigenous ethnobotany and medical anthropology, which opened the doors for me to go on to a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley.