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“Well, just don’t wind up in jail, Ma,” said my daughter Elanor, with
laughter in her voice. She’d just asked me to fill in my itinerary for
my next few months in the field, and this time the trajectory included
both Chiapas, Mexico, and Northern Ireland.
At thirty-five, El was now a mother and she carried the six-month-
old Fiona in a Maya Wrap, the forty-dollar version of a Latin Amer-
ican rebozo, and the legacy of a childhood in the field in Mexico. A
month before, I’d come to visit with my friend Josefa from Chiapas,
a real live Maya, who’d demonstrated three or four different ways to
carry a baby in a shawl, using Dress-Me-Up Ernie to illustrate. She and
Elanor talked about the experience of having a baby in the support-
ive cradle of Maya family life and compared it to the loneliness of the
American nuclear family. It was a real cross-cultural moment.
Elanor was seven the first time I brought her to the field, and her sis-
ter Rachel, ten years younger, was a true child of fieldwork. Though I
am now officially an applied cultural anthropologist, I began my wan-
derings doing archaeology in the northwest Mexican deserts. I was a
thirty-year-old, single mom undergrad when Rich Pailes, my archae-
ology mentor at the University of Oklahoma was fool enough to al-
low me to bring my precocious daughter with me to do archaeologi-
cal research. Years later, as I guided my own field programs, I thought
kindly of the professor who’d let me have this opportunity, and mod-
eled my programs after his. Over the years, there’d been “conven-
tional” students, diabetics, mid-life non-traditionals and their young-
sters, wanna-be hippies, affluent conservatives, and my own kids. For
15. Field of Dreams; Fields of Reality:
Growing with and in Anthropology
jeanne simonelli, erin mcculley, and rachel simonelli