A life well spent: Aubrey Williams

I checked the website of my former college’s anthropology department today, and I was saddened to learn that one of my favorite professors, Aubrey Williams, died a couple months ago. The story was in the Washington Post, and I feel like shit for having taken so long to find out about it. Aubrey (he insisted on being called by his first name, including by his undergraduate students) was one of those rare teachers who you inevitably remember fondly years down the road. He was also a humble guy; I didn’t know during his courses, for example, that he had been a B-17 gunner in the European theater of WWII. I did know, on the other hand, that he’d been actively involved in organizing protests against every war since, up to and including the present war in Iraq. I remember him telling my Cultures of Native North America class, for instance, of the time he was invited to partake in a peyote ritual with members of the Navajo church. He said that he’d gotten up and began running at right angles (in sort of a giant square pattern), and that it took four adult Navajo men to capture and restrain him until he calmed down. He also told of the time he was served psilocybin mushroom tea by an indigenous medicine woman in rural Mexico. He’d hallucinated that he was inside a soap bubble, and could see the world curved around him. Needless to say, that drew a lot of snickers from the wide-eyed classroom full of undergraduates. But I got the biggest kick out of it, having recently had my first experiences with that same entheogen.

At the end of my last class with Aubrey (I’d taken two), he invited all of us to a barbecue at his home in Tacoma Park. That was definitely one of the most unique experiences I had in college: hobnobbing with my professor and my classmates over cocktails, while our final papers sat on his living room table, waiting to be graded. When we spoke that night he said he was leaving soon to consider a job offer as the curator of ethnography at the national museum of Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world and one where few westerners have ever traveled. As I later learned, that position was not funded as planned and it didn’t work out, but Aubrey still got to enjoy a rare vacation in the Kingdom of Bhutan. A selected autobiography of Aubrey Williams’ work can be found here.

I’ll always remember him for his intelligence, his humility, his passion, and his dedication to his students and his treatment of them as peers. His was truly a life well spent. Rest in peace, Aubrey, and thank you for making a difference in my life.