Vol. 4 · No. 2 · 2000
The Long Walk II - 'For As Long As I Can Remember Anthropology Has Been Reinventing Itself'An Interview With Donald Powell Cole
Mark Allen Peterson
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In 1971, Donald Powell Cole came to the American University in Cairo as an assistant professor, the ink scarcely dry on his new PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. For twenty-nine years he has made his home in Cairo, currently residing in the old Bab el-Luk district downtown, a ten-minute walk from the university. Although he has done stints as visiting professor or researcher at the Universities of California-Berkeley, Chicago, Texas-Austin and Georgetown, and is active in the American Anthropological Association (in 1999 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Association's Middle East Studies Section), his long expatriate status seems to give him a kind of insider-outsider perspective on anthropology, akin to, but not quite parallel to that many anthropologists ascribe to the fieldwork experience.