Vern Carroll

Vern Carroll, 79, of Clearwater Beach, passed away August 3, 2013. For any given occasion, Vern Carroll always had a story or saying guaranteed to bring a smile to those nearby. Sadly, those stories and sayings are now silenced and with deep sadness and regret, we remember the loss of Vern Carroll, born in Brooklyn in 1933, who died in August, 2013, in Clearwater, Florida, one month shy of his 80th birthday. He is survived by his loved and loving wife of 52 years, Raymonde Carroll, as well as his four children and six grandchildren. He is also survived by his sister Ginger Letts. Together they looked stunning in childhood pictures, in which Vern often draped a protective brotherly arm over his proud younger sister. With his French sisters- and brothers-in-law, Viviane and Henri Vareilles, France and Philippe Schubert, Lucy and Jean Cohen, Dolly and Claude Esdraffo, Isdey and Alexandra Cohen, he learned a new meaning of family and they, along with nieces and nephews, on both sides of the Atlantic, and friends and colleagues all around the globe, continue to miss him deeply. Always quick out of the starting block, Vern was continually ahead of his time, whether it was by stealing away at night to see jazz greats such as Charlie Parker in jazz houses in New York at the ripe old age of thirteen, or by being one of the few young, white, male members of the NAACP in the 50's, and venturing to a meeting in the mid-fifties in a church house in some Florida backwoods. By twenty one, he was father to the first of three beautiful blonde girls, Rachel (first born and mother to three lovely children Luisa, Ben and Sarah), Blair (mother to wonderful Leela) and Allison (first to become a licensed pilot like Vern). Blair gave Vern his first hands-on experience of grandfather-hood with the birth of her beautiful daughter Leela and the year they both spent living with Papi, as Leela called him, in Michigan was a cherished gift. By thirty, Vern had not only a BA and MA from Yale, but a BA/MA from Cambridge University (England) and was in the midst of a doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD. As Captain in the US Marines, he piloted planes and helicopters in Japan during the Korean War and in the Reserve. In Paris Vern met and fell for the love of his life Raymonde, with whom he shared not only a marriage of love, but also a marriage of the minds. Their intellectual partnership and mutually expanding and enriching world of thought would inform their life together. Their daughter, Tama, spent her first years on a Polynesian atoll in Micronesia, Nukuoro, watching her father do fieldwork and learning Nukuoro as her first language. Tama gave Vern two more beautiful grandchildren, Natasha and Mick (another cherished gift), who spent many a vacation delighting and being delighted by their Grampy. "Vern/Dad/ Papi/Grampy" sayings and stories were so much a part of the family folklore that they will echo in our minds as we remember them. From early on in his career, Vern was an influential presence in the field of anthropology and Oceania. A continual innovator, he was a pioneer in the use of new technologies, such as computers (initially, the size of a room), to invent a way of eliciting material to create a Nukuoro dictionary in record time. He went on to teach at the University of Washington and University of Michigan and to innovate and create organizations, programs, methodologies and ideas in the anthropological world. His latest work explored the "Anthropology of Mind", especially in his popular and highly sought-after class, "Culture, Thought and Meaning". He facilitated access to the writings of such luminaries as Gregory Bateson and created now thriving organizations such as ASAO (see below). He has left behind many students who were highly inspired by his teachings and who mourn the loss of their mentor. He also left behind those touched by his ideas and writings, and mourn the loss of such a brilliant man who was, as one former colleague wrote, "truly one of the great anthropological minds of his time". A year later, his voice remains just as vivid as ever. We love and remember you always. ASAO OBITUARIES VERN CARROLL Vern Carroll, who conceived and organized the founding of ASAO, died on August 3, 2013, in Clearwater, Florida, at age 79. An undergraduate at Yale and Cambridge with M. A. degrees from both institutions, Vern earned his Ph. D. in anthropology from University of Chicago in 1966. A knowledgeable linguistic anthropologist and ethnographer, Vern's career was marked by the innovative pathways he created for his colleagues and students while at the University of Washington (1966 - 1972) and University of Michigan (1972-1993). Every innovation at every stage of his career was the result of collaboration with colleagues and students. During his field trips to and from Nukuoro atoll, he developed close working relationships with Pacific linguists at University of Hawaii. With Ann Peters, an early systems designer, he worked out a process of automating the production of Nukuoro syllables by programming a computer with the rules of phonemic combination to obtain a list of all possible words in the language (of specified limit of length). The resulting printout was over 1000 pages and weighed about 5 pounds. It took Vern and his assistant, Tobias Soulik, months of exacting work to identify those forms that were actual words, affixes, and particles in the Nukuoro language. These forms constituted less than 1 % of the entire corpus and became the database for the next stage, the automation of the entire Nukuoro lexicon. Carroll and Soulik augmented the list with plant, fish, and place names to get an exhaustive list of Nukuoro words, from which they extracted roots. Vern and Ann Peters then programmed a computer with the most common ways of inflecting a Nukuoro root word, e.g., full and/or partial reduplication, prefixes such as haga- or hee-, and suffixes like -nga or -ina. The computer would then predict the word form in the resulting printout. It was this work that Don Topping and Byron Bender used as a model for what became the Pacific and Asian Linguistics Institute series of Micronesian lexicons that included Nukuoro, Kapingamarangi, Pohnpeian, Chuukese, Kosraean, Mortlockese, Yapese, Marshallese, Chammoro, and Palauan. During a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Hawaii, Vern developed a working relationship with a number of Pacific demographers at the East-West Population Institute. In this collaborative effort, he applied a systems framework he had been developing (with Gregory Bateson) to atoll demography. Despite the fact that the margin of error for small populations is very narrow, Vern and his key demographic colleague, Griffith Feeney, were convinced that careful data collection and analysis would make atoll demography a rich field for social and cultural comparison. He organized a four day conference on atoll demography in 1972 that brought together a group of Pacific Island specialists at the East-West Center and which resulted in Pacific Atoll Populations, edited by Vern and published in 1975. This was the first comparative study of its kind that established new demographic methodologies for the cultural study of atoll populations. Following his first fellowship year in Hawaii, Vern returned to Seattle for a year. He had worked with Gregory Bateson in Hawaii exploring the implications of systems theories and cybernetics for a theory of culture that displays the complexities of the organization of human meaning without reifying culture as some kind of thing. He began an urgent project on his return. He had discovered that Bateson's CV was so wildly inaccurate that it was practically useless for citation of any sort. He formed a small group that included me and graduate students David Holmberg and Katharine March (now at Cornell University) to divide up the work of tracking down accurate citations for all of Bateson's published work and copying each item found. Before leaving for his second post-doctoral year, Vern secured an agreement with Bantam Books (through Lou Langness) to publish whatever compilation of articles Bateson would choose. On his return to Hawaii, Vern presented Bateson with the printed collection of articles and the agreement to publish his selection and whatever connecting text Gregory would write. The result was Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind and the subsequent acclaim Bateson enjoyed. These two years of exploring systems ideas and methods are manifest in Vern's last published paper in 1977, "Communities and Non-communities: the Nukuoro on Ponape," (in Exiles and Migrants in Oceania). This remarkable piece of work compared the resettled Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi populations on Pohnpei Island. These neighboring atoll populations are both Polynesian and share many features of cultural and social organization, but while Kapingamarangi replicate their social order in a resettled community, the Nukuoro do not. Vern explains these different social outcomes in two stages, the first as the result of each population replicating its cultural assumptions about the typical trajectories of social relationships. Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi people both know that any social relationship is always subject to stress, but Nukuoro expect that it takes very little sustained stress before a relationship ruptures, while Kapingamarangi expect that relationships are robust, requiring a lot of stress to cause a rupture. Nukuoro expect a rupture to be permanent, while Kapingamarangi expect it to be temporary until some third person intervenes to bring people back together. Nukuoro replicate these assumptions in long histories of people falling out with one leaving, never to return. The dispersal of Nukuoro living on land leased to their chief by the Japanese in 1917 is a recent example of a long-standing pattern. The stability of the resettled Kapingamarangi community after a number of potentially schismatic disputes replicates an equally long standing pattern of relationship. The second stage takes his cultural explanation of this pair of cases as a special case of a more general process for understanding historical change. The process takes an information theoretic approach to historical events as distinct from a linear approach where event A results in event B, which results in event C. Carroll asks, given events A and B, what alternative events, say C, D, E, and F might have occurred? What constraints did A and B pose that made D, E and F less likely to occur than C? For example, why is (what constraints render) reconciliation after a rupture less likely for Nukuoro than walking away and never looking back? The basic assumption here is that in any entropic universe, predictability is the result of order, which is always less likely than disorder. Order is the result of placing constraints on otherwise random events such that one is more likely than others. The observer's job is to identify the constraints that render some events more and other events less likely. Vern's contribution to systems theories is the identification of cultural constraints as necessary and sometimes sufficient to explain historical events. History may not repeat itself, but patterns of constraint commonly do. In the early 1970s, Vern became interested in carnivale as a cultural representation of the social orders of the communities that maintain and reproduce them. The possibilities for comparing communities through ethnographic comparison of these productions fascinated Vern, and he applied for grant money to conduct ethnographic research. For the first time, he did not receive grant funding, which was a great personal disappointment for him. He pursued the research on his own, although hampered by a lack of resources. This kind of work did become common after the mid-1970s. The innovation that has most affected Vern's colleagues and discipline has been the design and execution of his vision of conducting ethnographic comparison through face-to-face conversation. This design eschews academic presentation and responses to the presentation, a kind of adult show-and-tell, in favor of pre-circulating ethnographic presentations to participants, who have a extended conversations based on questions that the presentations raise. Written presentations focus on a topic that participants have agreed on, and subsequent conversation identifies what the ethnographic cases have in common, what they don't, and why. The symposium volume that presents these collaborative presentations and discussions is the final step of the ASAO format. This is what Vern's design tries to accomplish, and the way he originally planned its execution was to begin with a session organizer who gets a group of scholars together to share data and ideas about a topic, say adoption. The organizer uses the precirculated papers to generate an agenda for discussion over a two day period. Vern tried out his idea in 1965 by inviting colleagues to meet to discuss adoption in Oceania. Vern arranged to convene the symposium at University of California at Santa Cruz, hosted by Roger Keesing, head of the Pacific Studies Center at UCSC in 1967. Two problems became clear at that first symposium. First, conversation quickly became stilted, difficult, and sometimes excruciating. The fact was that we had never had the experience of conversing in a group about an ethnographic issue for an extended period without the security blanket that presenting papers affords. We did not have a clue about how to talk to each other. That we produced a volume from this (which Vern had arranged with University of Hawaii Press) is still a mystery to me, except for the fact that it was Vern who would not allow it not to happen. The second problem was organizational. It is difficult to create and sustain a tradition of collaborative comparison when one-per-year is the limit, and when the meeting depends on the limited resources (and interests) of a single unit of a single institution. Vern realized this to be the case and understood that promoting this kind of collaboration demanded organizational support that no university could or would provide. He had proposed a new organization in 1969 and precipitated a heated debate that resulted in general agreement that a new, stand-alone organization was necessary. The result was ASAO, a non-profit incorporated in Washington State in 1972. It needs to be said here that ASAO has not fundamentally changed since 1967. It is still a refuge for collaborative research and analysis in an academic universe that gives lip service but little encouragement to collaboration. The session organizers remain the engines that drive the vehicle, and they retain all of the power that they need to make comparative anthropology happen. The session organizer can do anything he or she wants to do with a session, from choosing the topic of discussion to organizing discussion and discussion formats, closing the session or opening it to any interested person. ASAO's board of directors and officers are basically a support staff for session organizers, taking care of the logistics of creating and maintaining edifying conversations. It is the session organizers that have introduced new formats: Mac Marshall's idea of the working session and Bob McKnight's informal session. Alternative publication outlets, including journals and publishers other than the ASAO Monograph Series are also session organizers' innovations. It is Vern Carroll's organizational genius that allowed all of this to happen. He sustained our halting and sometimes clumsy efforts long enough for us to finally learn how to talk to one another. ASAO is his lasting monument. David C. Gross Funeral Homes, Belcher Road Chapel in Clearwater is serving the family. Service Information