Encounter with a Angry God - Reflections of my Life with John Peabody Harrington

By: Carobeth Laird

Encounter With an Angry God is the story of the author's life with John Peabody Harrington, controversial linguist-ethnographer (whose lifetime data on American Indian tribes filled whole warehouses) from the time when, as an eager 19-year-old student, she met him unhappily teaching a summer linguistics class and looking, she thought romantically, "like an angry god." Bedazzled by "a scholar, a scientist, who was also young and beautiful," she was willingly drawn into his orbit. As his bride, for some time the romantic haze obscured the fact that, in his obsession for collecting Indian language data, he regarded any activity that took him away from his fieldwork as a waste of time, and that as well as being brilliant, he was also penurious, insensitive, and endlessly demanding. With the perspective of many years, she writes that he had "no deliberate cruelty; neither ever a trace of empathy or compassion." He could leave a young, fearful, eight-months pregnant wife alone in a strange Indian rancheria without money or sufficient food while a supposedly four-day trip stretched into two weeks (because on his way home he had found a man who would make metal files for his notes and he wanted to supervise the job), then wonder, when he finally returned, why his wife was upset and seemed to blame him for something. The role of wifely helpmeet would become an increasingly thankless and monumental task. "She would type, act as chauffeur, make contacts he wished to avoid -- do anything and everything he found boring, frightening, embarrassing, or time consuming." Then, when she had proven her ability, he sent her unwillingly to do fieldwork on her own, and in doing so, lost her.

• Format: Hardcover
• ISBN: B000KDHXAM
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Malki museum Press
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.1"