UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1349
HUTCHINSON, SHARON

HUTCHINSON, SHARON (1952-)
Professor Emerita of Anthropology
At UW: 1990-2011

Interviewed: 	2013 (1 session)
Interviewer: 	M. Crawford Young
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	1 hour, 30 minutes

Abstract: In her July 2013 interviews with Crawford Young, Sharon Hutchinson chronicles her education, family life, and career in anthropology.  She traces major influences on her skills as an anthropologist and details how she made critical choices about how to balance her career and family life.  She also reflects on African Studies and the anthropology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Finally, she discusses her research program from the 1980s to the late 2000s among the Nuer of southern Sudan, which included high profile international advocacy for southern Sudanese peoples and numerous academic publications.  This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.

Key Words: Carleton College; anthropology; Paul Riesman; University of Chicago; Sudan; the Nuer; Terence Turner; E. E. Evans-Pritchard; Foreign Language and Area Studies grants (FLAS); Jean Comaroff; John Comaroff; Nancy Munn; Raymond Smith; Steven Hutchinson; Ivan Karp; Steven Feierman; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Yale University; Nuer Dilemmas (1996); civil war in Sudan; Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir; Human Rights Watch; Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA); Jok Madut Jok; African Studies Program (ASP).

Note: A second portion of this interview, not included in this summary, has been restricted until January 1, 2023 may only be used with the express written permission of Sharon Hutchinson.

First Interview Session (July 23, 2013): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:17	Question: Talk about your family background. Answer: Hutchinson was born in Mamaroneck NY. She discussed how her happy childhood was interrupted by the separation of her parents, which placed upon her the role of messenger between her parents. She observed that this experience helped her develop skills she later used in anthropological fieldwork.

00:03:06	[no question] She discussed how she survived the situation at home through school, where she received encouragement and people acted rationally. She talked about her HS and choosing Carleton College because it was a long distance from home.

00:05:10	[no question] She recalled encountering financial difficulties at Carleton College because her father had failed to pay for her first year of schooling. She explained how she resolved this difficulty by spending a year in South Africa, after which she would return to Carleton. This was her first fieldwork.

00:08:13	[no question] She explained how she changed from a pre-med major to anthropology through her year in South Africa, and afterward was able to work her way through college. She credited Paul Riesman with being her first mentor in anthropology, a key influence on her early work and encouragement to go to graduate school.

00:10:39	[no question] She recounted applying to graduate school at the University of Chicago after taking a year to work and getting married. She remembered that, naively assuming Chicago’s African studies program would teach African languages and finding only Arabic available, she decided to move her interests to northern Africa.

00:12:50	[no question] She credited Terence Turner’s “Intensive Study of Culture” core course with sparking her interest in the Nuer people. She expanded her seminar paper for the course into her master’s thesis.  She also noted other influences she encountered at Chicago—the Comaroffs; Raymond Smith; Nancy Munn—particularly for allowing her latitude to do what kind of research she wanted.

00:16:05	[no question] She discussed being funded at the University of Chicago through the National Defense Foreign Languages program and then, after 2 years, being awarded a grant to study Arabic at American University in Cairo. While studying North Africa interested her, she increasingly felt that as a woman in Egypt her project would be limited by the level of access only afforded to men. 

00:19:41	[no question] She explained how during her year in Cairo, she sought out a Nuer student, who encouraged her to travel to southern Sudan. She detailed her trip there, where she found that the boundaries she’d encountered in Egypt didn’t exist. This led her to see the promise of a project with the Nuer, which she conducted after returning to Chicago to finish classwork.

00:24:00	Question: Family life during fieldwork? Answer: Hutchinson explained that her husband was writing his dissertation in comparative literature in Spain while she conducted her fieldwork in Sudan. He completed his dissertation in 1985 and taught at UW while she raised their children--after that, their children were old enough for her to feel comfortable pursuing a job. At this point, she received an offer from Yale, but when Steven couldn’t get a job near Yale, she was able to get a job at UW.

00:30:44	[no question] Hutchinson recalled being warned by Chicago colleagues not to study the Nuer because of Evans-Pritchard’s influence. But because others working in the area were vigorously debating Evans-Pritchard’s data, they took interest in her work.

00:34:06	Question: Talk about issues encountered during your dissertation fieldwork. Answer: Hutchinson explained that following the influential work of Evans-Pritchard, numerous other scholars had re-analyzed his “closed corpus” of data. Some of these, including Ivan Karp and Steven Feierman, were influential in getting her funding to do pre-dissertation work and fieldwork.

00:37:57	[no question] Continuing to talk about her fieldwork, she noted that she decided that if she were to follow Evans-Pritchard’s work, she would need to delve into a great many fields of analysis and look at regional variations.

00:41:18	[no question] She reflected on learning the Nuer language, having decided not to use a field assistant to translate for her. She discussed learning the language totally in context. This allowed her, she observed, to go on long walk-abouts, get to know many people and regions, and not develop a “lazy tongue” from people becoming used to her way of pronouncing the language.

00:46:01	Question: What challenges did parenting and having a two-career family pose? Answer: She said that in one’s academic career, the period between passing preliminary exams and finishing the dissertation offered some flexibility to parent small children (as opposed to being on the tenure clock), so she decided to have children while she was writing and her husband was working in the Spanish dept at UW-Madison (1985). She talked about challenges and blessings of this period.

00:51:47	[no question] She discussed finishing the dissertation in 1987, waiting to defend until she was ready to go on the job-market, and interviewing within days of her defense. She got an interview at Yale and explained how she was able to offer Steven a fellow-ship to allow the whole family to move to New Haven.

00:53:46	[no question] Continuing to reflect on this period, she said she put family first when her children were young.

00:54:35	[no question] She recounted how, just before the move to Yale, her husband Steven had medical issues that required he recover in Madison, after which he came to Yale. But when he could not initially find a job near Yale, after a second round of fieldwork in Sudan, and when she was offered a job at UW, they decided to move back to Madison. She discussed her concerns about being hired on merit, rather than as a spousal hire, and other advantages of being at UW compared to Yale.

01:00:19	[no question] She briefly noted that she’d never taken her children to south Sudan.

01:01:48	[Young and Hutchinson discuss which question to proceed with]

01:05:45	Question: Talk about Nuer Dilemmas and the civil war in Sudan. Answer: She answered why she had continued to do research in southern Sudan over a long period—being able to do deep anthropological research had required significant personal and professional investment (languages, time, etc).

01:09:39	[no question] She continued by observing that she was very aware during her fieldwork in 1982-83 that a civil war was brewing, wondering if she’d be able to complete her research before it blew up. Then when civil war broke out, it hit first in the area where she’d lived during her fieldwork. Thus she was determined to return to visit her Nuer contacts as soon as possible.

01:10:14	[no question] She described return trips between 1989 and 1992, just after Omar al-Bashir’s coup—initially a time when she was the only western researcher or journalist allowed into Khartoum. She recalled the intense experience of seeing southern Sudanese fleeing the south to Khartoum and her growing involvement with human rights watch organizations and humanitarian agencies as they sought her out for advice on Nuer regions. This caused her some crises in her own scholarship, but also opportunities since she was in some way the only one who could write about some of the things that were happening in southern Sudan.

01:15:56	[no question] She recalled her growing discomfort with the concept of the “Nuer” knowing that it was becoming an obstacle in internal Sudanese relations, especially between Nuer and Dinka. At this point, she said, she began doing parallel fieldwork with Jok Madut Jok about the two sides separated by military order. The effect of this was to confirm the importance of taking scholarly initiative from actual events on the ground, not from theoretical trends in the field.

01:19:43	[no question] She related her later involvement with a civilian protection monitoring team for the US State Dept, and how her research from the 1980s on accumulated a “massive archive” of information on war issues and processes of global change, confirming the serendipitous choice of southern Sudan as a field site. These global changes, she said, also shifted her teaching interests at UW, and the flexibility of anthropology allowed her to do this.

01:23:10	Question: Talk about work in the peace settlement in South Sudan. Answer: She related how unresolved tensions in Sudanese society surfaced after the 2005 peace settlement. Because the UN struggled to control this situation involving the Nuer White Army and the Murle of Jonglei, she was consulted to guide the peace process because of her deep knowledge of historical processes there.

01:26:18	Question: Talk about African Studies at UW. Answer: Hutchinson said that ASP had been a major draw for her when she came to UW. She discussed several major conferences she’d organized with the help of ASP resources, but noted that her colleagues had been the real blessing of ASP. She listed a number of key figures in the program who were supportive of her work.

01:30:30	End of First Interview Session (unrestricted)

End of Oral History #1349