People ask me with a too great frequency—what kind of an anthropologist are you anyway? How can you fit topics like language learning, high blood pressure, family planning, and shamanism in New Orleans together? How and why do you get to travel to or live in the Tirol in the European Alps, China, the Pacific islands of Micronesia, a housing development named Desire, and Charity Hospital or a Spiritual Church in New Orleans? What courses do you teach?

Long story, but I love fieldwork, writing, and teaching. I've been able to travel well on academic grant money, to live and conduct research in extraordinary places, and to find great publishers for the books I write. When I worked with the UNO International Studies Program, I taught in Austria, then founded and for many years directed a Field School in Cultural Anthropology at Brunnenburg Castle in the German-speaking area of northern Italy. I am fortunate to have been involved at both personal and professional levels with the explosive growth of the fields of medical anthropology and women's studies. I've had the opportunity to work with Wenner-Gren, the Social Science Research Council, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health. The complex intersections of these fields have led me to research on early child-bearing, gender, poverty, and AIDS—and to intensive collaborations with colleagues in the College of Urban and Public Affairs or CUPA.

Since the mid 1990s I have been absorbed in a series of projects on women's lives that grew out of connections to the programs in Women's Studies here at UNO. I wrote a textbook with teachers' guides—now in several successful editions—and a complementary collection of women's autobiographies. Recent projects include field research on anti-racism organizations and urban shamanism. These topics—women's lives, race, and magico-medical religions—have blended into the most recent book, Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau.

In the summer of 2003 I returned to Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia three decades after I first did fieldwork there and have completed a second edition of Nest in the Wind: An Anthropologist's Adventures on a Tropical Island. The combined experiences of traveling, research, and teaching have inspired me to a new project—a personal ethnography or ethno-autobiographical narrative with an assortment of titles—How I Got To Be White or Confederate Daughters and Voodoo Queens.

My only child, Marlowe, is a veterinarian. Happily divorced, I live in and keep alive an old Victorian house in Carrollton, a historic village within New Orleans proper.