Richard A. Barrett

I was born in San Fernando, California. Attended public schools there and graduated from San Fernando High in 1956. I now think that I didn't absorb a great deal in my early education because I was surprised by all that I didn't

know as a freshman at UCLA. Fortunately, I realized something was amiss and education and learning became my passion for the next two years. This period was interrupted when a childhood friend sent me Albert Camus' novel, The Stranger, with the laconic note "Ya shld read this. Kinda interesting." I did read it in one entirely absorbed day

and decided that life was absurd and ultimately meaningless. So what to do? Well quit school of course. Why struggle to make good grades on exams that were doubly absurd if life itself was absurd! So I joined the U.S. Army. I reasoned that the army would give me plenty of time to think about the meaninglessness of life. Once

released from the service, I traveled to Spain and enrolled in a course for foreign students at the University of Madrid. I spent almost a year there; became fluent in Spanish, met a Japanese woman studying in the same program and married her in Gibraltar. Came back to the U.S. with my wife, reentered UCLA and earned a BA with

a concentration in anthropology. Graduated (1964) Summa Cum Laude, was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa and won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for graduate study. That same year I entered the graduate program in anthropology at the University of Michigan. Earned a Masters Degree in 1965 and was awarded a National Institutes of Mental Health fellowship for two years. In 1967 I was made part of a Ford Foundation grant for my anthropological fieldwork in Benabarre, Spain (1967-68). Fieldwork completed, I returned to the U.S. and accepted a teaching position at Temple University. Taught there for two years, finished my doctoral dissertation and earned my PhD from the University of Michigan in 1970. My son, Kenji, was born that year and I accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico. I taught there until I retired in 1992. In that period I published two books: Benabarre:The Modernization of a Spanish Village; and Culture and Conduct: An Excursion in Anthropology. My most recent book, Tales from a Spanish Village, was published in 2010. I was divorced from my wife in 1979 and two years later married my present wife, Dottie Barrett, an accomplished cellist, marvelous hostess and delightful companion.