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From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Date: Jan 30, 2006 4:26 AM
Subject: [Vsg] Nicholas Gubser?
Hi all,
I wonder if any of us have crossed paths in or around Viet Nam with an
anthropologist, Nicholas Gubser, or with his publications.
Last week in New Haven at a social event I met a Viet Nam veteran who
was surprised that I hadn't heard of Gubser. Apparently he was
well-known around Yale for his involvement in VN during the war.
I find that he is author of a 1965 Yale University Press book, "The
Nunamiut Eskimos, hunters of caribou". But he doesn't have any other
books listed under his name.
Before I look for articles, at AAS resources, and then the indexes of
books on the Army and CIA in VN, I would like to ask what any of us know
about Nicholas Gubser's career.
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 07:25:56 -0500
From: "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Nicholas James Gubser, b. 1938
Hi all,
It's helpful to find that no one has heard of Gubser, not even David
Marr, Charles Keyes and Oscar Salemink. Gubser will be making a brief
appearance in my dissertation, one of many figures from the false
starts and dead ends of Vietnamese studies in the US.
We wrote some terrific books in the 40s and 50s and early 60s, but the
authors appear from nowhere and vanish. Gubser is a case of what might
have been.
His Yale University Press ethnography of Alaskan subsistence hunters is
terrific. He submitted it as a senior thesis in 1962 and finished it
as a Rhodes Scholar in 1964, publishing in 1965. The book doesn't engage
in the theory of his day, but in observed detail and the ethnographic
record. It is still used by leading researchers like Bruce Winterhalder.
The introduction to the book is by Murdock, the Human Relations Area
Files man. Gubser wrote the thesis under Pospisil, the anti-Marxist
ethnographer of law generally and New Guinea in particular. Campbell
paid for the fieldwork, helped along by the arch-conservative university
administrator DeVane, and the individualist Scholars of the House program at Yale.
This is elite stuff. Another Scholar of the House of a few years before was Tom Enders, the man who bombed Cambodia. There was a Charles S. Gubser (R, CA)in the House from 53-74, who supported civil rights, opposed Asian immigration, investigated My Lai, and resigned rather
than face the Eugene McCarthy wave.
Further back, there was a Harlan Gubser involved in the 1930s with
Alaskan affairs, especially reindeer. In our day, there is a Peter
Gubser, who graduated from the same residential college at Yale two
years after Nicholas, who is a scholar on Jordan, running a foundation
in DC.
I don't yet know if these are grandfather, father and brother, uncle
and
cousin to Nicholas or not, but that would just be icing on the cake.
He
is a man of ability and position.
One member of the Rhodes class before his is David Souter, the Supreme
Court justice. The class after includes Josiah Bunting, now president
of Guggenheim, and the celebrated novelist John Edgar Wideman. It
would have been great to have Gubser around for the last forty years
throwing some weight for Vietnamese studies.
"The only way we are going to find out what is going in Viet Nam is to
go there," he told an Officer's Candidate School classmate at Benning
in
1967. Then, according to his friend, Gubser went Airborne/Ranger. I
don't know what he did from 1964 to 1967 or what he did in the war.
Since he was already so good at walking around in the woods with a
rifle and a friend or two, speaking a language he had just learned,
strategizing about how to kill other animals and stay alive, I expect
he went to work in the highlands with Special Forces.
But my Green Beret lifer friends have never heard of him, so maybe not.
Since he went to Yale I expect he worked with the CIA. But I don't
find him in the Times files of Army/CIA scandals in the highlands.
So I got his address from the alumni office and sent him a letter in
Colorado, where the retired Congressman who might be his father also
lives. Nicholas shows up on Google as an alpinist still active in the
1990s.
But everyone I know personally in Colorado is there to get over the
Viet Nam war, because they leave you alone. So he might not write back.
Next time I am in New Haven I will go ask Pospisil and Conklin, his
teachers, who this anthropologist was and what he did in Viet Nam.
Meanwhile, if that sketch reminds any of you of some news, please let
me know.
Dan
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Date: Feb 21, 2006 5:39 AM
Subject: [Vsg] Nicholas James Gubser, b. 1938
Hi, I have had some replies about Nicholas Gubser, the anthropologist
who went to Viet Nam as a soldier and seems to have vanished from public
life, as described in the fuller acount below.
Here's an update. Someone who knew him as Nick, but has lost track of
him, confirms that Dr. Peter Gubser is his brother, and that Nicholas
has a son, Steven Gubser, who is a professor of physics at Princeton.
Moreover, this informant says Nicholas wrote a novel about his time in
Viet Nam.
Forgotten one-off novels by cadet members of the establishment who got
derailed by that war have been a constant interest of mine for decades,
but I have never heard of one by Gubser. There is none listed in
Worldcat, or in the catalogue to the LaSalle collection of Imaginative
Representations of the Viet Nam War.
I have asked its curator, John Baky, and will call David Willson,
retired from Green River Community College. I have forgotten the name
of the other eminent bibliographer of this stuff, but he lives in
Colorado, so maybe he knows Gubser himself.
My subsistence ethnographer friends say they have never heard of him. I
was wrong about Gubser's book - its life is more among readers and
undergraduate courses than in research bibliographies. But one contact
gave names of some older colleagues who would know about an Arctic
ethnographer who got involved with military or intelligence in Viet Nam.
My purpose in communicating this progress is to keep shaking the tree.
Anyone know anything about this man? Sooner or later I will be
descending on his friends, classmates, family, teachers and colleagues.
Cop stuff - talk to a lot of people, get a little from them all and a
whole lot from one or two. I reason that another Yalie author
anthropologist is fair game for this kind of treatment.
But I would rather deal first with someone who comes forward. The man
himself hasn't written back yet.
Thanks for your consideration -
Dan
From: jon mcintyre <jon.mcintyre@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 21, 2006 8:46 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nicholas James Gubser, b. 1938
Dan, I don't know if it's any help. In our library we also have a book he (and his wife? a
Mary Gubser) published in 1986 entitled Back to the Damn Soil.
-Jon
From: Gilbert <mgilbert@ngcsu.edu>
Date: Feb 21, 2006 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nicholas James Gubser, b. 1938
Is the name Dan Duffy coud not recall that of John Clark Pratt?
John's email address is jcpratt@lamar.colostate.edu
In return, could Dan give me David Two Els Willson's phone numbe? I
have misplaced it.
Marc
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu> >
Date: Feb 24, 2006 5:01 AM
Subject: [Vsg] Nicholas Gubser
Just a small update. I've heard enough from some friends of the
anthropologist who went to Viet Nam with the US Army to suggest that the
reason he vanishes from the public record after an illustrious start is
that he decided to do his own thing. I'm as reluctant to bother someone
like that as I was eager to nail down the facts on a scientist who had
joined the spooks. So I won't be pushing hard on this. If he walks in
with the ms. of a novel about an ethnographer on military duty in Viet
Nam, I will let you all know.
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu> >
Date: Feb 24, 2006 5:01 AM
Subject: [Vsg] Nicholas Gubser
Just a small update. I've heard enough from some friends of the
anthropologist who went to Viet Nam with the US Army to suggest that the
reason he vanishes from the public record after an illustrious start is
that he decided to do his own thing. I'm as reluctant to bother someone
like that as I was eager to nail down the facts on a scientist who had
joined the spooks. So I won't be pushing hard on this. If he walks in
with the ms. of a novel about an ethnographer on military duty in Viet
Nam, I will let you all know.
Just a small update. I've heard enough from some friends of the
anthropologist who went to Viet Nam with the US Army to suggest that
the reason he vanishes from the public record after an illustrious start
is that he decided to do his own thing. I'm as reluctant to bother
someone like that as I was eager to nail down the facts on a scientist who
had joined the spooks. So I won't be pushing hard on this. If he walks
in with the ms. of a novel about an ethnographer on military duty in
Viet Nam, I will let you all know.
Dan
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