Wende suggests that I "point to the books that specifically influenced you to take one path over another"

Often the experience is one of enticement to put my attention in a particular direction, with the consequence that I make some change in trajectory and/or vector. As soon as I start thinking of candidates others come to mind, from various phases of my life, so I'll try to put them in order and see if there's a single Narrative that emerges.

• Betsy and I both were profoundly influenced by The Family of Man, back in the 1950s. The many hours of poring over the photographs sealed me into an internationalist state of being, which led eventually to Anthropology as a discipline. The realization was of the form "I could do that..." which Betsy reported for her encounter with Ansel Adams, but in my case the realization was not (then) primarily photographic, but more concerned with understanding the glorious variety of humankind.

• the books of my high school years don't seem to have been path-defining, and there's no single one that I landed upon that spun me around (no Holden Caulfield, no Kerouac, no Ayn Rand). Some of that sort of one-path-over-another did happen musically in those years, for sure (heading me to ethnic/world/folk territory; that first Joan Baez record...).

• it wasn't until Harvard days that my reading led me to start choosing paths. The best analogy might be to a pinball machine: here you are rolling along down a chute and a flipper sends you off on a new vector and bells ring and the score goes up... and then another flipper and another crazy ride into different territory... And it wasn't the reading I was supposed to be doing but somehow Nevil Shute's The Checkerboard fell into my hands and I was briefly transfixed by Burma (which was at the time inaccessible) and then my sister in law Marjanna introduced me to the work of Jan de Hartog, specifically The Spiral Road, which is set in Indonesia when it was the Dutch East Indies.

• At much the same time (fall 1962) I answered an ad for a Research Assistant to Robert B. Textor, who was doing a Cross-Cultural project. The ensuing two years saw a slow-motion turn to one path over another, culminating with Peace Corps. Many details...

• And there were photography books that vastly influenced the direction of work with images. The Photographer's Eye (1966) probably was the inflection point.

• During the 1965-1967 time in Sarawak I read two from the book locker that fundamentally altered my perspective and direction: Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands and James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which, combined with what I was seeing in Sarawak, led me to begin to think about regions as entities—a global distribution of spatial entities that interconnect and evolve...

• Stanford 1967-1972 many many books, but three stand out as influencing the path taken:
  • The Whole Earth Catalog ("Access to Tools") Vademecum if ever there was...:
  • Buckley's Sociology and Modern Systems Theory which gave me the vocabulary to talk about interconnection and evolutionary development
  • Spatial Organization: the Geographer's View of the World pointed me to the how of seeing and studying those regions: tracking the numbers and distribution of...

• It was map serendipity that first suggested Nova Scotia to me as a locale for the fieldwork that makes an anthropologist into a real rabbit, but the book that sat at the fulcrum of the turn to that specific path was A Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1831), and one of the next I encountered was People of Cove and Woodlot, from Harvard's Sterling County Study of the 1950s and not unlike an ethnography. Of course you can do anthropology in Nova Scotia...

• Once in Nova Scotia in 1972, almost the first book I happened to pick up was the telephone directory for Southwestern Nova Scotia, arranged by exchange. It couldn't have taken 3 minutes of reading (yeah, right: reading the phone book... YCMTSU) for me to see long runs of surnames... 40% of the households in the Pubnico exchange had the surname "D'Entremont". I started counting, made a thick book of surnames-by-location, imagined maps of the distributions, found 1914 business directory, more lists, more maps imagined... led eventually to the first computer, so I could make those maps...

• Ann Berthoff's Forming/Thinking/Writing was the primary reason I went to a series of weekend writing-across-the-curriculum workshops at Bard College, and the resultant turn made me attend to my own writing and thinking as a process to be documented—the most important thing to come out of that sabbatical, and let loose a couple of years later as hypertext, which led to the work at Washington & Lee...

• and finally I'll cite Blurb as another turning point: the production of Bluenose Physiognomy (2015). Yes, I can produce and distribute books myself...