Don't Make Me Over

This is a memoir by anthropologist Nancy Sullivan about working and living in Papua New Guinea for 24 years, where she is also married and raising children. Prompted by personal memories, the essays are episodic but also invoke some basic anthropological theory in a way that makes it accessible and applicable to the general reader. She writes about neurophilosophy, gender studies, pop psychology, behaviorism and a raft of other pop science fields that have begun to encroach on the space Margaret Mead once carved out for anthropology in the popular imagination. This is an attempt to reclaim some of that space and authority through a witty, insightful memoir about being an anthropologist.