Dear Dean Huskey,

Thank you for supporting my work as a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at the of Virginia and for funding my language studies in Bambara at Indiana University in the summer of 1993. My work in Bambara became more useful in my dissertation research than I could have imagined. I went to the Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa in October of '93 to study Frenchlanguage theater in Abidjan, a city of between three and four million people. When C.I.'s president died in December of '93, actors stopped performing for a long mourning period. So I decided to go to the northwestern Jula region of Odienné to study in a rural association of northern hunters. They spoke Jula, a language mutually intelligible with I had studied. Interestingly, these hunters had also become anticrime agents in cities and towns. In fact, shortly after my arrival in Odienné, the government began to suppress their activities.

Photographer Richard Yilémnabin Ouédraogo took this photo of several hunters and myself in the Ivoirian city of SanPédro, a large port far from the Ivoirian north where the hunters' association had originated. Northern hunters had arrived in SanPédro decades earlier as labor migrants. They had invited me to see how were organizing their anticrime patrols and had hired a photographer for the occasion. I was a popular oddity; how could I say no to a few photos, even though I had a fever and dysentery.? Little did I know that we would pose for pictures for nearly two hours!

As an encore, the hunters summoned reporters from several national newspapers who wanted to me. Given the hunters' delicate position, I had to be careful how I answered questions. The reporters asked me if I had been initiated into the associationindeed I had been, thus my costume-and, if so, if I had not contradicted my own religious faith. Hunters make sacrifices to the spirit of their association's founder; Muslims and Evangelical Christians had begun to attack them for this. Perhaps my vision of God is broader than that of the hunters' critics," I said. The reporters also asked if I had participated in the hunters' anticrime patrols and what opinion I had of their legality. I replied that my status as a foreigner prevented me from in matters of Ivoirian national security, and I referred the question to the more capable senior hunters in our midst. They saluted my evasion by blowing their hunting whistles in unison. Afterwards, we ended a long day with a surprisingly delicious meal of bat meat and rice.

A week or two later, one of the SanPédro photos appeared with my interview in an Ivoirian newspaper, Ivoir'Soir. Not only, then, did I have the chance to ask questions and take notes about life in C.I., in both Jula and French, Ivoirians also had the opportunitynot only in SanPédro, but on countless occasions elsewhere- to ask me questions and make a record of my visit. We thus learned both from and about each other. Thank for helping make that possible.

Sincerely,

Joseph Hellweg