Doppelgangers
During the process of writing my thesis, I found something weird. When I was doing my literature review about indigenous politics I realize there were two pairs of doppelgangers. The first couple was composed by John Gledhill, a former professor at the University of Manchester, and John Gledhill, a professor at Oxford. It would be enough if their names were the same, but it doesn’t end there. They also shared academic interests!
The first John Gledhill, the true one for me, is a well-recognized anthropologist. In the nineties, he did fieldwork in Michoacán, the region where I’m interested. He published works on the impacts of neoliberalism and political inestability in México. More recently he has written about indigenous autonomies, their difficulties with the State, and with criminal groups. On the other hand, the younger John Gledhill is an internationalist and professor of Global Governance in the Department of International Development. His research focuses on the topics of conflict, peace, and resistance. He has published about globalization, war, and peace-making. Both share an interest in international politics and difficult settings, and also they both are looking for ways to improve the environments where they work.
The other pair of doppelgangers are Jeffrey W. Rubin and Jeffrey Z. Rubin. I like how they differentiate from each other only by their middle name initials. “W” Rubin (again, the real one for me) is a professor of history at Boston University. According to his profile on the BU website, “W” Rubin researches “Latin American history with a focus on the historical and cultural origins of grassroots activism and the ways in which social movements contribute to the deepening of democracy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”. While “W” research Latin American history of democracies and activisms, “Z” Rubin was a renamed psychologist from Harvard interested in peace, negotiation, and resolution of conflict. Those interests connect him directly with one of the previous Gledhills, the younger one.
Finally, although I didn’t use the works of internationalist John Gledhill nor the ones by “Z” Rubin, I did use the theoretical works by sociologist Randall Collins about conflict and negotiation. For me, this is enough evidence that the developments in one discipline are parallels to the developments in others. Maybe we’re all working on the same project. Anthropologists, internationalists, historians, sociologists, and who knows who more, are in the same endeavor of understanding the world and making it a better place. Maybe the only thing we need to do is look out for our doppelgangers.
