irv devore

I heard yesterday that my friend and former advisor Irven DeVore died. He was important, amazing, charming, difficult, harsh, brilliant, fun, annoying. My relationship to him as an advisee and a friend was complex, important to me for many years, and formative. For those who don't know he was instrumental in developing several subfields of anthropology, including behavioral biology, primate behavioral studies, hunter-gatherer research, and even ethnoarchaeology. He was a cultural anthropologist who realized during his first field season that a) he was not cut out to be a cultural…

Under the present circumstances, it is clear that I now have to tell my one Welsh Corgi story. This is about a corgi named Dillon. Dillon was Irv and Nancy DeVore's Corgi. (Irv was my advisor in graduate school.) They had two corgi's, Dillon and another one with a similarly Welsh name that I can't recall at the moment. One or both of them came from amateur breeders whom I happen for entirely unrelated reasons to know, who in turn get their corgis directly from the Queen of England. Or the Queen of England gets her corgi's from them. I can never remember. Anyway, you all know what a…