My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century

* Winner: International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Outstanding Book Award 2016 *

＂My father was born into war,＂ begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston’s intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth-century social history. This is an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations--and wars. It is a daughter’s moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded, and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar’s reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory. This book is for Anthropology and Sociology courses in qualitative methods, ethnography, violence, migration, and ethnicity.

Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and author or editor of seven books including the graphic novel, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning (illustrated by Charlotte Corden). A Long-Term Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality (2020-present), she served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. She is editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography for Berghahn Books. Professor Waterston is author of two ethnographies on urban poverty in the US (Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence and Street Addicts in the Political Economy), and of the edited volumes, An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline and Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing (co-edited with Maria D. Vesperi).