Juno Salazar Parreñas - K. Sivaramakrishnan Reflection

Juno Salazar Parreñas
Cornell University

I’m ever so grateful for Shivi. When I got the offer letter from Agrarian Studies in early 2012, I was a misfit in the anthropology department at Harvard. It was a department undergoing a divorce between its biological and social wings. As a grad student in that time, that department felt like  feudal Scotland in the era of Macbeth where you were a serf in a professor’s minor fiefdom. You worked only with your lord or lady and no one else! While I was deep in the humanities fringe, my work on orangutans and the people caring for them in Sarawak on Malaysian Borneo didn’t make sense to most of the social anthropologists. So I was especially surprised when a very senior Asianist colleague who was not on my committee told me that Shivi enthusiastically spoke about my work to him.  Even before I met Shivi, he was already so supportive!

Being quite green at the time, I really needed that space of agrarian studies and its workshop environment to grow by reading, listening, and giving feedback. I was shamelessly naïve then and remember asking him for advice about applying for a critical development studies job and asking him, what’s critical development studies? And he answered me seriously!

Shivi was always gentle but direct. After bombing on that year’s tenure track job market, I applied for every postdoc under the sun, including one that Shivi was hiring. Shivi had to share the sad news that I didn’t get that postdoc and that it went to someone else (who was coincidentally a really good friend of mine and she of course completely deserved it!). He told me while we were walking to a lunch that he treated me to and in which we talked at length about my writing. That kind of gentle, forthright support is something that has stayed with me over the years and something I am trying to emulate now as a mentor and advisor.

In job interviews, when asked to describe my mentorship style, I always think about Shivi and how he had a file associated with each of his mentees so that whenever we met, he’d have a record to jump back into.

More so than any of my PhD committee members or postdoc mentors, I could talk with Shivi about the material conditions of academic work: of what one needs to do to get tenure, of the business of offer letters and appointment terms. My PhD advisor had passed away before I got my current job and Shivi was a key person in my corner with whom I could strategize in my negotiations. I remember him telling me a phrase in Tamil. I think it was something like, 'you get there eventually.’

I know too well that retirement isn’t guaranteed and I’m so glad that Shivi gets to enjoy that, knowing that all his quiet support has so many powerful ripple effects far beyond its point of origin.