Your name is John Luke Matthews. Shouldn’t Mark feel slighted? Well actually Luke’s not a legal name. John Matthews was the name given to me by my father when he adopted me a long time ago. I started out with a fully Japanese Okinawan name. I became John Matthews. And then in high school because I don’t have a middle name a friend of mine named Mark decided it would be a hoot to call me Luke. And so I became Luke. This was before Star Wars. It was a very rare name at the time. So I was the only Luke around. And then 1977 rolls around and every rugrat in the world is named Luke. And so I always say it’s a great name for a Buddhist kid, isn’t it? John Luke Matthews. You’re Buddhist? I adopted Zen Buddhism a little later, around high school or so. I’m not Buddhist now. I always describe myself as a flaming materialist. I’m not particularly religious anymore. You’re born Okinawan? Yes, I’m born Okinawan. I lived there til I was two months shy of 18 years old. Then we moved to the States. We moved to my dad’s little hometown in rural southern Georgia. We went from relatively urban Japan to rural southern Georgia, a town of about 800 people. I lived there for probably six months until the culture shock really freaked me out. I joined the Army as a way of getting out. Since then I’ve bounced around the country. Were your parents the typical American serviceman and Okinawan wife? Yeah, pretty much. My mom was in the war. It arrived when she was 13. She survived that and got her mother and grandmother through it and rebuilt their lives. She met my dad. They both moved to southern Georgia and dragged us kids along. My brother stayed because he was too young to leave. I got out as soon as I could. What’s your Okinawan name? Can I write it for you? [Reaches for notebook. Writes “Kuniyoshi Akira.”] Do you ever go by that name in other contexts? No, not really. Some of my friends know that name and might call me Mr. Kuniyoshi on occasion because it sounds exotic. [laughs] As Matthew would sound exotic in Japan. Did you say you’re adopted? Well, it’s kind of a funny thing. There’s family stories that I’m adopted and family stories that I’m not. And I’ve never been able to chase them down. They’re very closed, they’re very private about that stuff. So there’s a lot of mystery there. I’ve got paperwork to show my citizenship and everything else. So after 40 years I’m still thinking how do I figure this all out? I need to go back to Japan and look into the legal records there. You know your mother is your birth mother? Oh, yeah. But you’re not sure your birth father? Yeah, you know family resemblances. I look at my brother and he looks like my father. He walks like my dad. He talks like my dad. His coloration is like my dad. And then me, I look like my mother. I don’t look like my dad. If you were to design a triathlon that you’d be assured of winning, what would be the events? Three things you do exceptionally well. I’m almost reluctant to talk about this. The simplest thing is I read. A lot. I read remarkably fast. I’ve read a lot. I’ve been known to go through a [350-page book] in a day. This is something I started doing in graduate school because you have to read so much, and go for comprehension at the same time. Friends of mine never want to read anything with me because I’ll be done on the first day and they’re still on the first chapter at the end of the week. I like to think I’m a good teacher. I love teaching. I fell in love with it during grad school when I got a TAship and I’ve loved it ever since. Whether or not I do it well I guess you’d have to talk to my students. I’m bumping into them all over town. When I came in [to Mermaid Coffee Shop] the barrista is a former student who went on to get a BA in anthropology. I hadn’t seen her in years. So, reading, teaching … Any party tricks? No [laughs]. I’m pretty comfortable with technology? I don’t know. We’ll call it good. You mentioned your love of teaching. Why teach at the community college level? I love MATC. I started out my college career at a community college in Pittsburg. This was immediately after the Army. I love the whole second-chance feel of the community college. So many of my students come out of families that have never been to college. I love my students, the ones who slacked off in high school because it was sort of boring for them, they didn’t see the point and then they took a year off or two and they come back to MATC. If I can turn those guys on, they’ll say, ‘Oh, here’s a guy who really loves anthropology.’ If I can provide that spark, that second-chance feeling about community college, I love that. Let’s get to the throwing things in class story. Okay, I was trying to explain the idea of the word arbitrary, that the meaning of words is not emergent from the word itself. This is a cup but there’s nothing cuplike about the word itself. So to demonstrate there’s nothing cuplike about the word cup – I used a chair – there’s nothing chairlike about the word chair, so I threw a chair and showed it didn’t make a chair sound when it hit the floor. So that just cemented that idea in people’s heads. Former students will come back and demand that I do that lecture. It’s like, okay, it doesn’t fit what I’m talking about. When was the first chair tossed? It must have been 1998. I started in 1997 but that first semester I was afraid of being too wild and crazy so I didn’t throw much. Pretty much every semester, someone asks for it? Yes, it seems to be pretty much word of mouth. There’s one class, my introduction to cultural anthropology class, it happens there just to make that point about arbitrariness. But I teach other classes where it doesn’t fit and I don’t do it there. People just associate it with me now. Have you thrown other things? I don’t know if I should tell you. I threw a spear in class and left a hole in the wall. I was demonstrating Paleolithic hunting techniques and I have a spear and a spearthrower. I just tossed it across the room and hit the drywall and stuck in the wall. Did you hear from administrators? No. Although I may now! This was years and years ago. They’ve probably refurbished that room. I couldn’t bring that spear to campus now with the no weapons rules. I try to keep my classrooms interesting and light. We talk about a lot of serious things, you know anthropology you deal with things global poverty. But if you have to keep it light and interesting, throw a joke in every now and then. In the field of anthropology, what are some unanswered questions that keep you interested and engaged? What I love about anthropology is that it gives me lots of opportunities to talk about what it means to be a human being and that’s a question we’ve been trying to answer since before Plato and Socrates. And so those kinds of questions that we never quite get around to answering but it’s important to ask the question and try. I try to do that with my students, to point out that the point really isn’t to memorize what kind of kinship the Iroquois have or whatever, but it’s to use that as a vechile to think about what it means to be a human being. What’s our responsibility as human beings in the midst of the fact we have these choices about how we live. I’m always asking them to challenge their assumptions. One of the things that irritates my students right away is that whatever they say, I try to pull the rug out from under them. I have to keep pulling them out until they get used to having them pulled out. You got your Master’s degree from UW-Madison and have taught for years at MATC. What about the other place does each place not understand well enough? I think there’s an idea at the university that we’re just a little college, that we don’t quite measure up. Most universities do look down their noses at the community colleges in their midst. UW faculty here tends to look down their noses at the UWW faculty or UWM faculty. It’s this ego contest that goes on. A lot of my students have talked to me when come back about how when they go to the university people act as if they shouldn’t take MATC seriously as if our classes aren’t as rigorous.