ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the narrative of a life in which anthropology has been the lens through which it all made sense. In the 1950s, Barbara Olsen grew up in a one-room cabin without running water and attended a one-room school. When she finally received her doctorate at age forty-four, colleges had fewer anthropology departments and more graduates were becoming practicing anthropologists. As an advertising executive, she was an aberration to her colleagues, ahead of her time using anthropology to solve marketing problems, while to the Marxist anthropology faculty at her graduate school she was a capitalist entrepreneur. However, an esoteric career like anthropology was for wealthy dilettantes, not children of factory workers, and she got a depressing job as a caseworker for the department of social welfare in New York City in 1968. Night classes in anthropology at the New School and art classes at the School of Visual Arts provided a balance to corporate life.
