ABSTRACT
My life as a sociologist has never been confined to the campus of the college or university with which I was affiliated, or to the city in which it was located; nor has it been circumscribed by the boundaries of the United States. However, throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the professional activities in which I was engaged greatly expanded in scope and geographical range, as well as in number. They entailed a ramifying succession of opportunities and responsibilities that included elections to offices and memberships on boards in an array of professional organizations; a variety of different sorts of lecturing and teaching undertakings throughout the country; and travel that carried me beyond the American, European, and African terrains with which I was familiar, to places as distant as China and Japan. It was also a time when I became the recipient of a number of honors, including several honorary degrees.
