Thursday, May 18, 2023
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Remembering Ossy
Oswald Werner (1928-2023)
I am so sorry to hear about the passing of Oswald Werner. “Ossy” was a long-time friend, colleague, mentor and professor who I first met as a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University in September 1968. Ossy joined the department in 1963 and so I came to know him first as a professor and then later as a participant in the creation of the Northwestern University Program in Ethnography and Public Policy (“NUPEPP”). This was a forward-thinking graduate training program, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, that stressed the value of ethnography in examining community, institutional and policy-making processes and settings. Later, in 1982, when I joined the department as a faculty member Ossy became an important mentor and colleague who was always available to help with whatever issues I had as a new faculty member and also to think together about the practice of ethnography and ways to impart this approach to undergraduate and graduate students. Ossy and June also provided wonderful support to me, and my husband John (also a graduate of the NU Anthropology department), as we became new parents at almost the same time as I began teaching at NU. Our daughter, Lauren (who is now 40), still remembers Ossy teaching her how to pronounce the Navajo word for hello, “Yá'át'ééh,”
In 1973 Ossy founded the Northwestern Ethnographic Field School which operated until 1994 and provided opportunities in the summer for undergraduate and graduate anthropology students to participate in and contribute to programs and activities in Latino and Indigenous communities in New Mexico and Arizona. As illustrated by the curriculum which he developed for the field school Ossy was passionate about the need to develop ways to describe cultural systems of knowledge and he was specifically concerned with understanding and documenting Navaho terms for, and conceptions of, illness and disease. This led to the development of what is still an ongoing program, The Navaho Ethno-Medical Encyclopedia Project. Ossy preferred the use of the term “consultants,” as opposed to “informants,” to describe his relationship to the people with whom he worked. Here he was ahead of his time in his preference for a term that emphasized partnership rather than hierarchy in fieldwork relationships. He was also ahead of his time in terms of proposing in 1984 the various ways that personal computers could be used for recording, managing and analyzing field material. And, he was an early adopter of email using the AOL format (which he never stopped using!).
When Ossy retired in 1998 the Department created the Oswald Werner Prize for Distinguished Honors Thesis in Anthropology to honor the many research, teaching, fieldwork training and administrative contributions that Ossy made as a faculty member for 35 years in the Department. This included serving as Chair from 1978-1983 and 1987-1989; and also, as already mentioned, as Founder and Director of the Northwestern University Ethnographic Field School. This prize specifically recognized Ossy’s ardent support of undergraduate research and in July 2021 I sent him an email with the titles of all of the “Ossy Prize” winners from 2010-2021 to illustrate the diversity of topics that his prize had supported over this time period. Ossy appreciated receiving this list and reported that he found it difficult to believe that it had been over twenty years since he retired from Northwestern. I will be happy to send this list to anyone who would like to see it, just email me at hsjsls@northwestern.edu. I am also very thankful that he will continue to be remembered and honored by the awarding of this prize every year by the Department.
I feel very fortunate to have benefited from Ossy’s many acts of kindness, graciousness, generosity, advice and wisdom to me over the last 55 years. He will be greatly missed but also, importantly, remembered and honored by a network of family, friends and colleagues all over the world. These networks will continue to share Ossy’s ideas as well as his humor and also his haikus and our lives and work will most definitely be enhanced because we knew Ossy.
May 17, 2023
Helen B. Schwartzman
Professor Emerita of Anthropology
Northwestern University
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