Women Have Hair, Men Have Nicknames: Remembering Jay Dautcher

When I first created this blog ten years ago, I had trouble deciding on a name for it. So I called Jay Dautcher, my multi-talented polyglot musician-climber-anthropologist friend and fellow Berkeley anthropology Ph.D. who had been my go-to title crisis counselor for years. We had a long brainstorming session over Skype (back when that was a thing), and after he had grilled and goaded me for almost an hour about my vision for the site, and mercilessly shot down all of my corny, half-baked title suggestions, somehow the name of Dostoevsky came up and he suddenly blurted out "Notes from the Ethnoground." 

I said, "Jay, that's it! You're a genius."

And the rest, so they say, is history.

Jay Todd Dautcher was indeed a genius, and he left this world, tragically young and still in peak physical and mental condition, just over three years ago, victim of a uniquely severe allergic reaction caused by a rare immune system disease known as systemic mastocytosis that he himself, in typical Jay fashion, correctly diagnosed after months of inconclusive medical testing and his own obsessive online research. 

Jay on the beach near his home in Santa Cruz, 2018. Photo: Lyn Jefferey.

Jay was a child prodigy. He finished high school a year early and went on to take college-level math and science courses as well as foreign languages in Switzerland. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a degree in physics, and from there pursued a Master's in physics in China (and in Chinese!) at Peking University. Yet in the end, his passion for languages and cultural immersion outstripped his natural talent for math and science. He left the hard sciences for the social sciences, continuing his studies in China and getting a Master's Degree in Folklore at Beijing Normal University in 1991. 

Jay was a great lover of music and a talented musician in his own right. He played guitar and sang at bars around Beijing, where he met and befriended a number of prominent folk musicians, notably Uyghur artist Alimjan Tursun from Xinjiang in western China. Alimjan later achieved international recognition for his perfomance of traditional music in the Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

Jay at Lake Karakul in Xinjiang ca. 1995. Photo: Eric Karchmer, courtesy of Lyn Jefferey.

Already fluent in Chinese after living and studying in China for five years, Jay began traveling in Xinjiang and learning Uyghur, the Turkic language spoken by this Muslim ethnic group that has long suffered under Han Chinese domination. In 1991, he entered the Ph.D. program in anthropology at U.C. Berkeley (a year after I did) where he studied under the legendary folklore scholar Alan Dundes. As part of his dissertation fieldwork, he entered Xinjiang University in Urumqi to study the Uyghur language formally. With his tireless drive and prodigal language skills, he become fluent in Uyghur as well. 

With our shared interest in languages, travel and acoustic music, it was inevitable that Jay and I would become friends. I will never forget sunny days sitting in the eucalyptus grove along Strawberry Creek on the Berkeley campus, Jay with his Martin D-28 and I with my banjo, picking away at bluegrass classics, bossa nova, swing tunes and the occasional Charlie Parker bebop standard. 

Pickin' and grinnin' (and Wild Turkey). Berkeley, 1995. Photo: Maria N.F. da Silva.

Jay's mind never stopped, and yet his body was never far behind. As he reinvented himself intellectually and professionally, time and time again over the years, he also maintained himself in prime physical condition through weight training and rock climbing. In his youth, he accompanied mountaineering legend Rob Robinson in discovering the "Tennessee Wall" near Chattanooga for climbers in the mid-1980s. Jay made a number of first ascents on routes that still bear his name, and of course his creative titles such as "Finger Lockin' Good" and "Jay Walker." 

After finishing his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1999, Jay went on to a post-doctoral position at Harvard, where he began work on his pioneering book about the Uyghur people, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China (Harvard University Press: 2009). 

Being one of the few fluent American speakers of Uyghur in the U.S. in the early 2000s, Jay was called upon by public defense attorneys to translate for a number of Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp who had been captured during the U.S. war in Afghanistan. A total of 22 Uyghur were captured and detained despite being unarmed and not apparently involved in hostilities against the U.S. The last Uyghur captives were finally released only in 2013 after more than ten years of imprisonment. 

Jay's notes from his visit to Guantanamo.

Jay was a brilliant and acclaimed scholar, and he landed the most coveted position in the entire United States in the field of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. Yet he walked away from this dream job a few years later and moved to Santa Cruz, California, to be with the love of his life, Lynn Jeffery, and her son Ethan, whom he raised as his own. 

The academic grind was ultimately too narrow for Jay's warp-speed mind and voracious curiosity. After leaving academia, he held numerous jobs and consulting positions in translation, industrial ethnography and data analysis, working for a telescope manufacturing company based in China, a medical facility in the Midwest, Ricoh electronics and the "TurboTax" parent company, Intuit. 

During the last three years of his life, Jay returned to his roots in the hard sciences, reinventing himself once again as a data scientist. He spent a year teaching himself machine learning and then immediately landed a job at one of Silicon valley's top internet security firms. Throughout these permutations and reinventions, Jay was also an avid amateur inventor, and spent years creating designs for a "fish suit" that would allow people to swim with greater mechanical efficiency. 

As a consummate folklorist, Jay amassed vast collections of jokes, sayings, scams, folk songs and urban legends in Uyghur as well as Chinese. I remember one particular Uyghur saying that was important to his research into masculine identity: "Women have hair, men have nicknames." The saying refers to male joking practices among the Uyghur, a major focus of one chapter in his book. Uyghur boys receive nicknames, usually in reference to some embarrassing childhood incident that haunts them for the rest of their lives. Just as hair for women represents an intimate part of their social identity that must be hidden from all but their closest relations, men's nicknames are also a reflection of both intimacy and danger. Or to put it in another way, that which is dearest to us can also be our greatest vulnerability. 

As someone who always maintained both his body and mind in top condition through rigorous exercise and constant intellectual challenges, it was a sad irony that he was ultimately felled by the excessive vigor of his immune system, rather than by any weakness of it. My youngest son, who shares the same birthday with Jay, also coincidentally suffered from a mysterious and exceedingly rare immune system disease as a child.

Jay with my eldest son in 2002.

Another favorite Uyghur saying of Jay's was, "If you have teeth, eat meat!", an exhortation to live and enjoy life to one's fullest capacity. There is no question that Jay lived up to that motto. Though he spent his grad-school days subsisting on a minimalist diet based on the principal of time efficiency, his life with Lyn and Ethan inspired him to become a creative, and of course studious and prolific chef. 

During his last few years, and inspired by his adopted son Ethan, Jay got turned on to mycology. Like everything else in his life, Jay did not take to this new hobby casually. He enrolled in mushroom workshops with the famous Santa Cruz-based mycologist, David Arora. He made frequent mushroom hunting expeditions in the woods near his house and throughout the Santa Cruz mountains, occasionally sending me scale photos of his latest finds. He studied, learned and obsessively documented the full suite of fungi in the region, and discovered dozens of secret, reliable spots to gather favorite species to cook for his family. 

The last jar of porcini: September, 2018.

Though we talked occasionally on Skype, I hadn't seen Jay in person since 2008. We both suffered life-threatening illness episodes in 2015-2016, and decided it was time to see each other again soon. The last time we spoke, around May of 2018, I had finalized my plans to attend the upcoming American Anthropological Association meetings in nearby San José that November. We eagerly plotted out a busy itinerary of music, hiking, rock climbing, bonfires on the beach, a Thanksgiving mushroom extravaganza, and otherwise enjoying the scenery, the coffee shops and one another's company.

Instead I found myself in Santa Cruz in mid-September, stunned and in shock alongside family, co-workers, and friends both old and new, attending an inspiring and poignant memorial service, a month after his death and just two months before his 55th birthday. That night, Lyn and a few friends and I made risotto al funghi out of the last remnants of a jar of dried porcini mushrooms he had gathered the previous Spring. 

There is nothing quite like the bittersweet experience of cooking, savoring and consuming the fragrant harvest of a beloved friend who has departed the world so recently, and so prematurely. Grok?

In memory of his contribution to this web log from its very inception, ten years ago, and to his inimitable genius and our years of friendship, sadly cut short, I dedicate this posting to Jay, on what would have been his 58th birthday. 

"Hallelujah, done my duty, put on my travelin' shoes"

Jay Todd Dautcher: November 19, 1963 - August 4, 2018.

                                                                -----

Jay's family created a website of memories and stories for those who wish to learn or share more about his remarkable life.

Jay's friend and fellow Xinjiang expert Gardner Bovington receives donations for the Jay Dautcher Memorial Fund supporting young scholars in the field of Uyghur studies at Indiana University.