Michael found it occasionally necessary to yell at me. I accepted this without complaint. I was a football player in my youth and had been called worse by more menacing authority figures. Fidan Elcioglu recently recalled Michael shouting at me across the table in our Public Ethnography seminar, when I kept insisting that the software programmers I was playing dodgeball with at a Bay Area chapter of the Hindu Nationalist movement were “objectively fascists” because of their organizational and financial connections, and he insisting that I had shown nothing of the sort and was condescending to my subjects. I believe he was gripping the table as he leaned over it in my direction, face red and saliva spraying with exasperation. His comments on my final paper are still hard to read almost twenty years later: “I think your work is a fascinating case of politically driven ethnography that fails to explore the data, precisely because you are so fixated on the political message, the machinations of the [Hindu nationalists]. Your data don’t speak to that, and you don’t seem to be interested in letting the field speak back to you.” He was right, as painful as it was to admit (much later). The result was a crappy paper I never published, but an important lesson learned. It is the same advice that I now give, a bit more gently, to students in my Participant Observation seminar who refuse to take their own observations seriously.

Michael likened his dissertation supervising to a conflictual labor process in which “it is necessary for me to give you the space to press back, to challenge and contest my direction. You must be able to enter combat without appearing disloyal or untrusting…. The continuous banter, resistance, contestation, struggle that so shocks more respectful students, and sometimes even shocks me, is part of an essential looseness and flexibility that keeps your dissertation on track.” The advising relationship is a hegemonic production regime that establishes consent by containing resistance within tolerable bounds. But with a difference. First, our product, a dissertation, was to be a creative individual product that appeared to be the fruits of our own labor (obscuring the deep impact of our advisor on its conception). Second, the supervisor deployed his power on a craft scale in highly individualized forms—here, Gramsci arguably gave way to Foucault. Upon comparing notes, my friends and I learned that we all had totally different relationships with Michael: subjected to different degrees and forms of coercion, consent, and reward. Michael landed on coaching as the best analogy, and this seemed right, not only because of his track suits. With his ethnographer’s eye, coach Michael studied his players’ strengths, weaknesses, peculiarities, and amenability to reform, and devised his methods of correction accordingly.

I apparently needed some yelling, but only rarely did I make Michael resort to blunt force. He might have remembered it differently, but I eagerly consented to his hegemony. I had almost complete faith in his uncanny ability to see what was sociologically important in a morass of data and to locate the germ of a theory in a half-formed argument. I idolized his theoretical scope and rigor and was fully onboard with the extended case method. I remember largely following his advice, or at least always taking it seriously. In retrospect, he undoubtedly led me to ideas in ways that I took to be my own. Most of our good-natured combat occurred in the confines of that book-lined office facing the Golden Gate Bridge. I would sign up for a late slot, which often allowed the conversations to go over until a little after I could tell I was exhausting him.

There was also material reward and just plain fun. GSI’ing for Michael’s Social Theory was by far the highlight of my time at Berkeley, though not because I loved his meta-theme of the division of labor. I was enamored with the humanist Marxism I absorbed from Dylan Riley, while Michael was a staunch structuralist. I was still a bit of an anarchist, Michael a barely reconstructed Leninist who nevertheless tolerated my petit bourgeois deviations. It was only after graduating and teaching my own theory courses that I realized the true brilliance of Michael’s course design, with its well-chose excerpts and tightly interlocking parts summarized and compared through idiosyncratic diagrams (every time I try to improve upon it, I learn the hard way why each page of reading was there). But what made that year magical was a conjunction of world history, the collective effervescence of a fun and brilliant group of fellow GSIs that Michael convened and regaled, and a spirited collection of students that included several future sociologists. Lehman Brothers collapsed while we were teaching Marx and Engels, so it was easy to buy Michael’s argument that theory was “living.” Michael’s ludicrously generous Thursday dinners—I remember thinking, $25 entrees!—there were times to absorb Michael’s stories and informal sense of the field, before they descended into inebriated banter in which we applied social theory to our dating lives. Happy to gossip about ours, Michael was famously reticent about his own, though ultimately admitted to one “long war of position, brief war of movement.” The raucous year culminated with a class game show and Bollywood dance party, Michael pretending to swig from a vodka bottle while we line danced to the Slumdog Millionaire anthem “Jai Ho.” We mused that his grandfatherly appearance and British accent allowed him to get away with it. 

Perhaps because of the remoteness of my research from his own labor studies, Michael gave me a long leash to figure out how to turn my interest in anti-dispossession movements into a sociology of dispossession. He encouraged me to spend a year-and-a-half in an Indian village, and couldn’t have had any clue what I would find. I marvel now at his apparent confidence, or at least ability to make me confident, that such an endeavor was achievable and worth pursuing. In our hyper-professionalized discipline, I now realize how terrifying it is to encourage students to do ambitious dissertation projects that have no obvious relationship to the concerns of American sociology.

But Michael’s theory of “combat in the dissertation zone” is incomplete. I never loved a coach, but I loved Michael Burawoy. This is not because we had an especially personal relationship. It is because of the tremendous intellectual debt I owe him, my greatest teacher, which is both unrepayable and beyond expression because far deeper than ideas. It comes from the example of intellectual and political integrity that he modeled more than expressed, a raised eyebrow more than enough to communicate transgressions. It stems from the gratitude I feel for the countless hours of work he put into comments on papers and chapters of variable quality, usually hiding any exasperation he felt. Not least, there were the responses to my fieldwork memos, dispatched at odd hours of the night, which I would retrieve by taking a bus from the village I was studying to a Jaipur internet cafe. I clung to these missives like life rafts, reminding me what the hell I was doing, lonely and hungry, in a sweltering Rajasthani village. I will never forget the no-show job he gave me when I was suffering from repetitive stress injuries and could barely hold my neck up straight, much less type into a computer. Disbursed from one of the various “funds” Michael used to redistribute his salary, I figured he called it the Antonio Gramsci Fellowship because it was meant for infirm intellectuals. Michael biked to Barrows on a Sunday afternoon to hear the nth version of my job talk. We did not talk much about feelings, but this was emotional labor. Will Michael turn over in Highgate Cemetery if I suggest reconstructing his Gramscian theory of dissertation supervision with Hochschild?

Once I graduated, he said he no longer saw me as a means to my dissertation. I, in turn, tried hard not to use every moment together to suck knowledge from him. On trips to Baltimore, he was keen to hang out with family and friends. He played with my daughter Asha, pushing her around the playground in a little toy car. He told old stories, some even about his parents. In our correspondence, he was keen to ask about family and far less specific with research advice, many of our conversations now focused on my own questions about teaching and advising. I realize in hindsight—always in hindsight!—that he was preparing me to be coachless.

Michael is gone far too soon, and it is hard to find any consolation. He lives in his beloved theory and in his beloved students. I am forever grateful to have played for a great.