Dear Friends, Colleagues, Students and Family Members,  

 

It is with great sorrow that I have to let you know that my husband, my love, your professor, colleague, friend, father, stepfather, brother, brother-in-law and uncle, John W. Burton, passed away peacefully in my arms at home in the comforting presence of his Center For Hospice Care nurse, Bob, on the 27th of December.  The cause of his death was metastatic lung cancer. 

While he was briefly admitted to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital and was subsequently treated at Smilow Cancer Hospital for a few weeks during the fall, he received most of his care at home in the loving company of his close family.  I am grateful that John and I could celebrate Christmas and my birthday together before he passed away in the late afternoon of the 27th.

I am very thankful for all the support that we received from family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, healthcare and hospice care professionals. Your help made it possible for me to provide day and night care for John. Because you relieved us from other responsibilities, and assisted us with the tasks ahead, I hardly ever had to leave John’s side during the last four months of his life, and I consider this a beautiful gift that you all have given to the both of us.

As professor of anthropology at Connecticut College, John taught three courses with great joy during the fall semester until the end of October when his thirty-year-long teaching carrier at the College came to a sudden end due to an unexpected downturn in his physical condition. The news of his cancer came as a shock to all of us including John’s doctors. Although he struggled with health challenges during the past three years, the exact cause of his declining condition wasn’t discovered until the very last stages of his untreatable disease. 

As John’s physical condition weakened, he remained academically active; he and I spent considerable time working together on several books, outlined ideas for additional books and prepared to write four articles for the World Book Encyclopedia. He still read entire books in a few hours and wrote academic texts with breathtaking speed. As a fellow anthropologist, I felt fortunate for the chance to observe a true genius at work. Beside his intellectual power, his endurance, creativity and positive attitude never ceased to amaze me. He often remarked how lucky he felt that his hobby was his job and his job his hobby.  He loved anthropology and took great joy in teaching, which he thought of as a shared multidirectional learning experience of a community of practice rather than a one directional instructional exercise. 

His ability to connect with students and inspire them was legendary. Every semester, John received letters and testimonies on how his classes influenced people, shifted their perspectives, and changed their lives.  Based on anonymous student evaluations, The Princeton Review selected John as one of the 300 best professors in the United States. Upon the publication of this list, John’s editor from Waveland Press sent a congratulatory email and brought it to our attention that John was the only anthropologist on that list. 

As hard as it is for us to lose such a wonderful and brilliant person as John, we all should take comfort in the fact that he didn’t suffer much, he seemed comfortable, and that he felt the deep love and gratitude that we- his family, students and friends- surrounded him with. He was thankful for all the wonderful cards, well wishes, email messages and concerned phone calls you showered us with. Both John and I are forever grateful to you for the loving attention you granted us.  John maintained until the end that he lived a very good, happy, and vivacious life.  He didn’t want us to feel sorry for his early passing. He wanted us to know that he was at peace because he accomplished all that he wanted and fulfilled all his dreams.

John was born in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1952 to his mother, June Katherine Burton and his father Milton Burton. His parents received their college education at Boston University where they met and where June became a school nurse and Milton- a WWII veteran- earned a degree in education. Upon graduation, Milton secured a job as a high school student counselor.  The couple raised three children, Margaret, Nancy, and the youngest sibling, John. The family moved many times to various parts of the country, following the father’s career path.  The Burtons took many camping trips to national parks and those vacations made a lasting impression on John.

John received his high school diploma in Syosset, Long Island, in 1970. During his high school years, he became a talented athlete, ballet dancer, and an avid guitar and sitar player.  He and his friend, Ken Taub, formed a music band.  It was none other than the famous poet and composer, Allen Ginsberg, who taught John how to play the sitar in a Greenwich Village music shop.  As a teenager, John attended the first New York City concerts of such legends as the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and others.

John began his college studies at Northeastern University in 1970. It is likely that his enrollment saved him from being drafted or arrested as conscientious objector. His anti-war sentiments strengthened when authorities raided the campus in order to put down student protests. 

During his freshman year, he took an introductory anthropology class taught by Catherine Bateson, the daughter of well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead. Professor Bateson’s class had a life-transforming effect on John who decided to become an anthropologist after the first few classes. He transferred to Stony Brook University, which was thought to have the best anthropology department at the time and was strongly influenced by the legacy of the late E. E. Evans-Pritchard and the Oxford School of Anthropology.  John was advised by Professor William Arens there, and wrote his first academic article as an undergraduate. He received his Bachelor’s degree in 1974 and continued his studies toward a Ph.D.  After receiving a Masters of Arts degree, John interrupted his studies at Stony Brook by a yearlong research trip to England. He became a research student in social anthropology at Cambridge University. He conducted library research at the Sudan Archives, and prepared himself for fieldwork in the Southern Sudan.  While in England, he met Godfrey Leinhardt who became a trusted advisor and supporter of John’s work.  

Before leaving for Cambridge, John married his high school sweetheart, dance teacher and artist, L’Ana Burton.  His wife accompanied John not only to England but also to the Southern Sudan in order to help John conduct anthropological fieldwork among the Atuot people. John and L’Ana were graciously helped by renowned Sudanese ambassador, diplomat and scholar, Francis Deng. 

Upon returning to the States, John completed his dissertation in seven weeks and received his Ph.D. degree in 1978.  He accepted a one year teaching appointment at the University of Connecticut followed by an assistant professorship at Wheaton College before finding an intellectual home and starting a long academic career at Connecticut College in 1983.

During his extremely productive career, John authored four books, wrote an unpublished fifth, published 91 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals and encyclopedias and was the author of 51 book reviews. During the last year of his life, John was in the middle of working on a sixth book and was in the planning stages of the seventh and eighth.  John served as assistant dean of faculty at Connecticut College for four years.

John not only had an astonishingly productive academic career, but took time to enjoy many hobbies as well. He played tennis regularly, and he was the base player of a cover band, called Half Life. He loved boating in the Long Island Sound, mountain climbing in New Hampshire (he summited all but three of the forty-six mountains higher than four thousand feet in New Hampshire), model boat building, carpentry, gardening, cooking, and beach going. He was passionate about learning all he could on space explorations, mountain climbing and his favorite musicians, James Taylor and John Lennon. He not only pursued his hobbies but mastered them. He learned, created, built, cooked, gardened, and played with passion, perfection and great exuberance.  

John spent a lot of quality time with his family as a devoted father to daughter Jona and son Jason.  He adored his children and showered them with his attention.

John and L’Ana’s thirty- year-long marriage unfortunately came to an end in 2005. He was deeply saddened by the end of their long relationship that was filled with wonderful memories of love and laughter.

I first met John in the spring of 2004 -almost a decade ago- when I was a Ph.D. student at Yale University and was first given the opportunity to teach anthropology classes as a visiting instructor at Connecticut College. Our paths did not cross again until the fall of 2005 when my marriage was falling apart and as a colleague -having just gone through divorce himself- I asked for John’s advice.  It was only then that I realized that John was the same person whose articles I devoured while working for the Smithsonian Institution in 1993. I spent my lunch breaks reading anthropological articles on Africa- as I prepared to become an Africanist myself- and many of those were written by him. John’s anthropology inspired me greatly back then, but because I sensed a British “accent” in his style of writing, I never realized that J.W. Burton lived and worked in the United States. 

John and I became best friends, soul mates, and intellectual partners in 2006 as we got to know each other and our relationship deepened.  By the time we married on September 1st, 2006, the love we felt for each other was extraordinary. We both considered ourselves very lucky to have found and experienced such deep bond.

We welcomed our baby daughter, Julia, in our Quaker Hill home on September 1st, 2007, the day of our first wedding anniversary.  John took great joy in the fact that with midwives’ guidance, he assisted the birth and “caught” the baby himself.  He often mentioned that our home birth was the best time of his life.

John and I enjoyed hiking and biking and often took little Julia with us. We spent much time at Waterford Beach Park in the summers. We loved to garden together. We planted about five thousand trees, bushes and perennials around our house in Quaker Hill. In April, John’s long-time dream came true when we bought a vacation home in New Hampshire. We named the house Moose Chalet, and spent much time there in the spring, summer and fall. We dangled our feet into the cold snowmelt of the nearby Baker River, John cooked delicious dinners on the grill, we painted our new shed together, we stargazed at night on the meadow of Breezy Point, waited for bears to turn up in our yard, and took the cog-rail up to the top of Mount Washington on a warm summer day. During our last visit at Moose Chalet, we woke up to a beautiful early winter wonderland with two inches of snow covering the forests. We had many activities planned for the years ahead. I think of those now with an aching heart.

As his wife- now his widow- I am comforted by the thought that he could feel my undying love for him and I could feel his until the last breath he took. He was my midwife in birth and I was his midwife in death. His last sentences were all about the love and gratitude he felt for me. Seven years ago, on our wedding day on Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, we promised each other that we would “walk together until the end,” and we sure did.

John is also deeply mourned by his children Jona, Jason and Julia, his former wife L’Ana, his step-children Harrison, Spencer and Sophia, his mother-in-law Jutka, his two sisters, Nancy and Margaret “Peggy,” their husbands and children, and his friend and hiking partner, Craig. He was pre-deceased by his mother and father.

A memorial service will be held at Connecticut College’s Harkness Chapel on Saturday, February 15th at 11 a.m. Please feel free to write notes and stories on John’s memorial website where you can share memories publicly and send messages to the family privately. http://www.forevermissed.com/john-w-burton/#about  In lieu of flowers, please send donations in Johns’ memory to the Center For Hospice Care at 227 Dunham Street, Norwich, Connecticut 06360.

Thank you very much for all your kind thoughts and attention you have granted us. Let’s keep John’s memory and legacy alive together!

Sincerely,

Orshi Burton