william P delaney
Bill Delaney attended St. Philip Neri Grade School and Laboure Highschool in North St. Louis and Rockhurst College in Kansas City, BA in philosophy 1964. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois in 1977.
He taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill; and Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin. From 1965-67 he served in the Peace Corps in Pitsanuloke, Thailand, teaching English and helping to construct a 5 room village school with privies. There he learned to speak Central Thai. He returned to Northern Thailand on an NIMH grant for his anthropology dissertation research on aging in a Buddhist setting. Later he received a two-year postdoctoral National Inst of Aging fellowship at University of California San Francisco Medical Anthropology program under Professor Margaret Clark. After completing his postdoc, Bill trained with expert locksmiths at Golden Gate School of Lock Technology and opened his own locksmith and door business in San Francisco's Mission District. (Life is complicated).
Field Research Areas: dissertation fieldwork to study aging, death preparation, and the life cycle in Chiangmai, Northern Thailand, in 1973; in Oaxaca, Mexico, he studied village religious conflict in1969 among Zapotec Indians; from 1988-2002 he researched alcohol problems in U.S. auto factories (Wentzville, Mo, and Fremont, Ca) ; also stress. unwinding, and alcohol misuse among Muni bus drivers, San Francisco, at Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, CA, working under principal investigators Jenny Ames and David Ragland. Leaving research, he returned to his love of carpentry and the building trades. He served as a plumbers helper for one year, honed his remodeling skills and became a licensed CA general contractor working in Oakland and Berkeley specializing in bathroom remodels, decks, doors and windows, Redwood gates, fences, and handyman tasks.
Bill is now retired and draws and paints daily. He has contributed paintings to several shows at Studio Gallery in San Francisco (studiogallerysf.com)(Instagram, billdelaney38) and the Mealticket Restaurant, Berkeley. He lives in the rugged Oakland hills (Shepherd Canyon) with his treasured wife, Susan Raeburn, clinical psychologist, author, musician, serious clothes horse, funster, and rock and roll fan. He has experienced deep gratitude, the joy of service to others, a loving relationship, and patience through his 12 Step program of many years.
Supervisors: Genevieve Ames, Ph.D., Margaret Clark, Douglas Butterworth, F.K. Lehman, David Plath, Clark Cunningham, Ed Bruner, Oscar Lewis, Joel Grube, and David Ragland
He taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill; and Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin. From 1965-67 he served in the Peace Corps in Pitsanuloke, Thailand, teaching English and helping to construct a 5 room village school with privies. There he learned to speak Central Thai. He returned to Northern Thailand on an NIMH grant for his anthropology dissertation research on aging in a Buddhist setting. Later he received a two-year postdoctoral National Inst of Aging fellowship at University of California San Francisco Medical Anthropology program under Professor Margaret Clark. After completing his postdoc, Bill trained with expert locksmiths at Golden Gate School of Lock Technology and opened his own locksmith and door business in San Francisco's Mission District. (Life is complicated).
Field Research Areas: dissertation fieldwork to study aging, death preparation, and the life cycle in Chiangmai, Northern Thailand, in 1973; in Oaxaca, Mexico, he studied village religious conflict in1969 among Zapotec Indians; from 1988-2002 he researched alcohol problems in U.S. auto factories (Wentzville, Mo, and Fremont, Ca) ; also stress. unwinding, and alcohol misuse among Muni bus drivers, San Francisco, at Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, CA, working under principal investigators Jenny Ames and David Ragland. Leaving research, he returned to his love of carpentry and the building trades. He served as a plumbers helper for one year, honed his remodeling skills and became a licensed CA general contractor working in Oakland and Berkeley specializing in bathroom remodels, decks, doors and windows, Redwood gates, fences, and handyman tasks.
Bill is now retired and draws and paints daily. He has contributed paintings to several shows at Studio Gallery in San Francisco (studiogallerysf.com)(Instagram, billdelaney38) and the Mealticket Restaurant, Berkeley. He lives in the rugged Oakland hills (Shepherd Canyon) with his treasured wife, Susan Raeburn, clinical psychologist, author, musician, serious clothes horse, funster, and rock and roll fan. He has experienced deep gratitude, the joy of service to others, a loving relationship, and patience through his 12 Step program of many years.
Supervisors: Genevieve Ames, Ph.D., Margaret Clark, Douglas Butterworth, F.K. Lehman, David Plath, Clark Cunningham, Ed Bruner, Oscar Lewis, Joel Grube, and David Ragland
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Thailand Thai Culture by william P delaney
To understand death in this society is to understand the mechanism that makes everything work. It is the supreme generator of all events, all happenings, all successes and failures, all diseases, all lottery wins, all births and all deaths. For the Westerner I dare say it is virtually unfathomable how extensive and penetrating is this notion of Buddhist merit, tied to karma.
If merit and merit-making is the means to influence your karma then the project of accumulating merit is paramount. Death in northern Thailand invokes a massive cultural attempt to increase merit by all means possible and for the old and departing to beneficially dissolve into the great process of dying and being reborn.
Let us look at some of the proscriptions and cultural details the Northern Thai have evolved to achieve a good death.
So join me for a moment and explore in detail a very significant ritual that defines ChiangMai city and its sacred nodes. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering these symbolic elements woven into the fabric of northern Thai culture and society many decades ago.
I hope making this report available will motivate other scholars to keep studying Northern Thai ritual, religion, and symbolism.
I had the unique opportunity to teach English to a high ranking officer in the Royal Thai Police Force who also invited me to join him and his men for social drinking sessions after work. This article is based on experiences and observations in those sessions and from which I derive a grounded theory of drinking, status deflation, and unwinding for Thai work culture.
Differences in rank and status among Thai policemen made interactions during off-duty drinking sessions tense and strained at times. It is argued that Thai social etiquette and the constraints of the hierarchical status system made achieving “time-out” after work challenging for work groups in Thailand. Because of these constraints many Thai work groups may in fact never attempt to drink together or attain time-out from work as a group. In the present study time-out was achieved among Thai policemen by using alcohol and various interpersonal maneuvers to offset the status constraints that stymied free-flowing interaction. A core category of status deflation or relaxation was derived from the data and linked to unwinding with alcohol to account for and interpret Thai drinking behavior. A step by step process is described for how this core category was obtained along with a list of descriptive observations of how Thai policemen drink in a group of mixed-status peers. Broad stages of status blurring are outlined.
This is a rough draft. Comments welcomed. The data were obtained in 1966-67 in Thailand.
In this article I describe how elderly men and women spend a night at the temple once a month; and how the temple becomes a place of solace, safety, and hope. Yes, there were disappointments around lack of merit-making rites and this caused resentments among the old people. But time at the temple, hearing sermons, aiding the monks, chanting, sitting in the shade would dissipate much of the hurt.
In the final analysis, the temple and household are contrasted as two competing spheres each with its distinctive ethos or emotional tone. The testimony of two vital elderly Buddhist Nuns is presented and examined for the type of resolutions elderly Northern Thai were attempting with their families and selves.
Philosophy, Art, and Literature by william P delaney
In Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill skillfully transforms his own and family’s pain stemming from alcoholism into a powerful work of art, showcasing his impressive ability to channel his experiences into storytelling. The setting is Harry Hope’s run-down bar which serves as an sunken haven for 12 drunks and 3 prostitutes. Shielded from facing reality through heavy drinking and unrealistic pipe dreams, the group is upset by the arrival of Hickey, a charismatic figure known for throwing parties, who unexpectedly shocks the group by proposing they stop drinking and lay aside their pipe dreams.
O’Neill’s insight into the comforting yet sinister pipe dream is unparalleled. Years of avoiding responsibility has brought the habitués of Harry’s bar into a deadened passivity. Unable to recognize their situation until they attempt to stop drinking, the theme of malignant self-absorption appears. Their stagnation for years at the bar has cannibalized their ego strength and self-will leaving them seriously handicapped to take action and function in the world. Hickey’s venture to stop drinking has led to one suicide, one confession and arrest for murder, and an abundance of guilt, shame, and recriminations.
O’Neill’s play reveals another danger that looms over Hickey’s experiment with not drinking: The group’s staggering inability to help one another. Warped by ultra sensitivity and self-preoccupation they are now prevented from being able to offer any genuine support to one another. The drunks at Harry’s are not a community in any sense of the term. They are doomed to exist in one of America’s most nihilistic plays where drunks never change.
Dreyfus' bio shows he has spent his life winnowing away, asking questions, trying to make sense out of Heidegger. In the process, he has plumbed the underpinnings of human skills, battled the artificial intelligence people, and built a community of dedicated former students and fellow applied philosophers who are critiquing the West at its technological roots. He contends that within Heidegger's work are terrains and gorges of philosophical substance immensely important for our age.
Drugs and Politics by william P delaney
This is the deeper story that lay behind the original arrest of Lo Hsing Han (Law Sik Han) the opium-heroin tycoon in Southeast Asia's Goldern Triangle in 1973. The author, a graduate student, was able to obtain this story from expatriate missionaries on the Thai side of the border. Fascinating and disturbing, the shrewd political negotiations the young Lo Hsing Han was learning shortly before his arrest would come to represent a modus operandi among armed groups in the northern hills with varying political agendas who sold their anticommunist and anti-rebel military services in exchange for covert rights to drug smuggling. The fact that Lo would go to jail, be sentenced to death, yet come out, and become one of the most successful business tycoons of Burmese society reflects the power of criminal elites to survive and thrive across shifting patron-clients networks in complicated authoritarian-anarchic settings.
Alcohol Research by william P delaney
Using direct observations and extensive field interviewing over a 4-year period, this paper examines practices and beliefs of shop stewards in their effects on drinking patterns and consequences. It also includes response frequencies from a random sample survey questionnaire (n = 984) that are consistent with the qualitative analysis of steward behavior. Several themes are extracted which position steward handling of alcohol-related cases as intervening between disciplinary measures of supervisors and consequences of work-related drinking of union employees.
In this study, Jenny Ames and I had the benefit of working directly with Anselm Strauss who we had hired as a qualitative research consultant. Meeting him in his home in San Franciso, Anselm Strauss aided us by helping to sift through interviews from auto plant employees and build a grounded theory of minimization of alcohol problems on the part of supervisors. We worked closely with the actual words and descriptions of the workers and supervisors and sketched concepts that remained integral to their depictions of events and interpretations of workplace alcohol policies.
To understand death in this society is to understand the mechanism that makes everything work. It is the supreme generator of all events, all happenings, all successes and failures, all diseases, all lottery wins, all births and all deaths. For the Westerner I dare say it is virtually unfathomable how extensive and penetrating is this notion of Buddhist merit, tied to karma.
If merit and merit-making is the means to influence your karma then the project of accumulating merit is paramount. Death in northern Thailand invokes a massive cultural attempt to increase merit by all means possible and for the old and departing to beneficially dissolve into the great process of dying and being reborn.
Let us look at some of the proscriptions and cultural details the Northern Thai have evolved to achieve a good death.
So join me for a moment and explore in detail a very significant ritual that defines ChiangMai city and its sacred nodes. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering these symbolic elements woven into the fabric of northern Thai culture and society many decades ago.
I hope making this report available will motivate other scholars to keep studying Northern Thai ritual, religion, and symbolism.
I had the unique opportunity to teach English to a high ranking officer in the Royal Thai Police Force who also invited me to join him and his men for social drinking sessions after work. This article is based on experiences and observations in those sessions and from which I derive a grounded theory of drinking, status deflation, and unwinding for Thai work culture.
Differences in rank and status among Thai policemen made interactions during off-duty drinking sessions tense and strained at times. It is argued that Thai social etiquette and the constraints of the hierarchical status system made achieving “time-out” after work challenging for work groups in Thailand. Because of these constraints many Thai work groups may in fact never attempt to drink together or attain time-out from work as a group. In the present study time-out was achieved among Thai policemen by using alcohol and various interpersonal maneuvers to offset the status constraints that stymied free-flowing interaction. A core category of status deflation or relaxation was derived from the data and linked to unwinding with alcohol to account for and interpret Thai drinking behavior. A step by step process is described for how this core category was obtained along with a list of descriptive observations of how Thai policemen drink in a group of mixed-status peers. Broad stages of status blurring are outlined.
This is a rough draft. Comments welcomed. The data were obtained in 1966-67 in Thailand.
In this article I describe how elderly men and women spend a night at the temple once a month; and how the temple becomes a place of solace, safety, and hope. Yes, there were disappointments around lack of merit-making rites and this caused resentments among the old people. But time at the temple, hearing sermons, aiding the monks, chanting, sitting in the shade would dissipate much of the hurt.
In the final analysis, the temple and household are contrasted as two competing spheres each with its distinctive ethos or emotional tone. The testimony of two vital elderly Buddhist Nuns is presented and examined for the type of resolutions elderly Northern Thai were attempting with their families and selves.
In Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill skillfully transforms his own and family’s pain stemming from alcoholism into a powerful work of art, showcasing his impressive ability to channel his experiences into storytelling. The setting is Harry Hope’s run-down bar which serves as an sunken haven for 12 drunks and 3 prostitutes. Shielded from facing reality through heavy drinking and unrealistic pipe dreams, the group is upset by the arrival of Hickey, a charismatic figure known for throwing parties, who unexpectedly shocks the group by proposing they stop drinking and lay aside their pipe dreams.
O’Neill’s insight into the comforting yet sinister pipe dream is unparalleled. Years of avoiding responsibility has brought the habitués of Harry’s bar into a deadened passivity. Unable to recognize their situation until they attempt to stop drinking, the theme of malignant self-absorption appears. Their stagnation for years at the bar has cannibalized their ego strength and self-will leaving them seriously handicapped to take action and function in the world. Hickey’s venture to stop drinking has led to one suicide, one confession and arrest for murder, and an abundance of guilt, shame, and recriminations.
O’Neill’s play reveals another danger that looms over Hickey’s experiment with not drinking: The group’s staggering inability to help one another. Warped by ultra sensitivity and self-preoccupation they are now prevented from being able to offer any genuine support to one another. The drunks at Harry’s are not a community in any sense of the term. They are doomed to exist in one of America’s most nihilistic plays where drunks never change.
Dreyfus' bio shows he has spent his life winnowing away, asking questions, trying to make sense out of Heidegger. In the process, he has plumbed the underpinnings of human skills, battled the artificial intelligence people, and built a community of dedicated former students and fellow applied philosophers who are critiquing the West at its technological roots. He contends that within Heidegger's work are terrains and gorges of philosophical substance immensely important for our age.
This is the deeper story that lay behind the original arrest of Lo Hsing Han (Law Sik Han) the opium-heroin tycoon in Southeast Asia's Goldern Triangle in 1973. The author, a graduate student, was able to obtain this story from expatriate missionaries on the Thai side of the border. Fascinating and disturbing, the shrewd political negotiations the young Lo Hsing Han was learning shortly before his arrest would come to represent a modus operandi among armed groups in the northern hills with varying political agendas who sold their anticommunist and anti-rebel military services in exchange for covert rights to drug smuggling. The fact that Lo would go to jail, be sentenced to death, yet come out, and become one of the most successful business tycoons of Burmese society reflects the power of criminal elites to survive and thrive across shifting patron-clients networks in complicated authoritarian-anarchic settings.
Using direct observations and extensive field interviewing over a 4-year period, this paper examines practices and beliefs of shop stewards in their effects on drinking patterns and consequences. It also includes response frequencies from a random sample survey questionnaire (n = 984) that are consistent with the qualitative analysis of steward behavior. Several themes are extracted which position steward handling of alcohol-related cases as intervening between disciplinary measures of supervisors and consequences of work-related drinking of union employees.
In this study, Jenny Ames and I had the benefit of working directly with Anselm Strauss who we had hired as a qualitative research consultant. Meeting him in his home in San Franciso, Anselm Strauss aided us by helping to sift through interviews from auto plant employees and build a grounded theory of minimization of alcohol problems on the part of supervisors. We worked closely with the actual words and descriptions of the workers and supervisors and sketched concepts that remained integral to their depictions of events and interpretations of workplace alcohol policies.
Results showed that depression and anxiety were the most frequently cited non-musculoskeletal problems and pain and stiffness the most frequently cited musculoskeletal problems in both samples. Ten percent of sample 1 and 16% of sample 2 musicians indicated that alcohol or drug abuse had hurt their performance in the previous year.
More than half of the musicians in sample 1 and 2 had health insurance, but most obtained it through non-music-related jobs or family coverage. The findings are compared to other musician samples where possible and specific concerns and strategies for future research on popular musician health status are suggested.
Co-authors on this paper were: John Hipple, PhD, William P. Delaney, PhD, and Kris Chesky, PhD.
Is the world an alcoholic system? Gregory Bateson seems to think so. And if so there may be a way out.