An Entrepreneur of the Social Sciences

Marine Lab Director Brings an Anthropologist's View and a Connection to the Sea to the Facilitation Table p.3

He also is active with the Pew Charitable Trusts, serving as a consultant for the Pew Oceans Commission and as a advisory board member for the Pew Scholars in Marine Conservation Program. He proudly notes that Joshua Reichert, who leads Pew’s environmental division, once introduced Orbach as “the head of the new Duke marine conservation mafia” because of Nicholas School graduates’ strong and growing presence in marine policy.

Margaret Davidson, who directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Coastal Services Center in Charleston, S.C., says, “We clearly need more people who have his interests and his skill sets in the coastal and ocean communities.” (In the late 1970s, Orbach spent three years working out of Washington, D.C., as a social anthropologist for NOAA).

Orbach “also has a talent for attracting bright young and capable people to Duke who I think are going to be tomorrow’s leaders,” adds Davidson, whose center provides technical assistance to non-profit coastal resource managers. “In a relatively short period of time I think he has built the Duke program into a contender.”

Orbach acknowledges that there is more than professional interest behind his drive. “Part of what originally drew me into a maritime context with my research is that I wanted to stay around the water,” he says.

From the time he could first be left alone with a boat, Orbach fondly remembers beginning his summers with a 26-mile sail from Orange County, Calif., to Catalina Island for two weeks of diving and spearfishing.

His mother, Betty, was one of Esther Williams’ synchronized-swimming troupe in the 1940s. And his father, Harry Kenneth, started out as a sailor in the U.S. Navy who loved sailing, body surfing and surf fishing.

“Both my brother and I, and now my son, have all been fishermen and surfers and sailors in some mix,” says Orbach, who himself started teaching sailing at age 12 and by 15 was racing ocean-going Hawaiian outrigger canoes.

But more than a love of water got passed on from parents to son. His father, “Kenny”, was a plasma chemist, and his mother an English teacher. By high school, Orbach had grown into a math whiz who also was strongly attracted to the humanities.

As an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, he combined those counterbalancing proclivities by majoring in economics. During grad school he switched from econometrics to cultural anthropology, where he turned to answering his “So what?” questions. For his doctoral thesis at the University of California, San Diego, he joined Portuguese and Italian tuna fishermen as they plied the Pacific from California to Central America.

Around that time he also met Judi, the woman who would become his wife and would persuade him to first grow a moustache. Judi now runs a folk arts society in Carteret and Craven counties. In 1979 their son Matthew was born, who is now a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in the Ukraine.

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5