If you’re ever fortunate enough to sit down and chat with Richard Lobban, CLA ‘68, and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, CLA ‘66, ‘68, there are a few things you should expect. Of course, there is Carolyn’s warmth or Richard’s penchant for dad jokes. Then there are the incredible stories from lives and careers that span ancient archaeological digs, assignments in war-torn African nations, high-stakes political asylum cases, political campaigns, run-ins with notable artists and emissaries, counterterrorism work and so much more.
It might sound like the synopsis of a Hollywood blockbuster, but Richard and Carolyn attribute this wealth of experiences to the field of anthropology, where they’ve enjoyed long and prolific careers as esteemed researchers, chroniclers and educators specializing in African and Middle Eastern studies.
“Anthropology comprises subfields like legal anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and we’ve gotten to work in all of these fields, more or less,” explains Richard. “It’s all because we accepted, and Temple accepted, that this is a holistic, comprehensive discipline.”
Passionate about education and their field, the couple has made it a mission to create pathways to success for young, fledgling anthropologists here at Temple. In 2011, they established the Dr. Richard A. Lobban, Jr. and Dr. Carolyn B. Fluehr-Lobban Pre-Dissertation Research Award in Anthropology. Their annual award allows graduate students in the Department to conduct preliminary or exploratory research and lay groundwork for their dissertation research. They are also working on establishing an endowment fund for support to future interns at the newly renovated Temple Anthropology Laboratory and Museum.
“Temple really gave us our best education. I learned all of my basic anthropology, the fundamentals, at Temple, and we feel a very strong sense of giving back,” explains Carolyn.
They credit their time at Temple University with cementing their dedication to anthropology and creating the foundation from which they built such incredible careers. Not only that, but the two met at Temple, forging a marriage that has lasted 57 years to date.
“The History of Anthropological Theory, how romantic is that?” laughs Richard.
Foundations in Philadelphia
Carolyn Fluehr was born and raised in Philadelphia, growing up in the Hunting Park neighborhood of North Philadelphia. Her mother, Anne Wolsonovich Fluehr, was a recipient of a full scholarship to Temple in 1937. The first in her family to attend college, Anne took courses in journalism until 1939, when she met and married Carolyn’s father, Chris Fluehr. He was a labor organizer and a founder of the Retail Clerks and Managers Protective Association (which in 1980 became the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or UFCW). The family moved to Georgia when Carolyn was 13, and soon her own college career began as a philosophy major at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
“I started out as a philosophy major because I had the big questions, but when I took classes and was asking the big questions, the answers were very ambiguous,” explains Carolyn. “Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you try anthropology?’ So I took my first anthropology class, with my big questions, and I found there was a methodology for being able to answer them.”
Midway through her bachelor’s, Carolyn returned to her hometown and decided to enroll at nearby Temple. “I knew it was the kind of place where I’d feel comfortable, and I could afford it,” she remembers. “It was a people’s school.” She had some archaeology experience in Georgia, so she took an opportunity to analyze the dentition of teeth in actual Algonquian skulls for her bachelor’s honors project. Temple had just launched a new Master’s Degree in Anthropology, and Carolyn decided to enter the program. It was there that she met a young Richard Lobban.
Richard’s initial motivations for coming to Temple were a little different: “I figured Temple sounded better than becoming a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, which I didn’t really much favor.”
Richard was a well-traveled civil rights and anti-war activist. He attended the March on Washington in 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and he had spent time in Africa, working alongside the Mozambican Liberation Front in Tanzania. His upcoming assignment in the Peace Corps had fallen apart due to the Biafran War, and enrolling at Temple would maintain his draft deferment status. And so, Richard Lobban became the first ever student in Temple’s Anthropology Master’s program.
The Lobbans recognize these Temple years as formative, and not just for their respective careers and eventual marriage—it was a momentous time in history to be a student at a college like Temple in a city like Philadelphia. This was especially true within their diverse and tight-knit anthropology cohort. Carolyn recalls a night when classmates invited her to a small jazz club in South Philadelphia, where she got to see John Coltrane perform up close. Another time, Sammy Davis Jr. dropped in at Mitten Hall to perform and speak with students. The two remember a close friend who came from Namibia and majored in political science. His name was Theo-Ben Gurirab. He would later serve terms as Foreign Minister in Namibia and Chair of the UN Security Council.
“Temple is a people’s school, and these are the kind of people you could meet. There’s an inherent humanism that you feel everywhere you go, whether you’re in the classroom or the cafeteria,” says Carolyn. “And there was a great camaraderie among us, because we were all pioneers.”
Chicago and Places Even Further Away
Temple did not yet offer a PhD in Anthropology, so in 1968, the newly married Lobbans headed to Chicago for Northwestern University’s African Studies in Anthropology program. At first, Illinois was an exciting change of scenery for the two, but it was only the beginning.
“We applied to go to Kenya for our PhDs, but we never heard back. We were warned not to go to Sudan, so of course, we also applied to go to Sudan,” says Richard. “And we got accepted to go to Sudan.”
They lived and studied in Sudan from November 1970 until early 1972. Richard completed his PhD on Sudanese social network analysis. Carolyn’s doctorate was on homicide in Sudan, a natural progression from her legal anthropology studies at Temple.
“My master’s degree was on observation of the two Philadelphia lower criminal courts, and there was a direct connection between that experience and deciding to study Islamic law in Sudan,” explains Carolyn. “By that time, my Arabic was pretty good, so I spent hours and hours in Sudanese courts, from family law to criminal court. The judges were so impressed that a khawaja, or a white woman from America, had come to do this kind of study, that they often would invite me to come up and sit beside them.”
After returning from Sudan, Richard and Carolyn were both hired by Rhode Island College (RIC) in 1972. There, they taught, conducted research and wrote prolifically on Africa and the Middle East for the next four decades. They continued to visit the region often. In fact, just the next year, in 1973, Richard was on location as a journalist covering the war for Guinea-Bissau’s independence from Portugal. He was the first American to cross the country on foot and spent an evening at the Portuguese fort at Guiledge just days after it fell in the final, decisive battle, leading to the fall of 500 years of Portuguese colonialism in Africa over the following year.
A Retirement in Name Only
By 2012, both Richard and Carolyn had retired from their full-time teaching positions, though it almost seems disingenuous to frame their activity since then as “retirement.”
Shortly after stepping down from RIC, Richard began working with an international team excavating an ancient Nubian temple in Sudan, unearthing 2,000-year-old Meroitic-era artifacts. In 2005, he was contacted by the CIA—three years before the horrific attacks of September 11th, 2001, he had written about Osama bin Laden’s lingering presence in Sudan for The Providence Journal, and they wanted to pick his brain. These talks, and Richard’s established expertise on the region, led to 19 years teaching African security and counterterrorism at the Naval War College in Rhode Island.
“I thought, with my opposition to the Vietnam War and having been embedded with insurgents who were fighting groups the US supported, I’d never get qualified,” explains Richard.
“I was hired on the spot.”
Carolyn can still be found in courtrooms. Over the past twenty years, she and Richard have worked on over 100 political asylum cases, testifying as expert witnesses and radically impacting (and sometimes outright saving) the lives of asylum seekers from all over Africa.
Through all of this, the two somehow find time to tend to their bees. They have been serious beekeepers for the past 25 years. You could say they feel a kinship with their colony of winged workers. “The bees believe in collective work and making the best result, and they produce a very sweet reward,” explains Carolyn. “We’re conservationalists and we try to do a lot for the environment. We follow the bees’ good instruction. After all, they’ve been around for 50 million years. We’re still working on our first million.”
When they can, the couple still returns to Temple to present their scholarship in person. They cherish the opportunity to meet with the students and take another look at the campus where it all started for them.
“Temple, somewhat inadvertently, somewhat deliberately, somewhat serendipitously, was not only foundational in our formal academic training, but in terms of careers, degrees, marriage…just setting the course for our lives,” notes Richard. “Every one of those things is Temple.”
“That word—serendipity—came from Arabic, by the way,” he adds.