by Matt Herper
MIT Anthropology Professor Martin Diskin lost a 25-year battle with leukemia on August 3. Diskin died at Mount Auburn Hospital at the age of 62.
Professor Diskin studied the inequity and impoverishment endemic to the agrarian economies of Central America. He was a passionate advocate for change in this region. Last year, he was the first recipient of the Matin-Baro Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights Award.
A memorial service for Professor Diskin was held in the Wong Auditorium at Tang Center on August 24. Family, friends, and colleagues spoke at the memorial, remembering Diskin as a brave man with an active intellect and a remarkable social conscience.
Professor of Anthropology Jean Jackson (whose office has been adjacent to Diskin's for 24 years), Professor Emeritus of Literature Louis Kampf, and Congressman Jim McGovern were among those who spoke at the service.
Professor Diskin's anthropology and politics were both marked by his empathy and compassion for the people of Central America. At the memorial service, Martin's twin brother Saul remembered, "[This] connection came from his heart."
"He had a sense of the humanity [of the people he studied.] He had a sense that poor people aren't just poor people," said Professor Jackson. "These are people who are full of humor and full of adventure even though they were being kicked in the teeth everyday."
For his doctoral thesis, Diskin studied peasants living in Mexico's "perfect market," where supply and demand alone regulated prices. "Living intimately with rural peasant Indians," he told Tech Talk, "I saw how anthropology systematically ignores desperate poverty... the experience convinced me that the phenomenon of poverty is appropriate for anthropologists to study."
Diskin continued to study rural Central American cultures after receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California in Los Angeles and becoming an assistant professor at MIT in 1967. In addition to Mexico, he did anthropological work in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Professor Diskin was a passionate defender of the rights of Central Americans. He protested the shutdown of of El Salvador's National University by the government in 1983, was arrested along with sixteen MIT colleagues and students who protested the Reagan administration's Nicaraguan policy in 1985, visited political prisoners in Cuba in 1988 and joined a vigil in Lexington, Massachusetts for an American nun murdered in Nicaragua in 1990.
Diskin testified before several congressional committees on reform in El Salvador and served as an official election observer in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
This past year, Diskin raised his voice in support of his former student Lori Berenson, who was sentenced to life in prison by a Peruvian tribunal. "She has to be considered a victim of the political system," he said.
Martin Diskin's activism consisted of more than a series of speeches and demonstrations. Diskin cared deeply about the people whose culture he studied and whose rights he defended.
Saul Diskin commented at his brother's memorial service that although Martin's activism may not have made him a better anthropologist, his anthropology made him a better activist. Diskin's anthropology fed his social conscience.
At the memorial service, Congressman Jim McGovern remembered visiting El Salvador with Professor Diskin. McGovern recalled a night during which he and Diskin tried and failed to save the life of a young activist being held by El Salvador's government. Diskin had the courage to walk into a police barracks and the charisma and persistence to convince the police to look for the missing activist. The man they were looking for was found dead the next morning.
"Martin believed in committing himself to making the world a better place...He was a person who grappled with the real world. [The failure of others to do so] was a complaint he had about academia," recalled Jean Jackson.
Diskin's belief that people take action based on their knowledge became part of his teaching style. Jean Jackson remembers, "Teaching a class, he really cared that students both learn the material and think about the ethical and moral implications [of what they were learning.]"
Belinda M. Garcia, a 1996 MIT Alumna, remembers Diskin's class as "one of the most memorable [classes] of my entire undergraduate career." She recalls, in particular, that Diskin told a morally outraged student, "I understand what you're feeling, but you must, all of you must get past your indignation. It is not politically efficacious."
Martin Diskin was a skilled teacher and anthropologist with a hatred of injustice who always put his skills to use in ways that were politically efficacious for the impoverished and oppressed in Central America.
Professor Diskin is survived by his wife, Viluyna, of Lexington; a daughter, Leah Judith of Cambridge; a son, Aaron Mendel, of Brooklyn; his mother, Rhoda, of Los Angeles; and two brothers, Saul, a twin, of Pheonix, and Philip of Los Angeles.