A four-year-old child lands in Chicago, having been flown from Athens in the care of her adoptive mother. As a grown woman, she cannot remember anything of these early years, yet they continue to haunt her into the present day.

A young woman recalls how as a child she found solace in Greek mythology whose stories felt more real to her than those that circulated in the household of her adoptive U.S. family.

A child is placed in a box outside the orphanage in Patras, Greece, in May 1953, only to be adopted three years later by a married couple living in San Diego. In turn, the couple would adopt three more children, among them a boy from an orphanage in Athens. Facing nightly abuse from her adoptive father for repeated bedwetting that continued until she was twelve years old, the girl fantasizes about her birth father, thinking to herself, “My real dad would never treat me this way.”

For another adoptee, the story of unsettlement and dislocation would begin with her being left at the same orphanage in Patras, a note attached to her infant body reading, “Her name is Despo. She was born 1/5/1958. She likes to eat.”

A thirteen-year-old boy on a car ride with his father and uncle recognizes without understanding why that he is not related by blood to the people in the car with him, that he is somehow a “fraud,” without a family line he can call his own.

A twelve-year-old boy growing up in the shadow of Disneyland is completing a registration form for junior high school and realizes he doesn’t know the answer to the question, “What is your city of birth?” In the conversation that occurs with his parents, his father tells him, “You were adopted, we told you before.” As he would remember years later, he couldn’t at that moment fathom the reason anyone would want to give their child away.

Twenty-five years after being forced to give her son up for adoption, a Greek woman writes to her now-grown son a letter that will change both their lives.

Every journey starts with a first step. A decision, really, to take that first step. To metaphorically move one foot in front of the other. That first step for me was taken on March 10, 2011. It was a cold, overcast, dreary Saturday morning when I typed the words “Patras orphanage” into the search bar. Life is full of unexpected journeys, and this was not my first one.

The past six months had been so difficult. Shirley, my wife of 24 years, had passed away, suddenly, but not unexpectedly, the previous September. We both knew she was sick. Having been a certified nurse’s aide in the home health care field for many years, she knew her prognosis. There is no cure for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). I knew that, too. What I didn’t know was how soon it would take her. She knew, though, and as I look back, there were signs.

Shirley’s death left a void in my life and also gave me time to think about other things, like my own life and where it began. I hit “enter” on the keyboard that Saturday morning in March and that’s when everything changed. The first entry came up and was about the Skagiopouleio Orphanage. Was this the orphanage? My orphanage? I clicked on the second entry and it was there I found an article from April 13, 1996, published in the New York Times entitled “Tales of Stolen Babies and Lost Identities: A Greek Scandal Echoes in New York.” The article told the stories of Maxine Deller, and others, in their search for the truth behind their adoptions from Greece in the 1950s. All came from the orphanage in Patras.

“Holy shit! Could I have been a part of this?” I said out loud to no one. I had never heard of this and I quickly became obsessed. The rest of that day was spent searching. There was a website (no longer in existence) published by a Greek adoptee regarding his experiences as an adoptee. On it were pictures of the Patras Municipal Orphanage, an old, decrepit building, long since torn down.

Introduction

On 31 March 2020, Sierra Leone reported its first case of COVID-19. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was already implementing curfews, quarantines and contact tracing to try and prevent the novel coronavirus from continuing to spread. Sierra Leone was experienced in implementing similar measures, being one of the three contiguous West African countries that suffered from the worst outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in history, from 2014 to 2016. Sierra Leone was finally deemed Ebola-free in March 2016, after 14,124 probable cases and 3,956 deaths out of 11,325 deaths worldwide (CDC, 2019).

Sierra Leone’s experience and lessons learned fighting Ebola are relevant today, as COVID-19 is present in nearly every country on earth. How did Sierra Leone manage to curb the spread of Ebola when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) projected that up to 1.4 million people would succumb to the disease? Not only did Sierra Leone rank 180 out of 187 on the UN Human Development Index in 2014, but it was also ranked among the world’s 10 poorest countries (World Bank, 2011). When Ebola hit, the country had only recently emerged from an 11-year civil war and local trust in the government was low. It had one of the weakest healthcare systems in the world, with an average life expectancy of 52.37 years (World Bank). The number of doctors for the population was dangerously low and rural roads were in such poor condition, with clinics so far away, that it made it nearly impossible for people to seek healthcare – and they might be unwilling to go anyway, given the rumours circulating about Ebola. Some believed that the disease was introduced by the ruling political party to kill their rivals. Others simply believed that Ebola was a death sentence: if you went to an Ebola treatment unit (ETU) you would die and the doctors would not return your body to your family for a traditional burial, despite its cultural importance. The high death rate was also tragically reflected in the number of local healthcare workers who succumbed to the disease: out of the 307 who were infected in Sierra Leone, 221 died (Raven et al., 2018).

In the 1990s, when I was a journalist working in Philadelphia, I executive produced a documentary about an orphanage in Guatemala that, at the time, was one of the “go to” places where childless couples could find infants and young children to adopt. I remember helping the reporter and producer craft the storyline, deciding to begin by telling the story of Moses (yes, that Moses), who was maybe one of the first adoptees in recorded history, and what that story has meant in Judaism and in the greater historical narrative about adoption.

I worked on the story dispassionately. We had long discussions about the plucking of Guatemalan children from their rich culture and language to see them dispatched to points all over the globe. We talked about birth mothers and fathers. We talked about what could become of these children and what they might feel about their adoptions as they grew up. And yet, I failed to internalize the stories and destinies of those precious children. I failed to acknowledge, in my own heart, that I was one of them, even as I had begun my own search for biological kin, via the sluggish U.S. Postal Service, before the Internet was widely available.

My own ten-year search (to this point in the 1990s) was not yielding fruit; my biological mother, whose name was listed on my Greek birth certificate, had decided, after many letters through intermediaries back and forth, that she would not pursue and did not want a meeting with me, as I had requested. No explanation was given, just speculation about her feelings and frame of mind, but again, I failed to internalize the news. Rather than to feel about it, I abruptly abandoned my search. Obviously, I was too hurt to deal with the rejection, but failed to express it. I summarily buried my deepest feelings about the circumstances of my birth, my adoption, and what it felt like to have been born into one family and be given to and raised by another.

It was not until after both my adoptive parents had died when I allowed myself to seriously think about my early childhood again.

Introduction: From Political Economy to Sociology

There is general agreement that Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and David Ricardo (1772–1823) are founders of political economy (Roll 1973: 173). Their status depends to a large extent on two, but profoundly influential, publications: An Essay on Population in 1798 and Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817. Nevertheless, they produced a voluminous collection of publications. Pietro Sraffa's edition of Ricardo ran to eleven volumes. Malthus is also recognised in his own right as a founding figure of political economy, but his development of social science has in the past often been overshadowed by moral criticism that is blind to his real scientific contributions. In this chapter, I promote the idea that Malthus and Ricardo were also founders of sociology without whom there would be, for example, no Marxist sociology of social class. When Ricardo introduced the growth of manufacturing into the third edition of Principles, then wages cannot rise and the conflict between capitalists and landlords over rent evaporated to be replaced by a conflict between capitalists and workers as machines replaced labour (Davis 1993). Thus, the foundation of Marx's class theory was already well developed in classical political economy. Sociology in the case of Max Weber's generation emerged out of economics conceived as a ‘science of man’ that examined the ‘conditions of existence’ of people. Thus, sociology was already embedded in the Historical School of German ‘political economy’ (Hennis 1988: 105–45). German economists rejected Adam Smith's ‘cosmopolitanism’ in which nations freely traded with each other to their mutual benefit. For Weber, economics was a political science based on national struggle for domination. Weber was only too aware of issues around population growth and immigration from a national perspective (Tribe 1989). Prussian Junkers were hiring Polish workers to lower their costs of production, thereby displacing the German population. In his 1895 Inaugural Address to the University of Freiberg, he criticised the policies that resulted in the displacement of German by Polish workers in the East Elbian provinces of Prussia with disastrous effects on German character and culture. Weber concluded: ‘As usual, a large number of children follows hard on the heels of a low standard of living, since this tends to obliterate any calculation of future welfare.

I was born in my great-grandmother’s house on January 2, 1955, in Alagonia, Messinias, Kalamata, Greece. I was named Despina after my greatgrandmother. My mother was promised that I would receive a piece of land if she would honor her husband’s mother with my name.

I am the third-born of four children. However, the fourth-born, who was a baby, was not the one being adopted. I was. At the age of seven, I was adopted by John and Beatrice, an elderly couple from the United States. He was Greek-born and married to an American from the Deep South, ages 72 and 48, respectively. I was not an orphan, but I would be classified as such soon enough. This entire process took about a year and a half.

Being adopted near adolescence, I can recall with vivid detail what it was like to be partially stripped of my culture that was already deeply embedded. I maintained communication with my family back in Greece, and saw, all my life, what it could have been, had I not been adopted. My only solace in my life was that my new father was Greek-born. My village was my whole universe. Would it miss me as much as I missed it? My mother’s goal was to relinquish me in an attempt to “benefit” the whole family. I didn’t feel singled out. She could have chosen any one of us. But it was me and I was part of a plan my mother had hatched.

It was 1961. The president of the Michigan chapter of American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) was scheduled to attend a ceremony in Greece, but was unable to make it due to health issues. Instead, my great-grandmother’s son, John Anastos, would fill in for him and take the trip with his wife, Beatrice. He had not returned to visit Greece since he was seventeen. He was now nearing seventy.

During their stay, they decided to visit his hometown of Alagonia where he owned a home, which happened to be mine, where I was born and living with my family. This is where it all started.

This collection of essays on the life and work of Peter Ludwig Berger (March 17, 1929–June 27, 2017) offers a broad perspective on his many contributions to sociology and social theory. But his contributions also go well beyond these fields. His uses of both empirical observation and theoretical insight made Peter the most effective kind of activist, always committed to arguing about how to help people in various nations help themselves. His meditations on religion, secularism, capitalism, mediating structures, and pluralism are living proof that he saw in quite familiar commitments to family, community, and nation, those ingredients that contribute to what has lately been called “flourishing.” He could not be easily pigeonholed to one political side or the other. Faith and reason were for him incompatible with ideology.

I first met Peter L. Berger in the mid-1970s when he was president of the Eastern Sociological Society. We met again in 1981 when his wife Brigitte hired me at Wellesley College, where I have remained for the past 40 years. Both Peter and Brigitte were everything I wanted to be as a sociologist with their ever broadening and deepening erudition that was always directed to matters of public interest and importance. With my appointment in 1998 as an Editor-in-Chief of Society, I began a fruitful collaboration with Peter and what was then the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture and what later became the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. We worked together on many conferences that were eventually published in the journal as well as in books. This was what Peter sometimes referred to as “the business side” of our relationship.

I was fortunate to know Peter over these same years in special ways that others close to him knew him. I have never been very good at remembering jokes. Peter offered a constant supply of them every time we met to discuss our work together. One sociologist who reviewed Peter’s book on humor wrote, “Consider it a benevolent and profound sermon about the possibilities of benign humor for lifting the human spirit.”