American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations
400
American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations
400eBook
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Overview
In American Anthropology and Company, linguist and sociologist Stephen O. Murray explores the connections between anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and history, in broad-ranging essays on the history of anthropology and allied disciplines. On subjects ranging from Native American linguistics to the pitfalls of American, Latin American, and East Asian fieldwork, among other topics, American Anthropology and Company presents the views of a historian of anthropology interested in the theoretical and institutional connections between disciplines that have always been in conversation with anthropology. Recurring characters include Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Redfield, W. I. and Dorothy Thomas, and William Ogburn.
While histories of anthropology rarely cross disciplinary boundaries, Murray moves in essay after essay toward an examination of the institutions, theories, and social networks of scholars as never before, maintaining a healthy skepticism toward anthropologists’ views of their own methods and theories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496209900 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2018 |
| Series: | Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Stephen O. Murray is the director of El Instituto Obregón in San Francisco. He is the coauthor of Looking through Taiwan: American Anthropologists’ Collusions with Ethnic Domination (Nebraska, 2005) and Boy Wives and Female Husbands, and the author of American Sociolinguistics; Angkor Life; Homosexualities; and other books.
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CHAPTER 1
Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data
Boasian Views
Particularly under the stimulus of Jan Vansina (1965, 1986), the possibility of using oral traditions to draw historical inferences regained legitimacy within anthropology (see, for instance, K. Brown and Roberts 1980). The earlier debate in which consideration of any historical value in such data shows a lack of agreement with the Boasian "band of sons," a phenomenon also evident in the shock to the older sons about what intellectual daughters of "Papa Franz" did, is discussed in chapter 3.
The Cultural Elements Paradigm
Franz Boas, the prime mover both in the institutionalization of American anthropology and in overthrowing the paradigm of nineteenth-century unilinear evolution theory, purported to view the distribution of cultural elements as not only a basis for reconstructing the history of societies without writing but as the only objective basis. During the first decade of the twentieth century, he directed his students to chart the geographical distribution of institutions, beliefs, and material objects from which to infer the migration of peoples and the diffusion of objects. He and they believed that the center of these scattergrams was the point of origin, that the peripheries where diffusion most recently had extended, and that the wider the distribution, the older the trait was. Sapir (1916) provided the most systematic account of the method for inferring age from area (l distribution).
Gathering data and refuting theories were more congenial to Boas than using data for the purposes for which they ostensibly were gathered. When his students began to draw inferences about prehistory, Boas did not support their efforts and shifted to another kind of particularistic study of single cultures, their psychic integration and reproduction. Nevertheless, those already pursuing the first Boasian "normal science," the one in which they had been trained at the turn of the century, continued to try to solve the kinds of historical problems that were never seriously addressed by Boas or by his later students. Particularly in the project of salvaging memory cultures in California, Alfred Kroeber continued mapping cultural traits as reported by his students through the 1930s.
John Reed Swanton and Roland Burrage Dixon were the first Boasians to affirm some historical kernel of truth within folk traditions. Both received PhDs from Harvard, where Frederic Ward Putnam, a patron of both Boas and Kroeber, had established a center for anthropological research. Both had taken courses at Columbia from Boas. Swanton would later aver: "Whatever I have done is due to the inspiration of our teacher, Boas" (Swanton:Robert Lowie, July 30, 1957). Dixon, like Boas a veteran of the Jesup North Pacific Coast expeditions (see Freed and Freed 1983), was interested in language family reconstruction. As Kroeber noted in his obituary of Dixon, "Almost alone among their major contemporaries, he and Swanton maintained a sane and constructive interest in tribal and ethnic migration" (1923a:295).
This was the enduring interest that motivated Swanton and Dixon at least to consider whether folk traditions might contain grains of history. In their 1914 survey of the continent's prehistory they did not recommend uncritical acceptance of such traditions as offering transparent history; indeed, they cautiously suggested, "In investigating still existing people like the American Indian we can appeal in the first place to their traditions, which, although sometimes noncommittal and frequently misleading, gain weight when recorded with other data" (Swanton and Dixon 1914:402).
The far-from-wholesale endorsement was too much for the Machian positivist Robert Lowie, who was to succeed Swanton as editor of the American Anthropologist in 1923 and was, during the late teens, its book review editor. After claiming that "we are not concerned with the abstract possibility of tradition preserving a knowledge of events, we want to know what historical conclusions may safely be drawn from given oral traditions in ethnological practice" (Lowie 1915:597), Lowie appealed to the exemplification of sound practice provided by attorney-folklorist E. Sidney Hartland (1914). Lowie then proceeded to do nothing other than lay down his absolutistic ban of any even "abstract possibility" of such use of oral tradition: "I cannot attach to oral tradition any historical value whatsoever under any condition whatsoever. We cannot know them to be true except on the basis of extraneous evidence, and in that case they are superfluous, since linguistic, ethnological, or archeological data suffice to establish the conclusion in question. ... From the traditions themselves, nothing can be deduced" (1915:598).
Dixon warned that "absolutely unqualified statements like that of Dr. Lowie's are usually dangerous" (1915:599), while Swanton defended folk traditions about movements as revealing at least of the direction of migrations. For Swanton (1915:601), an indicator that corroborated it in nine cases out of ten, when other evidence was available, could therefore be relied upon with some confidence in cases for which no other evidence was available. In Swanton's pragmatic view, some data were better than no data, but for Lowie, "it is our duty to doubt till the facts compel us to affirm" (Lowie:Paul Radin, October 2, 1920), which for Lowie, as for Boas, was never.
Boas's Columbia-Barnard colleague Alexander Goldenweiser, irritated by Lowie's attempted reductio ad absurdum in shifting from accepting reports of the direction of migration to crediting everything in creation myths, joined the fray, noting, "Dr. Lowie does not strengthen his case by citing creation myths as proof of deficient historical sense of the Indians. Commonly enough, the Indians themselves distinguish between a myth and a historical tradition. But even were that not so, who would doubt the word of a woman who tells of having witnessed a child being run over by a street car solely on the ground of his knowledge that the woman believes in ghosts?" (1915:764).
Goldenweiser also provided some less-colorful analogies:
Poor evidence is poor evidence, and the extent to which such evidence can be trusted is determined by the probability of it being true evidence, which again may be estimated from the frequency of agreement between such evidence of an intrinsically higher merit. Just as the physician is guided to his diagnosis of a disease by vague and doubtful symptoms until a positive one is forthcoming, just as the detective follows illusive and contradictory clues before establishing convincing proof of the crime, so the ethnologist in the absence of better evidence follows the lead of tradition until data of higher evidential value serve to confirm or refute his preliminary conjecture or hypothesis. (1915:763–64)
Lowie returned to his battle against native legends having any value as history with more straw men in his December 1916 address as outgoing president of the American Folk-Lore Society (a publication he saw fit to reprint in his collection of his most important ethnological papers), such as "How can the historian beguile himself into the belief that he need only question the natives of a tribe to get at its history?" (Lowie 1960:204) and issued another blanket rejection: "Indian tradition is historically worthless, because the occurrences, possibly real, which it retains are of no historical significance; and because it fails to record accurately, the most momentous happenings" (207).
In 1916 Edward Sapir — who was, with Goldenweiser, a member of what Lowie considered the Boasian "super-intelligentsia" (1959:133) — in laying out the age and area "hypothesis," rebelled against the methodological asceticism of Boas and Lowie. As in his own work on language classifications and phonemics (Sapir 1921a, 1925), Sapir preferred using imperfect data to throwing up his hands and not making historical inferences. In regard to trait distribution, Sapir went beyond Dixon and Swanton to infer the sources (that is, which tribe originated the trait), not just direction of migration, from folklore.
Lowie did not want to review Sapir's book but, having failed to get either Boas or Kroeber to do it, undertook the task. When his evaluation reached Sapir's discussion of "native testimony," Lowie produced an odd introduction: "Dr. Sapir's position with reference to certain moot questions is of interest" (1919:76). Considering that Lowie's own position had recently been attacked in the profession's core journal by four of his elders, including the journal's editor, "moot questions" is quite bold a definition of the situation! Besides which, I wonder how any answer to a "moot question" can be of interest. (Perhaps the word was understood differently a century ago?)
Just as he used creation myths to dismiss limited inferences about population movement in attacking Swanton and Dixon, Lowie set up a Sapirian straw man. Rather than multiple tribes agreeing that some other tribe invented something, Lowie switched to a hypothetical case in which each tribe claimed to have originated the trait and sententiously concluded that "the fact that one of them must be correct does not establish the methodological validity of accepting native traditions as history" (1919:76).
This account, internal to American anthropology (and, indeed, to the American Anthropologist), does not consider the extent to which both Boas and Lowie had been doing battle against German diffusionism theories, as most completely crystallized in Graebner (1911). Boas rarely cited anyone, but he not only reviewed Graebner's magnum opus very negatively but also reprinted his 1911 review from Science in his collection of his major publications, Race, Language, and Culture (Boas 1940:295 — 304). Lowie devoted a presentation at the 1911 annual meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society (published in its journal: Lowie 1913) to attacking the assumptions (and "premature classification" of similarities in culture traits) in Graebner's magnum opus of a conception of mechanical cultural transmission in positing historical transmission of cultural traits (also noted by Boas, whom Lowie did not mention in this connection).
Aftermath
Although Lowie's critique came down (at least in the lore of the field, at least as far as the 1970s) as refutation (in the full Popperian sense) of pseudohistorical methods, closer examination of the whole exchange (or two exchanges) shows that Lowie's dogmatic condemnation of ethnohistorical data fit with the antihistorical wave of the future (ca. 1920) of American anthropology (functionalism, structuralism, culture and personality). It is not that Lowie refuted Swanton and Dixon, only that interests turned away from history of any sort in general and trait distributions in particular (as Lowie 1955:120 recognized). The lack of attention to such evidence in the following decades has less to do with the cogency of Lowie's criticisms than with a shift from historical reconstruction to ahistorical work on modal personalities in intact cultures and synchronic fieldwork focused on social organization.
After completing his combination of linguistic stocks into protofamilies (see Sapir 1921a; Darnell 1971, 1990a), Sapir was at the forefront of "culture and/in personality" theorizing (see Darnell 1990a, 1998b; LaBarre 1958:280 — 81) and arranged for the main carrier to North America of ahistorical functionalism, A. R. Radcliffe Brown, to come to the University of Chicago (see chapter 10; Sapir:Louis Wirth, November 25, 1931). Lowie would eventually write a national character study (Lowie 1954) and a social organization textbook (Lowie 1948). Yet, at the end of his career, he would recollect, "It was the reconstruction of the ancient primitive life that interested me" (Lowie 1959:169), despite his part in making such work seem neither possible nor worth doing (especially in Lowie 1937).
As already mentioned, staggering under the responsibility of salvaging knowledge about numerous California tribes (of considerable language family diversity), Kroeber persisted in collecting checklists of culture elements into the 1930s. By statistical analyses of data gathered by sometimes unenthusiastic students, Kroeber and Harold Driver sought to draw inferences about diffusion and to correlate cultural and environmental areas long after Boas had decreed the study of diffusion ended, and after even Clark Wissler had given it up.
Competing with his Berkeley colleague Frederick Teggart (see chapter 13), Kroeber continued historical correlations on a grand scale (A. Kroeber 1944 was his magnum opus); after World War II Kroeber (1955, 1961) championed Maurice Swadesh's development of a new mechanical discovery procedure for genetic reconstruction of languages, lexicostatisics (see Murray 1994b:207 — 11).
Above I quoted Kroeber writing that only Swanton and Dixon maintained an interest in tribal migration. Dixon's interests shifted from Native America to Polynesia (see Dixon 1916, 1928). Swanton continued careful sifting of whatever could be recovered from explorers' accounts (notably, Swanton 1932) and Native American traditions (Swanton 1930, 1942, 1952). Lowie recurrently used Swanton's work on the lack of clans in some American Indian tribes to refute evolutionary schema and presented it as the prime exemplar of Boasian ethnology in The History of Ethnological Theory (Lowie 1937:145).
And for my generation (and later ones), interest in the possibility of lore containing some valid knowledge (of history, or herbal remedies, and so forth) revived, along with scrutiny of accounts of vanished or greatly modified cultures made by nonprofessional (and still suspect) observers (the whole field of ethnohistory).
For the history of American anthropology, who won in either the short or the long run is less important than is revealing the quite heated disagreement within the fraternity (which it still was in 1915 — 20) of Boasian anthropologists. Boas's discomfort with Sapir's lumping of language families (from the profusion of the "Powell classification") and the discomfort of the first generation of Boasians with the methods of the later generation — most especially Margaret Mead, with her "vigorous omniscience" and lack of command of the languages of the people about whom she pronounced — are better known (the latter is discussed in chapter 3). And almost immediately following the dustup over migration accounts, there was a better-remembered conflict between Kroeber (1917, 1918) advocating considering only "superorganic" phenomena and Sapir (1917) defending psychology (no particular psychology, but the individual as the locus of cultural analysis).
I think that "Boasian paradigm" is a meaningful locution, though those trained after the First World War were pointed at other problematics than those that their elders had been aimed at. Boas remained a nihilist about drawing conclusions and even making generalizations. He may have taught (old-fashioned for the day) statistical methods, but he strikes me as having been incapable of thinking statistically, continuing to search for a single counterinstance to "invalidate" any purported pattern across space or time.
CHAPTER 2The Manufacture of Linguistic Structure
The human intellect, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater order and equality in things than it actually finds, and while there are many things in Nature unique, and quite irregular, still it feigns parallels, correspondences, and relations that have no existence.
— FRANCIS BACON, Novum Organum (1620: L:xlv)
The observer who sets out to study a strange language or a local dialect often gets data from his informants only to find them using entirely different forms when they speak among themselves. ... An observer may thus record a language entirely unrelated to the one he is looking for.
— LEONARD BLOOMFIELD, Language (1933:497)
Classic sociolinguistic work on variation and the permeability of speech community boundaries (Gumperz 1962, Labov 1972) made comprehensible what earlier generations of linguists regarded as "error" deviating from clearly delineated structures of a language. To properly use texts elicited and recorded by hand — in many cases the only records of languages no longer spoken — requires hermeneutic attempts to recover the intent of the recorders (linguists) and informants (not all of whom were native speakers) in the original elicitation context, as well as the problematic(s) motivating the work and the theories through which data were filtered and dictations were heard. The kinds of caution needed to use work based on classical elicitation procedures can be clarified by considering what was typical in the best elicitation-based (white room) fieldwork, such as that of Li Fang-Kuei (1902 — 87).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Series Editor's Introduction xi
Introduction xv
Part 1 Anthropology and Some of Its Companions
Introduction: Before the Boasians 3
1 Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data: Boasian Views 15
2 The Manufacture of Linguistic Structure 22
3 Margaret Mead and the Professional Unpopularity of Popularizers 31
4 American Anthropologists Discover Peasants 52
5 The Non-eclipse of Americanist Anthropology during the 1930s and 1940s 88
6 The Pre-Freudian Georges Devereux, the Post-Freudian Alfred Kroeber, and Mohave Sexuality 102
7 University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology during the 1950s 114
8 American Anthropologists Looking through Taiwan to See "Traditional" China, 1950-1990, with Keelung Hong 122
Part 2 Sociology's Increasingly Uneasy Relations with Anthropology
Introduction 157
9 W. I. Thomas, Behaviorist Ethnologist 161
10 The Postmaturity of Sociolinguistics: Edward Sapir and Personality Studies in the Chicago Department of Sociology 172
11 The Reception of Anthropological Work in American Sociology, 1921-1951 194
12 The Rights of Research Assistants and the Rhetoric of Political Suppression: Morton Grodzins and the University of California Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Study 211
13 Resistance to Sociology at Berkeley 246
14 Does Editing Core Anthropology and Sociology Journals Increase Citations to the Editor? 264
Conclusion: Doing History of Anthropology 273
Acknowledgments 289
Notes 295
References 317
Index 363