Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California, and: Anthropology Put to Work (review)

Abalone Tales is a beautiful book that does justice to the beauty of abalone itself and to the oral traditions of California coastal tribes. Field is both present as a participant in the story and respectful of his collaborators. He adroitly brings together older ethnographic texts like Karl Teeter's translation of a Wiyot Abalone Woman story with contemporary literary creations like Cheryl Seidner's version of the same story and Florence Silva's stories about her grandfather, the Bole Maru dreamer John Boston, informant to Cora Du Bois in the 1930s. The book is an example of engaged ethnographic reporting that interweaves information from museum collections and oral history of contemporary California tribal people.

Anthropology Put to Work is itself a collaborative enterprise in that contributors came together to participate in a Wenner-Gren Symposium on "Anthropology Put to Work/Anthropology That Works?" Each contributor brought his or her knowledge and regional experience to bear on the topic. The result is a thoughtful and multifaceted collection that should be essential reading for graduating anthropologists looking for a place to combine the anthropological calling with meaningful work. It also suggests ways in which the work of anthropology and the anthropology of work bring about the discipline's "knowledge claims."

When I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, anthropology was not part of the curriculum. I decided to become an anthropologist anyway after a chance summer encounter with the Dane-zaa people of northeastern British Columbia, but I was occasionally confronted with the challenge: "Anthropology, how can you make a living from that?" I had a lot of catching up to do, but thanks to a four-square academic program at Harvard and the vision of my teachers among the Dane-zaa, I was able to define the field in a way that combined the practice of anthropology as a calling with employment as a tenure-track professor in an academic department. I was part of a fortunate generation for whom there were ample employment opportunities in university departments. I am eternally grateful for being able to do what I love and make a living from it. Anthropology graduates today must be more creative in defining the meaningful work available to them. These books provide a useful guide.

For today's students beginning to contemplate a career in anthropology, a calling to the discipline cannot be counted on to pay the bills and sustain gainful employment. The two books under review touch both on anthropology as a calling and on anthropology as a route to employment. Abalone Tales is a perfect example of collaborative ethnography in which the anthropologist's calling resonates with the deeply held core identity of the Native Americans with whom he works. The book is organized around "the relationship between the fate of abalone and that of Native Peoples of California." The anthropology of Kroeber and his colleagues declared many of the California tribes extinct, even though they exist to this day. Similarly, abalone is commercially extinct on the California coast but continues to have enormous symbolic value among Native Americans.

Field describes his collaborative work with the California tribes as polyphonic, in which he and his collaborators explore "Native identity and sovereignty through the lens of abalone" (12). In this case abalone is itself a polyphonic symbol: a mollusk, a food source, a raw material for sacred and ornamental necklaces, and an inspiration for stories that bring the sacred, the material, and the social together. Field researched abalone shell necklaces held in museum collections in Europe and North America and compared these to illustrations from Georg von Langsdorff and Cora Du Bois. Then he referenced abalone stories collected by Karl Teeter in relation to a beautiful contemporary interpretation by Wiyot Tribal Chair Cheryl Seidner and...