National and Transnational Anthropology: The Canadian Exemplar

As a historian of Canadian anthropology and a student of First Nations languages and cultures, I have been thinking at least sporadically about the history of Canadian anthropology since my arrival at the University of Alberta in 1969. Fresh from an Ivy League education and having completed a dissertation on the history of Americanist anthropology (though I came only recently to use the term "Americanist" for the tradition rather than its primary geographical location), I was eager to leap into documenting the professionalization of Canadian anthropology and its relation to the work of Franz Boas and his first generation of students in much the same way I had approached the earlier study. It turned out to be more complicated than that, for reasons that I believe shed light upon the character of Canadian anthropology and perhaps on the inevitable diversity of all national traditions in the way they hang together something that we might recognize as "anthropology." This paper will trace the process, moving between the two standpoints that have defined my own career: first, there is Canadian anthropology as I have, over the past four decades, made it my own (adapted from Darnell 2008); second, there is the virtual invisibility of a distinctively Canadian tradition outside the country and indeed among some Canadian anthropologists (adapted from Darnell 2009).

Back in 1969, then, I naïvely assumed that the lack of scholarship on the history of Canadian anthropology to that point was due to the unavailability of documents. Moreover, I cheerfully expected that the relatively shallow time depth of professionalization in Canadian anthropology, relative to that in the United States, would facilitate a felicitous combination of archival and oral history approaches. Accordingly, I devoted my first sabbatical in 1976-77 to this project, aspiring to visit major university and museum archives and to interview disciplinary elders, many of whom were still around. I wrote some things about Boasian anthropology in Ottawa under Edward Sapir, but in ways that merely added complexity to the story I had already told, with another country (Ottawa) heard from, as Clifford Geertz would have it. I was taken aback to learn that British Columbia anthropologists still resented the American-imported program in Ottawa, were not enamored of Boas's devotion to professionalization in universities, and tenaciously claimed an anthropology that preceded Boas and used local amateur knowledge to build a history and ethnography of the West Coast Native peoples. They believed that their anthropology was Canadian and Sapir's was not.

Furthermore, I met with a peculiarly Canadian level of civility, respect for the privacy of others, and absence of flamboyance that stymied all my efforts to liven up the story of institutional foundings, founding fathers (more rarely mothers than in the United States) and emerging academic programs based on oral testimony. No one wanted to talk about the foibles and false starts that are inherent in any historical process. (I particularly recall a thoroughly pleasant but historically uninformative high tea at the Empress Hotel in Victoria with Tom McFeat, his wife, and a woman whose name I no longer recall, but who was not an anthropologist.) My interlocutors were infallibly polite and fascinated by my project, but they steadfastly declined to read the past except from the retrospective of the acolyte. How it all came out must surely be the best of all possible worlds.

My next effort to instill order into the history of Canadian anthropology attempted to circumvent the individualism of "American" anthropology by focusing on the institutions of the discipline as recalled by the generation of their founders who perhaps could be persuaded to speak of their experiences for the collective edification of their intellectual progeny. This collaborative approach was somewhat more successful. People seemed less embarrassed to talk about institutional matters in which they were both observers and participants. The late Dick Pope and I organized a series of well-attended sessions at the Canadian Anthropology Society over the course of several years and encouraged participants to share their memories and aspirations in major departments and museums. The plan to publish the memoirs, which did in some...