Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886-1965 (review)

In Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886-1965, John S. Gilkeson articulates how the work of anthropologists, beginning with Franz Boas, facilitated the rise of America's "culture-consciousness" from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s. Comprising five thematically and historically organized essays, Gilkeson's work articulates the significant impacts of American anthropologists' roles in formulating and disseminating a uniquely American conception of "culture" as a crucial idea for the emergence of American cultural nationalism and eventual rediscovery.

Gilkeson focuses on the unique contributions and the peculiar space that the relatively new discipline of anthropology carved for itself within the broader American intellectual community as well as noting American anthropologists' penchant for public intellectualism. The book locates American anthropology's influences as occurring across disciplines to contextualize and trace the varying pathways of a newly conceptualized notion of culture as it empowered further notions of American character, personality, and civilization. Altogether, these constituted a rediscovery of America through the conceptualization and dissemination of shifting and shared ideas about culture and civilization.

Chapter 1, "Culture in the American Grain," documents the establishment of American anthropology as a discipline built on a newly Americanized concept of "culture." Akin to a biography of the concept itself, Gilkeson traces its currency from the arrival of Boas through to the struggles of a relatively new nation seeking to redescribe itself. Moreover, he shows how culture both "served as a foil for race and racial thinking" and "as a tool for anthropologists and social scientists . . . in achieving autonomy"—to name a few of the applications of culture that Gilkeson delineates as underwriting "the rediscovery of America" (68).

Chapter 2, "Social Class in the Ethnography of the American Scene," presents a vigorous exposition on the shifting intellectual debates over social class and power in American society by delineating the impacts and receptions of Robert and Helen Lynd's classic Middletown, showing how it popularized anthropology in specific ways, and sparked interests in how Americans perceived themselves. Gilkeson points out how the Lynds' ethnographies and, especially, those of Lloyd W. Warner, "led to the discovery of distinct American social classes, thereby challenging a core belief of American exceptionalism," although many contemporaries resisted such discoveries, preferring "status" to class and emphasizing the fluid quality of social mobility over the fixedness of class (168).

Chapter 3, "The Psychology of Culture and the American Scene," explores the influence of psychiatry and neo-Freudian psychoanalysis in anthropology. These, in turn, inspired interests in culture and personality research, national character studies and cross-cultural socialization with an emphasis on how these interests, in the fallout of the war, "spilled over" into other disciplines. Tracing the influence of anthropologists' work on national character studies more broadly, as many scholars appropriated the concept of the "American Character" at the height of its influence, Gilkeson notes the more broadly conceived and correlating goals of defining American "homogeneity and "durability"—with a corresponding loss of credibility in historical and American studies as the concepts of these projects became increasingly problematic throughout the 1960s (156-158).

Chapter 4 marks the intellectual turn toward studying values and the postwar trends toward positivism in social scientific research and sets the stage for the historical turn and a keen interest in peasant and civilization studies. A fresh and much needed exposition on the intellectual life of Clyde Kluckhohn, this section stresses Kluckhohn's shift to the study of values and his interest in "implicit culture," not to mention his leading role in establishing the practice of long-term field research in American anthropology (198-199).

Chapter 5, "America as a Civilization," provides a fresh perspective on the increasing interest in historical approaches to studying civilizations and the extent to which the United States had become an advanced civilization that possessed a "high" culture of its own. Together with a focus on the contributions of Alfred Kroeber and Robert Redfield, Gilkeson's epilogue further fleshes out...