Joseph Mitchell—with Variations

This 75-page Prickly Paradigm Press offering is perhaps the most intertextual text I have ever been challenged to review—which is to say, there are more voices per line of text here than an adventurous anthropological reader will encounter in a month of Sundays. Joseph Mitchell, the iconic, iconoclastic New Yorker writer, was "the chronicler of an earlier New York City's odder citizens," as Robert Brightman puts it in his introduction (1). Mitchell's chronicling combined the strengths of both journalism and anthropology; indeed, Brightman quotes Mitchell asserting that "the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and the occasional bartender" (1–2, Mitchell 1938:19).

Mitchell left his native North Carolina for New York at the age of 21, arriving there in 1929 intent on becoming a "political reporter" (1938:11). He started out covering what journalists call police beats—in Brooklyn, the West Side of Manhattan, and Harlem. "I liked Harlem best," he noted (1938:13). There he met people like Gilligan Holton, who ran a "honkytonk" where slumming White people got drunk and revealed their secrets, so that "Holton had a quantity of information about them, some of which would gag a goat" (1938:13). Such experiences had a decisive influence on Mitchell: "I was so fascinated by the melodrama of the metropolis at night that I forgot my ambition to become a political reporter" (1938:14).

Joseph Mitchell's "Man—with Variations": Interviews with Franz Boas and Colleagues Mitchell did not become an anthropologist. He became, in the words of his New Yorker colleague, David Remnick, "one of the most popular newspapermen in the city. His picture appeared on the sides of delivery trucks" (2008:ix). He was, according to Remnick, "infinitely curious," and "if he wanted to know a neighborhood better, he would take up residence there in a cheap rooming house" (2008:ix). Not by training an anthropologist, Mitchell was nonetheless akin to one (10), a kinship that was confirmed for Mitchell himself when he interviewed Franz Boas and some of his colleagues for the New York World-Telegram, leading to a six-part series titled "Man—with Variations" that ran November 1–6, 1937, and which is reproduced in the book under review for the first time.

The first two articles profiled Boas, sketching the range of his anthropology and focusing on his debunking of the idea of race and its ideological elaborations. Brightman notes that Mitchell "may have despaired of rationalizing [the] unity" of Boasian four-field anthropology (4). His summary of the Boasian critique of race, relying both on quotations from Boas and "excerpts from a written summary" provided by Ruth Benedict (5), was insistently topical; Mitchell emphasized its application both to Hitler's Germany and to US racism and xenophobia. The discussion of race also entailed some general remarks about the environmental (economic, historic, cultural) factors that influence human behavior and well-being. And Mitchell pointedly noted the relevance of anthropological data to ostensible truths upheld by other disciplines: "information gathered tediously in hundreds of obscure cultures…is forcing…philosophers of law, psychologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and economists to reevaluate their concepts" (29).

The adverb "tediously" is, in Mitchell's lexicon, a word of respect, as evidenced in the final four articles of the series which focused on the research of Boas's students and colleagues: Ruth Landes, Edward Kennard, George Herzog, Alexander Lesser, Gene Weltfish, and (as summarized by Benedict) Reo Fortune. The title of the first of these gives the flavor: "Average Anthropologist Gets a $500 Grant to Do a Miracle—and He Generally Does, Groping for the Ghost of the Past" (39). The "miracle" to which Mitchell referred concerns first of all the depth and quality of ethnographic fieldwork, as compared to "African expeditions organized by well-heeled young gents whose mamas are willing to buy them yachts and tons of Abercrombie & Fitch equipment," resulting in collections of "flea-bitten snake and...