The Meskwaki and Anthropologists: Action Anthropology Reconsidered

Series Editors' Introduction

Series Editors’ Introduction Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray Sol Tax’s “action anthropology” project with the Meskwaki community at Tama, Iowa, has been lauded in the received history of Americanist anthropology as an early successful attempt to combine the scientific aims of anthropology, the ethical aspirations of the anthropologist to be useful to the community studied, and the Native American impetus to utilize the results of such study for their own purposes. Judith Daubenmier’s account, grounded in a nonjudgmental historicism, successfully alternates between the standpoints of the Meskwaki and the anthropology students Tax sent to their community over more than a decade. Unlike works by many other historians, the perspective of contemporary Meskwaki survivors is a central part of the story Daubenmier tells about past anthropological activity.1 Carrying the story forward into the contemporary circumstances of the Meskwaki is a major accomplishment by Daubenmier. The contrast of perspectives provides insights of Tax’s practice of action anthropology to be of considerable relevance to contemporary situations. At the time the project seemed to have little transformative effect on the discipline of anthropology. The effects were more impressive in the emergence of Native American radical politics in the 1960s, again with the aiding and abetting by Sol Tax. Over the course of more recent decades, anthropology has moved much closer to Tax’s vision than to that of most of his contemporaries. Moreover (some) Chicago-trained anthropologists remain in the vanguard of support for Native American activism. Student participants, largely from the universities of Chicago and Iowa, have been enthusiastic about the aims and results of the project, both retrospectively and at the time of their studies. The Meskwaki project, for many, has served as a model for how Native American fieldwork ought to be done, in its emerging ethic of collaborative research. Most of the students did not pursue the rhetoric of action anthropology, and none of them developed a theoretical justification for the pragmatic or applied nature of their work. Thus, the legacy, for most of the discipline, has been largely invisible for decades. The narrative often depicts the students as naive and their urges to help the Meskwaki as reproducing the very hegemonies they aspired to transcend. They lacked the funding and the structural power to initiate dramatic changes in the material fortunes of the Meskwaki. What their hosts—often bemused, one suspects—made of them has more to do with their good will and openness to establishing local friendships and relationships than it does with actual improvements in the quality of life for Meskwaki. The anthropologists are remembered as pleasant young people, not as agents of transformation of the Meskwaki community. There is no question that the fledgling anthropologists remained outsiders. Daubenmier also puts the Meskwaki project in a comparative context with two bigger and better-funded Harvard projects (in Rimrock, New Mexico, and in highland Chiapas, Mexico) and with the kind of fieldwork training school with which Tax had been involved as a student during the early 1930s. This is not a biography of Sol Tax. In fact, he is sometimes a rather shadowy and distant figure in the narrative. But his commitment to making ethnography a more intersubjective experience, for both observer and observed, remains a significant legacy. The Meskwaki project and Tax’s efforts influenced a major change in the U.S. government ’s Indian policy from coerced assimilation to recognizing sovereignty and encouraging self-determination. Tax also was centrally involved in facilitating a pan-tribal gathering of Native American leaders that led directly to the Native American activism of the 1960s. xii series editors’ introduction The inclusive intention of Tax’s action anthropology provided a baseline for much of the applied anthropology that became more visible in the 1960s and 1970s, leading in turn to the more reflexive public anthropology of today. The Meskwaki project also showed Tax’s determination to internationalize the anthropological voice to include those who had formerly been the studied populations. All of these commitments remain germane and compelling. series editors’ introduction xiii ...