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4. Action Anthropology and the Values Question
- University of Nebraska Press
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4. Action Anthropology and the Values Question The creation of action anthropology may have occurred in the summer of 1948, but all its implications were not completely obvious at the end of that first summer, either to many settlement residents or to the action anthropologists. Students were well aware that they were taking on extra obligations that traditional anthropologists did not have, and they debated among themselves the propriety of doing so. Members of the community, on the other hand, wondered what the commitment to help would actually turn out to mean, beyond rides in the university car and occasional sandwiches. Having committed themselves to helping the Meskwaki, Tax and his students had to square that promise with their obligations as social scientists to carry out “objective, detached” research. They recognized that helping a community involved choices between possible goals, choices that could not be based on rationality but on values. As scientists, they found making value judgments to be uncomfortable and wondered whether they had the right to “tell people what to do.” Following the logic of social scientists such as Robert Lynd, the action anthropologists rejected the possibility of value-free research and concluded that social scientists always bring their own values to their work, whether they admit it or not. The difference in the approach taken by the Chicago group was that they would explicitly acknowledge that values were involved in their research and try to use them.1 Tax and the students assumed from the beginning that they did “not want to ‘impose’ our values on the community, but rather to act as therapists clarifying people’s own objectives and showing action anthropology and the values question 155 them how they can attain them.” Having noticed the poverty of the settlement and the difficulty of making a living there, the Chicagoans in late 1948 and early 1949 arrived at a general aim of helping the community continue to exist. That, in turn, entailed making the community more economically self-sufficient so that an individual’s decision to stay or leave was freely made, rather than forced by circumstances . Underlying the students’ desire to help the community exist was their appreciation for many aspects of Meskwaki life, as exemplified by their enchantment with people such as Phil and Julie Smith.2 By deciding that they wanted to help the community continue to exist, the action anthropologists implicitly threw their weight onto the side of the Old Bears, the anti-constitution group who preferred the “old ways” such as a hereditary chief, and against Davenport and the Young Bears, who supported the constitutional council and a wider range of innovations from whites.3 Researchers decided that the council was too weak as an institution to be of much value in planning for the community’s future and decided to work around it whenever possible. A commitment to helping the community continue to exist, so that individual Meskwaki had a truly free choice to leave or stay, also was diametrically opposed to federal Indian policy at the time, which favored assimilation into white society. Thus, the commitment of the students to help the Meskwaki carried with it the likelihood of clashes with both the council and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.4 Settling on a project that would benefit a community would be dif- ficult in any setting, but it was especially so in a place as politically fractured as the Meskwaki settlement. Over and over again, students heard Meskwaki complain that people just could not cooperate to accomplish anything for the community. Young Bears blamed the Old Bears. Old Bears blamed the Young Bears. And everybody blamed Ed Davenport. Lawrence Phillips once explained it this way to Bob Rietz and Tom Fallers: “Well, there’s two parts here. If one side wants to do something, the other side won’t go along. Always two parts.” A woman told Lisa Peattie, “People just can’t seem to get together.” Convinced [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:07 GMT) 156 action anthropology and the values question that what many people told them was true, the students hoped that carrying out a project with the community would help heal some of those divisions so that the settlement residents could accomplish more things on their own. In the process of trying to make things happen on the settlement, Tax and the students envisioned that they would learn more about how the community functioned than...