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Chapter 5: The Non-eclipse of Americanist Anthropology during the 1930s and 1940s
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88 5 The Non-eclipse of Americanist Anthropology during the 1930s and 1940s Before undertaking the research for this chapter, I accepted too easily the conventional view (“folklore” in the pejorative sense) that American anthropologists’ turn away from studying Native North American peoples began with Margaret Mead in Samoa and Robert Redfield in Mexico during the late 1920s, became more general with the importation (partly by Mead and Redfield and directly by the American sojourns of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski at, respectively, the University of Chicago and Yale University) of British functionalisms during the 1930s, and was established decisively with the mobilization of anthropologists into the U.S. war effort during the 1940s. When I looked more closely, I saw that the eclipse of Americanist work was lesser and later than many Americanists suppose. Clearly, Mead and Redfield and the visiting functionalists articulated an already widespread impatience with listing and mapping traits salvaged from the memories of those no longer living in aboriginal societies (see chapter 1). They and many students of the 1930s sought to study the functional integration of intact, distinct “primitive” cultures and scorned examination of how Native Americans lived on the reservations to which they had been confined. These anthropologists’ own fieldwork was mostly far from intensive and often did not even involve prolonged residence with the people studied.1 About the Omahas, with whom she reluctantly—and, I might add, clandestinely2—worked in the summer of 1930, Mead wrote that “there was very little out of the past that was recognizable and still less in the present that was aesthetically satisfying . . . . I had the unrewarding task of discussing a long history of mistakes in American policy toward the Indians and prophesying a still more disastrous fate for them in the future” (1972:190–91).3 As Hymes noted, The Non-eclipse of Americanist Anthropology 89 “Some anthropologists stopped studying Indians in the 1930s, because they had become like any other minority group” (1974:31). For instance, Elizabeth Colson (1985:178), whose first fieldwork was in California, recalled , “Many of us thought by the 1930s that what could be recorded here at home about the Native Americans’ pre-conquest past had been recorded, and we wanted a chance to write about living people. Today we no longer share a regional focus and probably have not done so since about 1950.” In addition to stressing that last date—coincidentally the year of my birth and the high tide of British functionalist social anthropology of Africa—I would note that interbellum Americanists had practically no systematic knowledge of reservation life to apply. Kelly (1985:129) discussed the critique Scudder Mekeel and Julian Steward made in 1936 and Steward (1977:336) reiterated that “in 1934 anthropologists were ill-equipped with basic understanding of culture change in the modern world” because “ethnologists were not interested in the factors, processes , and dynamics of change that had occurred during the many years following European contact” (also see Villa Rojas 1979:50). The acculturation studies of the 1930s continued to focus on (shared/ normative) cultural traits, not on communities, let alone communities in the context of states. Indian reservations could have been, but were not, the site of community studies. I don’t think that anyone thought to treat the Native Americans living in the 1930s as outside of history or as examples of endogenously maintained social equilibrium, as social anthropologists treated groupings in colonized Africa as being. [Radcliffe-]Brown did not undertake fieldwork during his Chicago tenure (1931–37) and greatly antagonized many Americanists, including Edward Sapir, who had been partly responsible for bringing him to Chicago.4 Although she put in some time on a reservation, Mead was very emphatic that she did not want to make a career as an Americanist and famously insisted on going to Polynesia for her first fieldwork in defiance of Boas’s wish for her to work with some American tribe (M. Mead 1972:128–30; see chapter 3). In that Derek Freeman (1983) has cast her as the Boasian archetype (see chapter 3), there is a special irony in her refusal to study Native Americans. The irony is increased by the markedly nationalistic American defense of Mead in that she was heavily influenced by British functionalists before almost any other American was and in that no one since Radcliffe-Brown had occasioned so uniform [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:25 GMT) 90 The Non-eclipse of...