American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations

Chapter 7: University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology during the 1950s

114 7 University of California, Berkeley, Anthropology during the 1950s The origins of anthropology at Berkeley—Franz Boas’s patron, Harvard’s Frederic Ward Putnam, being in nominal charge of the collection of antiquities Phoebe Apperson Hearst gave to the University of California —and how Boas’s first Columbia PhD, Alfred Louis Kroeber, went to California and began teaching anthropology at Berkeley—have been thoroughly explored by Timothy Thoresen (1975) and Ira Jacknis (1993a, 1993b, 2000, 2002). As the Ethnological and Archaeological Survey of California (established in 1903) led to the Handbook of the Indians of California (A. Kroeber 1925) and beyond, Kroeber presided over salvage elicitation of information about California Native Peoples whose cultures seemed irremediably shattered and whose languages seemed on the verge of extinction. Although more of native cultures and languages has persisted than seemed likely early in the twentieth century, material was elicited from the last speakers of a number of languages and memories of prereservation life were gathered, even though the data collection through the 1930s tended toward checking off lists of cultural traits, an endeavor that seemed frustratingly old-fashioned to 1930s graduate students sent out on salvage missions (see Beals 1978; Foster 1976)—and even to Kroeber’s teacher, regarded by many as the archparticularist , Franz Boas (see Jacknis 2002:525–26). George Foster and Ralph Beals wrote (and were recorded by interviewers ) about the seemingly detached and very busy figures with national reputations who taught them ethnology and sent them to sink or swim in the field, following Boas’s example. The more approachable University of California Museum director Edward W. Gifford began offering some courses in 1920 (although he did not officially become a professor until 1938) and Robert H. Lowie was hired from the American Museum of Natural History to teach at Berkeley in 1921. UC–Berkeley Anthropology during the 1950s 115 When Kroeber was able to add another faculty member he had many choices, but he chose the undistinguished but loyal alumnus Ronald L. Olson as a junior staff member to take on teaching introductory anthropology and other drudgeries. Not without reason, many have inferred that Kroeber did not want charismatic competition or competition in running what had de facto been his department from before its official founding. Robert Lowie was content to let Kroeber run the department. Moreover , an undistinguished scholar could not have been brought in when Lowie was hired, so this earlier hiring of a major anthropologist does not constitute convincing evidence against the surmise that Kroeber wanted, if not a flunky, at least someone providing no competition. (Perhaps he saw in Olson something others did not see and a promise that did not materialize.) After Kroeber, After World War II I have chosen to focus on the 1950s in part because the early decades of Berkeley anthropology have been well described in print and Berkeley of the 1960s has been much written about. Berkeley anthropology of the 1950s has not. In addition to recapitulating the example of avoiding competition that characterized not only Kroeber’s hiring of Olson but his allocation of “tribes” to one anthropologist who could then with perceived legitimacy object to “poaching” by others, my choice of the 1950s is motivated by interest in what Weber called the routinization of charisma. The charismatic founder of the institution, Alfred Kroeber, retired in 1946 and went back to his alma mater, Columbia, where he drew a number of productive students. He spent his summers in northern California and continued to be consulted by his successors in the Berkeley department until his death in 1960. Indeed, when the department finally added a linguistic anthropologist, as he had been advocating—after retirement—it was one of whom he more than approved (Dell Hymes). Kroeber took an interest in the Berkeley students of the 1950s and was regularly informed about them and other matters of departmental importance . Lowie retired in 1950 and also had successes in teaching in various places, including Berkeley, after retirement. Cultural anthropologist David Mandelbaum, who had been a student of Edward Sapir at Yale and was well established on the University of Minnesota faculty, and archaeologist Robert Heizer, a departmental 116 UC–Berkeley Anthropology during the 1950s alumnus, were hired in 1946 at the time of Kroeber’s retirement and the start of the surge of university enrollment propelled by the GI Bill and by the postwar growth of the California...