-
Chapter 9: W. I. Thomas, Behaviorist Ethnologist
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
161 9 W. I. Thomas, Behaviorist Ethnologist W. I. Thomas’s role in pioneering the kind of empirical research that is identified as “the Chicago school of sociology” is well recognized (see Bulmer 1984; R. Faris 1967; Kurtz 1984). That most of his writings were intended as contributions to ethnology has been forgotten by later generations of sociologists and anthropologists, and even by historians of social science. The fame of the monumental Polish Peasant in Europe and America overshadows both his earlier and later work collating ethnographic details gathered by others. The book was originally published in five volumes between 1918 and 1920, the first two by the University of Chicago Press, then all five by Richard Badger (Boston). Having consigned The Polish Peasant to sociology, anthropologists (and their historians ) neglect its priority for work on acculturation by American anthropologists. Leslie White, who, typically for anthropologists, considered The Polish Peasant a work of sociology, not anthropology, believed that Thomas’s anthropological books “have not been appreciated at their true worth by American anthropologists—probably, I believe, because Thomas was not a ‘member of the union.’” (White:Fred Mathews, November 29, 1964; cf. Lowie 1945:416). In this chapter I attempt to reclaim Thomas for the history of American anthropology, especially the move within it toward “culture and personality” work after the Boasian “refutation” of nineteenth-century evolutionisms. I also show that, although the personality and interests of Frederick Starr undoubtedly obstructed the “professionalization of scientific [which in the context is to say Boasian] anthropology” at the University of Chicago , as many scholars have noted (R. Faris 1967:16; also see Eggan 1974), Fay-Cooper Cole did not introduce Boasian doctrine to the University of Chicago Department of Sociology and Anthropology. There were two admirers of Franz Boas there two decades before the “takeoff” 162 W. I. Thomas, Behaviorist Ethnologist of anthropological research during the late 1920s led by Cole, Edward Sapir, and Robert Redfield. (On the later developments see Eggan [1974]; and chapter 10.) Thomas himself was something of an early Boasian convert, albeit “prematurely” interested in acculturation. Original Interests and Training William Isaac Thomas was born in Virginia in 1863 to a father who combined preaching with farming. In 1880 W. I. enrolled at the University of Tennessee, and in 1886 he received the first doctorate it ever granted. He began teaching (English, Greek, natural history) before completing his degree and continued until the all-but-obligatory year of study in Europe. During the 1888–89 academic year he went to Göttingen and Berlin, where he could learn firsthand about folk psychology and ethnology as practiced by Heymann Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus. On his return to the United States, he took a position at Oberlin College. He took a leave of absence in 1893–94 for graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago with Albion Small and Charles Henderson. However , at Chicago he took more courses in brain anatomy from Adolf Meyer and physiology from Jacques Loeb than sociology courses. Having already taught natural history, his graduate work at Chicago was that of a physical anthropologist. That summer he was appointed an instructor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. After earning a second doctorate in 1895 (with a thesis titled “On a Difference of the Metabolism of the Sexes”), Thomas became an assistant professor in the department (Janowitz 1966:xi–xiii). He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1900, to full professor in 1910. Although Thomas was a protégé of Small rather than of the senior, albeit prescientific anthropologist in the department, Frederick Starr (whose own PhD was in geology from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania ; see Miller 1975; Bulmer 1984:39–40), Thomas taught courses on primitive races, women, folk psychology, primitive art, primitive education , racial development, occupations, and sex. He does not seem ever to have been much impressed by Starr. Nor was Thomas subordinated to Starr in a department run by Thomas’s sometimes teacher Albion Small. Starr and Thomas managed to coexist physically removed from the sociologists in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. (After noting that his courses were being given in the Walker Museum, Thomas wrote President Harper on January 17, 1896, “I desire to be lo- [54.242.75.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:28 GMT) W. I. Thomas, Behaviorist Ethnologist 163 cated with the Department of Anthropology, as my books are to be combined with those of Mr. Starr.”) Starr was...