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Chapter 11: The Reception of Anthropological Work in American Sociology, 1921–1951
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194 11 The Reception of Anthropological Work in American Sociology, 1921–1951 During the 1940s American sociologists began to express in print their misgivings about the reliability and validity of observations by cultural anthropologists. This is later than one with a focus on boundary disputes (Kuklick 1980) might expect, but nearly four decades before Derek Freeman (1983) contended that he first “discovered” that there were weaknesses in the modus operandi of the second generation of Franz Boas students. The years surrounding the end of the Second World War might seem a strange time for interdisciplinary attacks, considering wartime cooperation on areal studies, work on propaganda and military morale, and the ubiquity of postwar interdisciplinary conferences and projects (see Heims 1977). Additionally, the GI Bill funded previously unparalleled academic growth, so competition for resources between disciplines was muted during the late 1940s. Moreover, the boundaries between social sciences were more permeable then than now. One indicator of this is that American anthropologists published significant work in the same sociology journals in which blistering attacks on anthropological field methods were later published. By examining how sociologists reviewed anthropological work between the two world wars in the three leading American sociology journals —the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), the American Sociological Review (ASR), and Social Forces (SF)—I hope to show that sociologists’ attacks during the 1940s were not bolts from the blue. Rather, they were rooted in an increasing recognition of the fallibility of generalizations with little basis on observation about national cultures made by anthropologists . In order of foundation, AJS, SF, and ASR remain the core sociology journals. Traditionally, American anthropology has consisted of four Reception of Anthropological Work, 1921–1951 195 subfields: cultural, linguistic, physical, and archeological. Applied and psychological anthropology have been subsumed under cultural anthropology , the largest subfield in number of practitioners. Although SF reviewers were attentive to conclusions from physical anthropology, there was not ongoing, systematic coverage of physical, linguistic, or archeological anthropology books in the journals considered here, so “anthropology ” can be considered an abbreviation for “cultural anthropology.” The American Journal of Sociology AJS, the oldest American sociology journal, founded in 1895, has always been edited within the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago for the University of Chicago Press. From the founding of the American Sociological Society in 1905 until 1936, it was also the official journal of the society (Rhoades 1981:16–17, 31–32), although relatively little used as a publication outlet by East Coast sociologists. In the first three decades of the twentieth century (as detailed in chapters 9 and 10) the intellectual environment within the sociology department at Chicago was open, even attuned, to anthropological work. All three groupings in what is commonly termed the “Chicago School of Sociology”—social psychologists trained by Ellsworth Faris and inspired by George Herbert Mead, those trained by William F. Ogburn to quantify cultural explanations of social change and of mental illness, and the urban ethnography tradition usually traced from W. I. Thomas through Robert Park and Ernest Burgess to Everett Hughes—were avid consumers of reports on cultures other than those of Anglo-America. Thomas, Faris, and Ogburn were in some sense Boasian, and Boas and some of his students influenced Thomas (as detailed in chapters 9 and 10). Park and Hughes, along with Herbert Blumer and Louis Wirth, were sophisticated readers of analyses of other cultures. Moreover, Chicago sociologists were quite familiar with the psychoanalytical ideas at the base of the developing “culture and personality” study within American cultural anthropology of the 1930s and 1940s. Also, as discussed in chapter 10, long before American anthropologists , Chicago sociologists were interested in what would later be called acculturation. They pioneered ethnography in both urban and peasant settings at a time when Boasian anthropologists were still eliciting idealized memories of what (analytically insularized) “primitive” cultures had been like a generation or more before the time of fieldwork and were [44.220.245.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:41 GMT) 196 Reception of Anthropological Work, 1921–1951 mapping distributions of cultural traits to infer prehistoric tribal movements and contacts (see chapter 3; Darnell 1977). In particular, the ethnographic technique that anthropologists view Edward Sapir as championing, the individual life history, was already a well-established tool of Chicago sociologists before his arrival in the Chicago department . Before studies of either acculturation or contemporary communities were considered legitimate in American anthropology, Chicago sociologists were producing both. And these works focused on individuals , not on...