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Acknowledgments
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289 Acknowledgments Revisiting these works on particular historical subjects reminds me of many debts of gratitude. One that jumps out at me is to journal editors who encouraged my historical work by accepting multiple pieces for publication: Jonathan Benthall (Anthropology Today), Russ Bernard (American Anthropologist), Konrad Koerner (Historiographia Linguistica and the John Benjamins monograph series), Barbara Ross (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences), and Florence Voegelin (Anthropological Linguistics). I have an even deeper debt to Regna Darnell, for defending my dissertation to an ad hoc group of University of Toronto sociologists and for decades of discussions about anthropology and its history, and more recently, joining the first list (as coeditor of the Histories of Anthropology Annual and of the University of Nebraska Press’s Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology monograph series). Reaching further back, I remain grateful for the education in ancient and modern (socio)political theory I received at James Madison College from Peter Lyman, Bruce Miller, Lewis Zerby, and Dick Zinman (and to my introductions to the sociology of knowledge and Freudian metapsychology from Peter Lyman, and the opportunity to explore the RousseauL évi-Strauss tradition provided by an independent study with my undergraduate academic advisor, Dick Zinman). Neither they nor I had any idea I was being prepared to perform on Robert Nisbet’s pretest in a way that impressed him and further “primed the pump” to move from Lévi-Strauss’s theories to Boasian and structuralist practices. I learned much about history, culture, and society from my anthropological linguistics mentors, Keith Basso, William Samarin, and John Gumperz (in chronological order). Dennis Magill ran interference for me and directed my dissertation research and writing, though his own primary interest was in the history of Canadian sociology, a field to which I have contributed nothing. 290 Acknowledgments William Samarin introduced me to ethnohistory in general and Jan Vansina’s work in particular (a byproduct of which was “Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data” in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19 [1983]: 335–40) and also to thinking about dictation of texts affecting how informants spoke (in an unnaturally slow and formal register). He, Richard de Mille, Victor Golla, and John Gumperz made helpful comments on earlier drafts of “The Manufacture of Linguistic Structure,” which appeared in the American Anthropologist 85 (1983): 356–62, though agreement with my interpretations should not be inferred. From Alaska, Ron Scollon and Michael Krauss both provided me information I gratefully used. I wrote a paper about “Margaret Mead and the Professional Unpopularity of Popularizers” before Freeman’s 1983 book—with an inexplicable assist from George Stocking, who usually delighted in blocking publication of anything he had not initiated—polluted the waters of discourse about Mead. Showing that Mead’s influence (and fan base among professional anthropologists) was grossly exaggerated (as Stocking knew and Freeman resolutely did not want to know) and that there were strong disagreements among those classed as “Boasians” took on urgency. There is a ripple of this in the third chapter of this book and in a series of attempts to correct Freeman’s misrepresentations that are not reprinted here. The revival and revision of the popularizer paper that is included here draws heavily on “Margaret Mead and Paradigm Shifts within Anthropology during the 1920s” (Murray and Darnell 2000), solicited by James Côte for a special issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence 29 (2005): 557–73. The only comments on the original paper that I recall came from Richard de Mille. The chapter on late-blooming anthropology of peasants draws heavily on collections (Redfield, Tax, Burgess, Park, press) in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, on the Kroeber and anthropology department archives in the Bancroft Library of the University of California , and on the Spicer collection of the Arizona State Museum in Tucson . My thoughts about the people and ideas discussed herein have been shaped in ways that are not always obvious by tape-recorded interviews of George Foster, Theodora Kroeber, and Rosamond Spicer and by untaped conversations with Raymond Fogelson, Everett Hughes, Edward Spicer, Sol Tax, and Yves Winkin. I am also grateful for comments on an earlier draft provided by Paul Kutsche and Clifford Wilcox and to Sol [54.166.234.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:16 GMT) Acknowledgments 291 Tax for allowing me access to his papers before they were officially open to researchers. A slightly different version of the chapter appeared...