American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations

Notes

295 Notes Information about archival collections consulted and cited can be found in the acknowledgments. Introduction 1. Some archaeologists are employed to do archaeology rather than to teach about it, though they seem to me to lack autonomy and to be employees (on the other hand, many physicians these days are employees and find their autonomy in deciding what to do for patients highly constrained by bureaucracies, whether insurance companies in the United States or governmental healthcare bureaucracies elsewhere). 2. I use “Americanist” here as a site of research (mostly in the restricted sense of Native North America; “First Nations” in Canadianese) not as a theory, method, or approach (cf. Hymes 1983:116; Darnell 1995, 1999). 3. Though much of my work is “internalist” in following internal developments in disciplines, the choice of subject matter clearly is and has been affected by external stimuli, most notably herein in the instance of the forced relocation and prolonged incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States (and Canada) but also in increasing interest in “acculturation” replacing attempts to factor out nonaboriginal influences on contemporary peoples. Also, looking beyond aboriginal North American peoples was influenced by the expanding military and imperial reach of the United States. Part 1 Introduction 1. Even within the monogenist paradigm, Gallatin had to contend with the belief that American Indians had degenerated in the adverse environment of the Americas. 2. As governor of the Territory of Michigan Cass circulated questionnaires gathering information on Native American cultures and languages. C. C. Trowbridge compiled reports based on these data. 3. If Ward is remembered at all, it is as a sociologist and ideologist of social 296 Notes to pages 10–57 planning (see Commager 1967; Hinkle and Hinkle 1954), but Powell hired him as a paleontologist in the Geological Survey. 4. Powell combated the ideological claims of powerful vested interests and popular fantasies. Because western land speculation was based on such fantasies, Powell’s science clashed with powerful popular views. Similarly, he opposed the view that Native Peoples were destined to be exterminated . See Stegner 1954. 5. On his formative years, see D. Cole 1999. 1. Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data 1. Lowie (1959:133) did not include Dixon or Swanton or Kroeber with Sapir, Radin, Ruth Benedict, and Goldenweiser, and there seems to me at least a hint of contempt for Swanton in a letter from Lowie to Kroeber dated March 13, 1917: “Swanton’s most recent effusion adds zero.” 2. “Methodological asceticism” is how Karl Mannheim (1945) characterized American social science’s eschewal of any knowledge not derived from replicable methods. One later Boasian, Leslie Spier (1929:142), characterized Roland Dixon as “stoutly conservative in his use of inferential methods ” with “an almost Puritanical adherence to evidence and logic,” a view shared by Cole (1952:164). 3. Margaret Mead and the Unpopularity of Popularizers 1. Mead’s single encounter with fieldwork among Native Americans took place after her Samoan fieldwork. She and her second husband, Reo Fortune , spent the summer of 1930 on the Omaha Reservation, where Mead in particular was appalled by what she considered the disintegration of culture. She did not compare it to the rapid culture change occurring in the Pacific and failed to acknowledge linguistic complexity (and her own reliance on interpreters) as one reason for the thinness of her Omaha work. 2. Her attraction to this non-Boasian school may owe something to the greater expertise on Pacific societies of non-American anthropologists, as well as to the intense intellectual ferment of her initial collaboration with Fortune. 4. American Anthropologists Discover Peasants 1. Godoy stresses that Redfield studied the early Spanish texts about Mexico and considers that “the chapter [of Tepoztlán] on material culture, like the appendix on kinship nomenclature, shows Redfield’s sensitivity to the historical background” (1978:75n9; cf. the peculiar explaining away of use of historical records in M. Singer 1991:177). To ignore the revolutionary violence that led him to evacuate his family and commute from the capital Notes to pages 58–88 297 rather than continue to live in Tepoztlán does not seem to me to differ from the general ignoring of events and the colonial, neocolonial, or other authoritarian settings of the peoples studied by anthropologists. 2. As Redfield summarized Gamio’s findings on U.S.-to-Mexico money orders , “the heaviest immigration comes from the States at the...