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Series Editor’s Introduction
- University of Nebraska Press
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xi Series Editor’s Introduction REGNA DARNELL I have known Steve Murray since he was a University of Toronto sociology graduate student starting a network analysis of anthropological linguists . From research on anthropological linguists and linguistics—which culminated in his magisterial 1994 book Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America—and without any institutional support, he branched out to examining other borders of academic anthropology, including the obvious one for a sociologist, sociology, plus (ethno)history , as well as psychological anthropology (in its “culture and personality ” guise). Very few readers are familiar with the full disciplinary range of his work. Most of the papers published in this volume have appeared in earlier forms in print, directed to diverse audiences. It seems to me that his method and argument define a unique critical perspective on anthropology as institutionalized for the past century and a quarter in North America. Reflexive bookends at the beginning and end motivate the choice of papers and integrate Murray’s preoccupations over his career . Few other historians of anthropology have written broadly enough on the subject for a career perspective to emerge. Several of the chapters of this book look at histories of central institutions of American anthropology, including its core journals and geographical expansion. Familiar, canonized anthropologist “culture heroes” (Sapir, Kroeber, Lowie, Mead, Boas, Redfield) indeed appear, but they are juxtaposed with the likes of William F. Ogburn and W. I. Thomas, leading figures of American sociology whose history was interwoven with that of anthropology at least until the end of the Second World War. Murray unravels much of the tension behind disciplinary coexistence at major institutions, particularly the Universities of Chicago and California , Berkeley. At Chicago, an anthropology department split off from xii Series Editor’s Introduction its august sociology department. At Berkeley, the anthropologists, particularly Alfred Kroeber, effectively opposed the emergence of a department of sociology and relegated the work of demographer Dorothy Swaine Thomas to agricultural economics (thereby also excluding her from histories of sociology, though she was the first female president of the American Sociological Society). Murray brings critical distance to the emergence of peasant studies as a rebellion against Boasian Native American salvage research; he foregrounds the sociological side of anthropology that attempted to move beyond the isolationism of North America in the interwar years. Murray is inclined to attribute the contemporary approach to urban anthropology and the ethnography of complex societies to Chicago sociologists rather than to the anthropologists in their midst and clearly shares a distaste he reports sociologists had for the pronouncements about “American culture” of 1940s anthropologists who had done little or no research on their own “home” society and culture. Questions of political suppression arise, for example, in the analysis of anthropologists’ complicity in World War II Japanese internment and with the long-running martial law on Taiwan by the Kuomintang, purporting to be “the Republic of China.” The history of anthropology and associated disciplines does not emerge as uniformly benign, and Murray’s work challenges contemporary anthropologists to evaluate where they have come from as part of present practice. Murray consults archival sources for professional correspondence and the published literature of articles and reviews for cues to anthropologists ’ networks and frames them in terms of institutional developments and cultural trends that were far from unique to anthropology. He is a tenacious archivist, following individuals and events from institution to institution and integrating widely dispersed sources. Trained as a sociologist , he counts things that can be counted—then tells his readers why the numbers explain what people were up to (citations, numbers of students , book reviews, etc.). He elicited memories and explanations from elders of the “tribes” (disciplines) who are now dead and triangulates these “native views” with archival records and published social science literature. Murray is skeptical of the stories anthropologists tell about themselves for an audience within the discipline and seeks out alternative explanations and connections, particularly at disciplinary connecting points [100.25.40.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:36 GMT) Series Editor’s Introduction xiii where cross-fertilization is most likely to occur. He has a way of getting to the point and challenging readers to disagree, but only on the basis of historicist interpretation of concrete evidence. Sloppy generalizations about the history of anthropology annoy him and often stimulate him to undertake research complicating pat explanations. In addition to ethnological analysis and theorizing, Murray has done (and published in refereed journals) ethnographic work in Latin America and...