American Anthropology and Company: Historical Explorations

Introduction: Before the Boasians

3 Introduction Before the Boasians Though the chapters in this book do not form a teleology or test any specific theory, some readers might find the particular topics addressed as beginning in medias res and/or readers may lack background in the prehistory of academic American anthropology—a process that began in the last years of the nineteenth century. In addition to recommending accounts in Bieder (1986), Bieder and Tax (1974), Darnell (1998a, 1999, 2001), Hinsley (1981), and Jacknis (2002), I provide a whirlwind overview below. From the beginning of European settlement of the Americas, missionaries tried to learn about Native American cultures and languages. Proselytizing in native languages and translating the Bible into them was an early and persisting commitment, along with understanding Others the better to manipulate them (“applied anthropology” après la lettre). Many Christians were interested in scrutinizing the native people to see if they were some “lost tribe of Israel” (Hodgen 1964:303–25; Stocking 1968:42–68). Rationalists during the eighteenth century also sought information about the native inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere to build and assess models of “the state of nature.” Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson was an American rationalist with wide-ranging interests . Prior to his election as president of the United States of America, he worked on problems of Native American philology and speculated about where Native people(s) came from. As president, he promoted the collection of information on Native Peoples, especially through the (Meriwether ) Lewis and (William) Clark expedition to the Pacific coast (1803– 6). Jefferson himself prepared a research memorandum for them and 4 Part 1 Introduction stressed the need to record languages and cultural traits. In his Notes on the State of Virginia of 1787, Jefferson set forth his own speculations about the ancestry of the American Indian(s), tabulated historical, descriptive, and statistical data on tribal groups, and reported on his own excavation of burial mounds. In frequent correspondence with leading European and American intellectuals of his time, he “and others of his circle set an example by accumulating new knowledge regarding Homo Americanus. This was anthropology without a portfolio, pursued in our own frontiers” (Hallowell 1960:16). Since Jefferson extended those frontiers, he also had less disinterested motivation for learning about the indigenous peoples. In his view, their cultures deserved respect. In the view of others, Native people were savages who happened to be in the way of what was later claimed to be the “manifest destiny” to supplant them with God’s chosen northern European people (Anglo-Saxons) across North America. Once the new American government committed itself to the principle of recognizing native title to western lands, “it was of great practical importance for the government to have reliable knowledge about the Western tribes” (Hallowell 1960:18). Jefferson’s own curiosity certainly extended beyond the practical needs of presiding over territorial expansion, but his wider humanistic motivations for inquiry were not necessarily shared by his successors, nor did they determine his presidential policies (see Wallace 2001). Jefferson institutionalized a connection between anthropological /linguistic inquiry, territorial expansion, and a responsibility for managing Native people within that encroachment. Gallatin, Schoolcraft, and the American Ethnological Society Together with Thomas Jefferson, whose secretary of the treasury and advisor on Indian affairs he was, Albert Gallatin (1761–1849) was one of the leading American Enlightenment figures. However, Gallatin “did not undertake serious ethnological studies until the 1820s, a time when Enlightenment assumptions about man were under attack” and German romanticism was increasingly influential (Bieder 1986:17). Gallatin participated in the cultural, intellectual, and social institutions of the New York elite in the first half of the nineteenth century. John Bartlett, a fellow officer in the New York Historical Society, proposed to him “a new society, the attention of which should be devoted Part 1 Introduction 5 to Geography, Archeology, Philology and inquiries generally connected with the human race” (quoted in Bieder and Tax 1976:12). Gallatin was elected president of the new American Ethnological Society (AES) in 1842. Its dinner meetings were held in his home until his death in 1849. “The active members tended to be gentlemen of some social standing in the New York community who knew each other well, and while they had some intellectual pretensions, they were not ‘ethnological experts.’ Nearly all were professional men. . . . Very few of the members, even in the early and more fruitful years of the AES had...