Anthropologists and Indians in the New South

Conclusions

The chapters in this volume, intended to be a retrospective of the relationships between anthropologists and Indians in the New South over the past 30 years, actually are a retrospective of the past century and a glimpse of what the new millennium will be, a “new world” for both anthropologists and Indians. These chapters represent work with a number of southern tribes (Catawba [Janet Levy], Cherokee [Max White, Lisa Le®er], Choctaw [Kendall Blanchard], Lumbee [Karen Blu], Maya [Allan Burns], Seminole [Penny Jessel, Susan Stans] and Waccamaw Sioux [Patricia Lerch]) and present an interesting array of topics and approaches as well as a re®ection of the relative ages and experiences of these scholars. Despite their diversity, a few themes are pervasive in all these essays: change and history, anthropological methodologies and perspectives, federal recognition or acknowledgment of tribes, and Indian identity. To some extent, these themes are interwoven as well. The Past and Change As anthropologists and scholars studying Indian communities, we are continually engaged in the study of cultural change—changes re®ected in the archaeological record, changes resulting from contact with European cultures and later with the American culture, and changes in lifestyles and value systems, to name just a few. However, sometimes we become so immersed in our study of change in other cultures that we tend to forget that we are also experiencing change in our own culture—and our own discipline—as well as in the Native American cultures that we study. Change in federal policies toward Indians—speci¤cally, recognition or acknowledgment —is the focus of George Roth’s chapter. This article is signi¤cant because it presents hitherto unpublished information on the acknowledgment process of tribes such as the Chitimacha (recognized and reservation established Conclusions Rachel A. Bonney in 1917), the Mississippi Choctaw (recognition and reservation by land purchase in 1918), and the Catawba, as well as failure to grant acknowledgment to certain tribes (Coushatta), the former criteria of the federal government for recognition, and rationales for the actions taken by the government. Of interest in Roth’s chapter, as well, is the fact that while relationships with tribes in the West were being terminated through allotment policies, and later, in the 1950s, through the Termination Act, the government was acknowledging southeastern tribes and buying land for them to establish reservations. Because Roth’s chapter goes through only the 1970s, he does not discuss, although he does mention, the reacknowledgment and restoration of the Catawba to federal status in 1993. Change in the discipline of anthropology is also re®ected in several chapters. When anthropology was getting its start as a scholarly discipline, the New South —the post–Civil War South—was emerging. Anthropologists such as Mooney, Speck, and others were working in the Boasian tradition of ¤eldwork and participant observation in southern tribes. These early anthropologists concentrated on recording what they could of traditions that were disappearing, emphasizing observation rather than participation, and attempting to describe traditional cultures before they had disappeared completely. Max White’s article on the scholarly research and orientations of anthropologists working with the Eastern Cherokee clearly shows this orientation in the work of early scholars such as James Mooney and Franz Olbrechts. Michael Logan and Stephen Ousley’s chapter on hypergamy in the South also re®ects the Boasian tradition, drawing on a database of more than 16,000 Native Americans collected by Boas. These data are fairly comprehensive, including the names, sex, tribe, place of birth, parental tribal/ethnic af¤liation, marital status, and, for females/mothers, fertility information , yet to date they have been utilized by only a few scholars and offer a potentially valuable database for future research. By the middle of the 20th century, anthropological research was focusing on studies of contemporary communities and ethnohistorical concerns. White’s article refers to the changes in the “theories and paradigms” by such scholars as John Gulick, Raymond Fogelson, Harriett Kupferer, Pendleton Banks, Hester Davis, and Robert K. Thomas. Generally, anthropologists continued to pursue “scholarly” topics which they themselves chose and entered the Indian communities as participant observers; the role of the people under investigation was basically that of passive “subjects” of study. Applied anthropology at the time was emerging as a comparatively new approach, sometimes referred to as “Sol Tax’s action anthropology,” but comparatively few researchers were interested in applying anthropological knowledge and skills to the communities they were studying. Conclusions 215 The 30-year period intended to be the focus of this...