Rhetoric in American Anthropology: Gender, Genre, and Science

Field Autobiographies: Rhetorical Recruitment and Embodied Ethnography

57 2 Field Autobiographies R Rhetorical Recruitment and Embodied Ethnography At the time of my advent into the sacred circle I was already familiar with their names, for I had pored over books and reports which they had written. . . . For an assorted gang of thoroughbred good sports, witty conversationalists, and loyal friends, I whole-heartedly recommend American archaeologists. —Ann Axtell Morris, Digging in the Southwest It was nice of you to root for me, but I shall believe something comes of it only when it does. Nothing has yet. But it will come about as follows: Kidder will speak of it to Sapir. The latter will answer if not the words at least the spirit, why bother with such a moron as that? Now I, I have lots of students who could do the work and do it well why don’t you take this one, and that one, etc. And then he will. —Gladys Reichard, letter to Ann Axtell Morris, 1932 AS ANTHROPOLOGY professionalized during the early decades of the twentieth century, the women who pursued careers in “the welcoming science” entered into an arena of contradiction. Against the backdrop of the significant changes in anthropologists’ rhetorical practices discussed in chapter 1, many women practitioners found themselves renegotiating their status relative to new disciplinary hierarchies. Whereas the amateur members of the Women’s Anthropological Society had been able, in the 1880s, to justify their papers as “real contributions to knowledge” simply by recording firsthand observations gained from their leisure and travel experiences, the professional anthropological community of the 1920s and 1930s demanded long-term, intensive fieldwork, undertaken with institutional support and completed apart from commercial or directly colonial activities. These material and epistemological 58 – Field Autobiographies demands heightened distinctions between professional and amateur researchers, clarifying opportunities but also creating challenges for women anthropologists during these decades. On one hand, public statements like that offered by Ann Axtell Morris, above, continued to announce anthropology as a science in which women were welcomed, integrated, and invited to participate actively. Indeed, avenues for advancement should become both clearer and more rationalized within a professionalized social science; one of the promises of professionalization was that admission into the professional community would be meritocratic, based on credentials and performance rather than informal networks—networks from which women were so often excluded during the protoprofessional period. Discussing her entrée into archaeology in her popular field autobiography, Digging in the Southwest, Ann Axtell Morris recounts that her interest in the ancient past led her first to college where she “absorbed a diploma-ful of history” before a professor finally explained that the discipline she was looking for was called archaeology. Morris explains that “if there was an ‘ology’ that told the story, and if there were ‘ologists’ who knew anything about it, my course lay clear. And so the spring I graduated from college I set sail for France to join the American School of Prehistoric Archaeology in Europe.” Having a clear path to pursue—in this case, a college degree followed by postgraduate professional field training—allowed Morris and other potential archaeologists to gain entry into a community of “good sports, witty conversationalists, and loyal friends” who, in her account, readily welcomed her as a member.1 On the other hand, private correspondence between women anthropologists —such as the letter quoted above from Gladys Reichard to Morris— registers discontent among women who found that professionalization did not alleviate but merely masked ongoing discrimination. Reichard’s fabricated dialogue between two eminent anthropologists—A. V. Kidder, who had received financial support from the Carnegie Foundation for several projects in the same geographical area where Reichard worked, and Edward Sapir, the most prominent linguist of the period who held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Chicago—underscores important realities faced by a woman seeking full professional membership. By portraying men affiliated with powerful institutions as privately passing judgment on the work of a woman (“such a moron as that”) and colluding to share professional rewards among themselves , Reichard registers her awareness that informal networks of influence continued to keep qualified women from receiving the rewards that their work might merit. Predicting that the student of one of her colleagues will receive Field Autobiographies – 59 funding, rather than Reichard herself as an established and widely published scholar, she acknowledges that informal relationships, unreasonable dislike, and selfish guarding of resources all continue to exert power...