Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (review)

Richard Handler's introduction to volume 9 of the Wisconsin series in History of Anthropology (HOA) reviews the history of the series under the editorship of its founder, George W. Stocking Jr., suggesting that the subdiscipline has attained sufficient centrality to anthropology to survive this routinization and transition. The series, which certainly demonstrates that Stocking is no longer the only historian of anthropology, will continue his editorial strategy of producing periodic thematic volumes rather than a journal open to miscellaneous papers and authors. At the cost of a potentially exclusionary gatekeeping function, each volume has served as a resource for scholarship and for teaching of anthropological history and theory. Inevitable dependence on the editor's professional network has created a University of Chicago slant to the series that is likely to continue (despite Handler's call for feedback on themes and papers). Continuity is further insured by Stocking's long paper on Sol Tax; Stocking has contributed a focal essay to each preceding volume.

Handler identifies persistent ambiguities around the boundaries and internal coherence of anthropology over its history, which he sees as definable only in retrospect. This volume expands the scope of HOA by problematizing individuals and kinds of work excluded from the contemporary canon (if indeed a canon can be said to exist in a postmodern climate hostile to historicist contextualization).

Most authors (with the exceptions of Peter Pels on the occult in Victorian constructions of race and theosophy and Doug Dalton on ties between colonial military cannons and the anthropological canon in Melanesia) organize their work biographically. Although the specialization of culture and personality is long out of fashion in American anthropology, many disciplinary historians apparently still subscribe to the great person theory of disciplinary access and progress. Exclusion is implicitly modeled as preventing certain kinds of individuals from attaining success or centrality.

Several biographers claim anthropological identity for those excluded or forgotten (although Pels suggests that some ancestors are better forgotten [12]). Little-known biographical subjects also may be chosen because they stand at the intersection of historical forces affecting the course of anthropology. Ronald Stade explores Lucie Varga's ethnography of National Socialism, to which he attributes an immediacy capturing a disappearing world. Moving between German historiography and the Annales School, Varga's career was derailed by war and her early death.

Alice Bacon and Robert Morton are key figures in Lee D. Baker's excursions into Afro-American folklore of the Hampton Institute. Franz Boas, Elsie Clews Parsons, and other mainstream Americanist anthropologists were drawn into this "racial politics of culture" beginning in the 1920s as a heritage project replaced an assimilationist one. Uses of the folklore for cultural pride soon transcended direct anthropological input: "The new Negro movement did not necessarily need the support of individual anthropologists because anthropology itself supported the movement with its concepts and research" (73).

Frances Slaney's fascinating discussion of Canadian anthropologist/folklorist Marius Barbeau follows him outside disciplinary boundaries into the arts, particularly landscape painting, and his efforts to construct a Canadian national identity. Barbeau's Canadian location, ingrained antipathy to Edward Sapir, and career-long oscillation between Northwest Coast ethnology and Quebec folklore all contributed to his marginality (despite intensive folkloristic collaboration with Boas).

Maria Lepowsky explores the failure of Charlotte Gower's anthropological career in a "subterranean" HOA of systemic discrimination most often brought to bear against women (cf. Ruth Landes as reanalyzed by Sally Cole). Ralph Linton, Sapir, and other colleagues actively curtailed publication and teaching positions for Gower, who is now virtually forgotten. Gower's early community study of Milocca, a Sicilian village, was performed simultaneously with Robert Redfield's Tepotzlan but was published only in 1970. Lepowsky's position at the University of Wisconsin, where Gower was excluded, lends poignancy to a lamentable story.

Stocking argues that Sol Tax, despite his position at the University of Chicago...