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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.1 (2003) 154-155



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Doing Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax. Edited by Robert A. Rubinstein. Foreword by Lisa Redfield Peattie. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xxix, 354 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Doing Fieldwork warrants our attention because its message, bolstered by the editor's new introduction, is that the 1930s heralded a paradigm shift in anthropology, and further that this shift in fact addressed the same contentious issues raised in today's so-called crisis of representation.

The "crisis of representation," to take up the latter first, asserts that the efforts of anthropologists to describe the people they work with, or historians to portray the past, flounder upon the naive assumption that the ethnography or the monograph are capable of such representations. Instead, critics insist, both genres more accurately reproduce the hegemonic control the two disciplines have over their subject matter. The philosophical position that what is "out there," people or past, remains forever hidden from the investigative eye—if it is not old hat, at the least strikes a familiar chord. The present "crisis" is unique mainly in its shrill indictment of our disciplinary heritages, said to be peopled by academic personnel who were methodologically inept at best, and self-serving at worst.

If, as the critics charge, graduate students left for the field underprepared, such faults do not justify total disparagement. Indeed, going back to the 1930s—the dawn of prehistory in the eye of today's self-appointed judge—we find the junior Sol Tax arguing with Robert Redfield, via a constant flow of letters from Chichicastenago to Chicago, over Tax's desire to conduct a broad survey of Guatemala's western highland communities, versus Redfield's plan to do in-depth studies of a few particularly strategic communities. Only after the merits of each strategy were debated did Redfield, from his position as genial director of the Carnegie-funded operation, write that Tax no longer needed to bring up the issue.

The paradigm shift, occurring in the very exchange of the letters, moved anthropology away from the cultural history program promoted by Franz Boas at Columbia University, to the social anthropology agenda developing in Chicago. The movement took the fieldworker away from attempts to reconstruct the precolumbian culture of native peoples and toward a consideration of how those people related to one another and to their nonindigenous neighbors in the contemporary world. In discussing the implementation of their fieldwork strategies, Tax and Redfield give us an unprecedented glimpse into academic life in the 1930s.

We find ourselves in an era where transportation to Guatemala is by boat, where local travel is often by stubborn mule or skinny horse, but where, paradoxically, mail arrives almost daily. Instead of being abandoned by our mentors with no more advice than to take "an ample supply of toilet paper," we are part of a research team, funded, however inadequately, for several years. For those of us who know [End Page 154] Guatemalan places such as Chichicastenango and Lake Atitlán, the letters from the 1930s carry a special poignancy. We smile when Sol Tax becomes "don Sol" and grin widely as wife Gertrude becomes, naturally, "doña Luna." Housing is scarce, and tourism is only just beginning (yet, already the indigenous people fear its impact.) Dr. Redfield becomes Bob, and he and his family began a period of field study; Bob's letters, delivered by whomever is traveling that way, thank Sol for the two horses delivered in a similar manner.

We know that daughters of both men, Susan Tax Freeman and Lisa Redfield Peattie, became anthropologists, and read with special care Peattie's foreword to this rich exchange of letters from the field during anthropology's Golden Age. And we finish full of admiration for both men, now dead, and gratitude to the editor for letting their voices be heard above today's multivocalic clamor.

 



Miles Richardson, Louisiana State University

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