3. Taking Ethnological Training outside the Classroom: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition as Field School

In 1928 A. L. Kroeber sent a University of California undergraduate anthropology major, Isabel Kelly, to remote Fort Bidwell, California, to do ethnography with the local Northern Paiute people. Years later Kelly complained to Kroeber that he had given her no preparatory training. Kroeber replied that "this field research business is not so much a technique as it is an art, and an art cannot be formally taught" (Kroeber 1955:1). One learns to do ethnography by plunging in and doing it, not by taking courses or being tutored in field methods. Kelly (1932), in fact, had plunged in and produced a quite credible monograph, the only systematic study ever done with the group. Kroeber and Kelly's exchange highlights a debate that has gone on in anthropology for over a century: How should student ethnographers be prepared to "go to the field"? In addition to data and theory courses, should they be tutored in field methods, introduced to ethical issues, perhaps sent through a field school? Or should they simply be taught some data and theory, then be handed a current copy of Notes and Queries in Anthropology and sent on their way to either "sink or swim"?

Prior to 1875, interested individuals who collected ethnographic and linguistic information on "Native peoples" were often guided by "heads of inquiry," "circulars," or ethnographic manuals produced, beginning in 1660, by scholarly societies in Europe and North America (Fowler 1975; Holmes and Mason 1902).¹ Most such guides were designed to ensure elicitation of information in a few hours or days from whatever Natives one happened to encounter in the course of other duties. The most thorough was written by Joseph-Marie Degérando (1969), produced in 1800 for the ill-fated French naval expedition to the South Pacific led by Nicholas Baudin. Degérando argued for plunging in and practicing participant observation over an extended time period as the only means of gaining accurate information about another culture.

By 1900 in North America, long-term "participant-observation" ethnographic field studies had been carried out by Franz Boas on Bafflin Island in 1883–84 (Douglas Cole 1999:63–82) and by Frank Hamilton Cushing at Zuni Pueblo between 1879 and 1884. For both, the experiences were life-changing rites of passage (although the term had yet to be coined). Boas (1888) published a solid, straightforward ethnographic account, the first of many he would produce. Cushing was very much in tune with the romantic exoticism of the nineteenth century. He depicted himself as an adventurous, scientific naturalist exploring the unknown at great peril. He published thrilling accounts of his experience at Zuni, intermingled with a corpus of significant scholarly data. He described how he developed methods of participant observation and learned the language, the better to understand Zuni culture and society. But he also described covert means of observation and note taking to obtain sensitive and secret data, often over community objections and threats. He justified his actions in the name of scientific inquiry (Baxter 1882a, 1882b; Cushing 1882, 1883a, 1883b, 1886, 1920; Hinsley 1983). By 1900 there was general agreement among professionals that the crux of good ethnographic fieldwork meant undertaking extended periods of intense interaction with a Native community. If this was not possible, one could conduct systematic surveys for more limited periods using a multiyear research strategy, especially for ethnological data collection (see Rivers 1913). If a new anthropologist was lucky, he could go on a British-style expedition; if not, he simply went and sank or swam. What mattered was that the data collection was systematic and that the fieldworker collected critical, basic information.

What had to be avoided at all costs was the appearance of brief, touristic, "in-and-out" encounters. In 1900 anthropology was just becoming established in universities, struggling to be accepted as a professional scientific discipline. Like other fields, anthropology was in transition from being a "field of study," pursued by self-taught individuals who had other day jobs, to being a "scientific discipline," meant to be pursued...