3. William Fielding Ogburn's Fostering of Sol Tax's Explorations of Small-Scale Mercantile Capitalism in Highland Guatemala

In 1929 a new anthropology department broke off from the preeminent sociology department in the United States, at the University of Chicago, two years after the most prominent cultural sociologist, William Fielding Ogburn, had joined that sociology program that included anthropology.¹ Ogburn, like Elsie Clews Parsons, had been a student of Franklin Giddings at Columbia University, earning his PhD degree in 1912. Early historians of American social theory Becker and Barnes noted that a

result of the training provided by the Columbia [sociology] department was the close relationship it established with anthropology. Although Giddings himself made little use of the great advances in ethnographic and ethnological knowledge achieved by Boas, the greater number of Giddings' students and associates assimilated enough to start cultural sociology on its way. Ogburn, [Malcolm] Willey, [F. Stuart] Chapin, and many others [including Frank Hankins, Howard W. Odum, and Bernard J. Stern] arrived at the conviction that the products of man's hands and brain, i.e., material and non-material culture, are far more important than the climatic, topographic and biological factors once rated so highly.

(1938:977–978)

Like Franz Boas, the Columbia-trained sociologists were engaged in improving measurement, statistical evaluation of hypotheses, and challenging residual social Darwinism and theories of racial destiny. In the pages of sociology journals they regularly called their colleagues' attention to anthropologists' findings from "primitive" societies (see Murray 1988a).

After completing his graduate work at Columbia Ogburn taught anthropology, economics, and sociology courses at Princeton, Reed, and the University of Washington and served on the National War Labor Board during World War I. In 1919 he succeeded Giddings as chair of the Department of Economics and Sociology at Columbia University and Barnard College (where his most famous student—and, for a time, assistant—was Margaret Mead, to whom he introduced psychoanalytic concepts).

Though in no sense an ethnographer, Ogburn was part of the Boasian circle at Columbia both intellectually and socially.² Ogburn was especially close to Robert H. Lowie and Edward Sapir. After meeting Sapir in 1915 (in San Francisco), Ogburn encouraged Sapir's first readings of Freud. Before moving to Chicago in 1927 Ogburn went to Europe, spending time in Vienna with leading psychoanalysts including Freud, and in Paris with French ethnologists, notably Marcel Mauss.

Ogburn was interested in technological innovation and most famous for the notion of "cultural lag" (social organization and customs adjusting to changes in material conditions, particularly technological change), though he did not consider lags a fundamental process of social change, as was diffusion (the phenomenon of central concern to Boasian anthropology into the 1920s) (Ogburn 1922).³ Ogburn's interests were wide-ranging, evidenced by his positions and intellectual social networks. It was in editing the Journal of the American Statistical Association that Mead was his assistant, and I have already mentioned his contact with Freud and Mauss, as well as with prominent Boasians. He was also director of research of the President's [Herbert Hoover] Research Committee on Social Trends from 1929 to 1933, which resulted to a two-volume report (Ogburn 1933).⁴

Ogburn went to Chicago a major figure in interdisciplinary American social science (see Ogburn and Goldenweiser 1927), the major sociologist most interested in culture (see Ogburn 1937a, 1964)—and the most Boasian one, interested in social indicators of culture, economy, and society, and in increasing the availability of comparative data for social history. Ogburn was not, however, in the Jeffersonian tradition of idealizing rural yeomen and demonizing cities as dens of vice and social disorganization, which significantly influenced and was elaborated upon by the "Chicago School of Sociology" urban ethnography of Robert Park.⁵ Nor was Sol Tax, whose initial formation as an anthropologist was as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin studying with Ralph Linton and Charlotte Gower (later Chapman [a Chicago alumna]). Before doing his University of Chicago dissertation research with the Mesquakies (then called "Fox") in Iowa (see Daubenmier 2007) and neighboring states (1932–33) at the behest of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Tax had participated...