The Pre-Freudian Georges Devereux, the Post-Freudian Alfred Kroeber, and Mohave Sexuality

University of California (Berkeley) dissertation defenses during the 1930s had programs that provided very visible genealogies. Georges Devereux (né Gyorgy Dobo in Lugos, Transylvania, 1906–85), who defended his dissertation December 9, 1935, had a particularly stellar one. After his baccalaureate at Turnu-Severein in Romania in 1926, he went to Paris, earned diplomas at both the Institut d'Ethnologie and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes (The National School for Living Oriental Languages) in 1928 and a licence ès lettres from the Sorbonne in 1932. He had taken courses in theoretical physics and radiation from Marie Curie, and in anthropology and primitive religion from Marcel Mauss;¹ he became a Rockefeller fellow in 1932–34. The program listed Hopi and Mohave fieldwork in 1932, fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in 1933 (with the Karuama and Roto), and in French Indochina (with the highland Sedang Moi) in 1933–34, along with graduate work at Berkeley in the fall of 1932 and in the spring and fall of 1935.

At Berkeley Devereux had taken courses on mythology and on field techniques from Robert H. Lowie, California ethnography and individual study with Alfred L. Kroeber, and a course on animal domestication taught by Kroeber and cultural geographer Carl Sauer (see Sauer 1936). Devereux's dissertation was a relatively orthodox descriptive work on an indigenous California culture, except for its focus on sexuality. Sixty of the 115 endnotes were to publications by Alfred L. Kroeber. There were ten to Darryl Forde, who had been a Commonwealth fellow at Berkeley 1928–30, six each to Berkeley Anthropology Museum curator and faculty lecturer Edward Gifford and to a Boasian contemporary of Kroeber and Lowie, Leslie Spier. Nothing by Lowie (or Boas or Freud) was cited or included in the bibliography. Devereux acknowledges with gratitude unpublished fieldwork materials by Thomas Waterman, Kroeber's first doctoral student, then junior colleague; and Abraham Halpern, a linguistic anthropologist specializing in Yuman languages. Kroeber was also the author of more cited works (six) than anyone else (followed by Spier, with three), and of the most frequently cited (the 1925 Handbook of the Indians of California).

Devereux clearly had not had his conversion to Freudian theory by the end of 1935. The only references to Freudians in the dissertation are one to Wilhelm Stekel (1933) and four to Géza Róheim (1932)—both incompletely listed in the dissertation's bibliography. What strikes me as the most contemptuous dismissal in the dissertation is this: "Róheim is obsessed by Freudian ideas and is obviously so ignorant of data from other Yuman tribes that he mistakes type—'dreams' made up largely of legends from true dreams" (Devereux 1935:96). Some would contend that Devereux's later work applying Freudian notions to Greek myths and tragedies (e.g., Devereux 1953, 1976) is open to the same criticism.

That Devereux's dissertation was completed before he turned Freudian is significant, because both the intensive recent analyses of Mohave and anthropologists' ontological conceptions of sexual categories retroject the later Freudianism on what Devereux wrote in the mid-1930s. One of the few scholars who evidences actually having examined Devereux's 1935 dissertation, Will Roscoe (1998:139, 149), casts Devereux as already Freud-blinded ("orthodox" is his characterization). More seriously—and repeatedly—Gilbert Herdt (1991:490–501) reads Devereux's best-known and most often cited article (1937) through Devereux's later Freudian orthodoxy and a functionalism that had not yet affected Devereux in 1935–36—particularly Devereux's "Normal and Abnormal" (1956), which was written while Devereux was working with psychiatric entrepreneur Karl Menninger, founder of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Devereux himself unequivocally stated,

having (to my misfortune) read in Indochina one of Róheim's books which my ignorance of psychoanalysis did not enable me understand, I remained an anti-Freudian until 1938. . . . Until 1938, I read practically only non-Freudian psychological and psychiatric works.

(1978:366)

Devereux's 1937 article expands upon the four-page section describing homosexual transvestites (heterogender homosexuality in current terms). Alyhâ (transgendered natal males) and hyam...