Back to Boas

I fear a major and growing loss of knowledge, both of the ethnographic record and of the gains to our understanding of human behavior derived from earlier anthropology. But the problems have not been solved and the future generations will inevitably return to them. It is time to look back to the work of our field to see what struggles our predecessors went through and what was learned through their efforts.

(Herbert Lewis 1998:726)

At the 2005 American Society for Ethnohistory meetings in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I presented a paper entitled "Julian Steward: Then and Now." That paper demonstrated the connection between Steward's theory and testimony for the U.S. Department of Justice in Indian Claims Commission (ICC) proceedings and current Canadian Aboriginal rights jurisprudence. During the discussion that followed the session's papers, I threw out a comment that divided the room—and not equally. I said I thought "we ought to go back to Boas." Here is why.

In 2003 Virginia Kerns presented the discipline of anthropology a well-timed biography of one its luminaries entitled Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward's Life and Theory. Clearing up many of the inconsistencies and impossibilities in earlier, often lackadaisical, accounts, Kerns offers a detailed analysis that calls into question how the discipline has reported Steward's life and understands his work.¹ Among the impeccably traced details of his life, she examines the intimate details of his fieldwork experience—and thus the empirical basis of his scientific claims—showing that Steward's work is not much more than an application of his preference for a male-centered approach to understanding society based on his belief in "innate male dominance."

Kerns argues that Steward's cross-cultural analyses, with a so-called purpose to generate transcendental or universal explanations of cultural development, created an entire new method of study—"cultural ecology" as he called it—effectively recodifying evolutionary theory into a scientific rhetoric (see Steward 1949, 1953, 1955; Harris 1968; Trigger 1996; Trencher 2002). She provides the social context for the development of his theory and systematically undermines his claim to an objective, scientific method for determining the conceptual basis for the root of society. Ultimately contending that Steward's primogenitor "patri-lineal band" was merely a reflection of his own social habits and only inferred into his theoretical paradigm, Kerns charges that his assumed model ensconced a male-centered approach to anthropological methods that was replicated and promoted in his theory and practice.

In tracing Steward's life, Kerns theorizes his career primarily through his relationship to Alfred Kroeber. She shows that the tenacity Steward displayed during his graduate training at Berkeley combined well with the Dean's connections in the discipline, and she demonstrates that this confluence located at this specific time in American history permitted Steward to gain a variety of professional and fieldwork experiences de novo early in his career. But curiously, Kerns contextualizes Steward's major concepts of multilinear evolution and cultural ecology, minimizing their centrality to his work and minimizing their importance to an understanding of him. She contends that multilinear evolution, the orienting principle of Steward's collected lifework, Theory of Culture Change (1955), was a hastily prepared statement offered merely to counter Kroeber (2003:273-281); moreover, she concludes her biography with this summation: "Tracing Steward's long journey to cultural ecology has led me to think that his ideas are best understood when viewed against the natural and social landscapes he inhabited during the first half of his life, which he remembered" (326). Completely eschewing the politics of his research and beliefs with respect to indigenous peoples, Kerns motivates her understanding of him through his anxiety over rejection and his simultaneous desire for recognition as an important figure in the discipline. She shows him as a man riddled with social anxieties and with the desire to establish himself as a standout from those before him, ultimately explaining the novelty of Theory of Culture Change in institutional and personal terms, without fully analyzing its methodological statements, or its place within the history of the discipline, particularly in relationship to...