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Reviewed by:
  • Action Anthropology and Sol Tax in 2012: The Final Word? edited by Darcy C. Stapp
  • Larry Nesper (bio)
Darcy C. Stapp, ed. Action Anthropology and Sol Tax in 2012: The Final Word? Richland wa: Journal of Northwest Anthropology, 2012. 250 pp. Paper, $10.99.

This special volume, Memoir no. 8 of the Journal of Northwest Anthropology, is an enlightening, upbeat, and inspiring collection of papers reflecting on the significance of action anthropology and Sol Tax’s impact on the field of anthropology undertaken by former students, colleagues, and his two daughters. Whether you are familiar with Tax and the emergence of action anthropology in the middle of the twentieth century, or this is your introduction to this remarkable man and the transformations that he inaugurated, you will appreciate both Sol Tax’s prescience regarding the decolonization of anthropological practice and the ramifying impact this somewhat marginalized figure has had on the discipline. The essays and remembrances are personal as well as analytical, appreciative, and critical. In aggregate they document the transformation of anthropology from a “study of people” to “a study for people,” in the words of contributor Solomon Katz (199), revealing the history of an ethical and epistemological shift that has not been associated with Tax and his students in recent reflections on the history of anthropology.

Sol Tax wrote his dissertation on the social organization of the Fox Indians, doing his fieldwork during the Great Depression at the Meskwaki settlement in Iowa. He went on to do fieldwork in Guatemala, and his book Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy emerged from that. In the late 1940s he established a field school in Tama and in 1951, reflecting on what he had been doing at least since his time in Guatemala, he coined the term action anthropology, to describe the praxis [End Page 442] of coming among a people both to help them solve some problem and to learn something of general theoretical interest in the process. An explicit critique of colonialism, it effectively represented a reversal of the relations between the academy, as the beneficiaries of the accumulation of intellectual capital, and indigenous groups, the traditional subjects of ethnographic interest. It was an epistemological and ethical transformation undertaken in the midst of the Cold War, when academic anthropology was growing increasingly scientistic, and at time when federal Indian policy was aggressively assimilationist. Shortly after founding the journal Current Anthropology in 1959, he would organize the American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961, a gathering of hundreds of American Indian people from scores of tribes who would draft the Declaration of Indian Purpose, present it to the president of the United States, and begin the process of dismantling the pernicious policy of termination and initiate the policy of self-determination, an era of federal Indian policy that continues to this day. Sol Tax remained an intellectual activist and scholar, publishing widely over the course of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

The edited volume is the outcome of a four-hour session at the 71st annual meeting of the Society of Applied Anthropology, held in Seattle. Former Tax students Joan Ablon, Albert Wahrhaftig, and Robert Hinshaw contributed essays, Ablon’s being the most personal, reflecting on Tax as philosopher and public intellectual. In his first essay, Wahrhaftig reviews the action anthropology project undertaken by Tax and Robert Thomas with the Cherokee in the early 1960s that led to a nativistic social movement; the review offers insights hitherto unavailable in the published record. Hinshaw’s first essay examines the intellectual and ethical synergy between Sol Tax and his geography department colleague Gilbert White, both committed to social justice and science—he refers to their style as “servant-leadership”—making a difference in the real world beyond the walls of the academy. His second essay reflects on Tax’s impact on his own fieldwork studying Mayan thought processes in the context of the failure of the Guatemalan state.

Daughters Marianna Tax Choldin and Susan Tax Freemen penned short remembrances with photos, the latter including her father’s mantra-like ego-less Fox Indian kinship chart and the syllabus from the 1958 class on action anthropology taught at University of Chicago. Inspired...

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