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ANTHROPOLOGY’S OTHER OTHERS Anthropology is by definition about “significant others,” with the word “others” (often, “Others”) standing for cultural alterity, as anthropologists understand it. In the title of the present volume, however, “significant others” refers otherwise , drawing on the meaning of the phrase in recent middlebrow American English: “spouses and lovers.” When we look at institutionalized anthropology from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, spouses (that is, wives) can certainly appear as paradigmatic significant others, not just in their domestic roles, but more particularly in the work that many anthropologists ’ wives did when they accompanied their professional husbands to the field. Although the contributions of these wifely significant others is only now beginning to be recognized in scholarship (see Tedlock 1995 for references ; also Kennedy 1995), it has long been understood that many women contributed both scholarly and domestic labor to their husbands’ careers.1 The present volume opens with two essays documenting the works and lives of anthropological couples: Matthew Engelke’s on Edith and Victor Turner, and Harry West’s on Jorge and Margot Dias. It closes with the “marriage,” at the turn of the last century, of the [male] Anthropological Society of Washington to the Women’s Anthropological Society of America, in the paper by Joy Rohde. Beyond spouses, Significant Others looks at several kinds of personal relationships that have been important to anthropologists as they practice their craft; hence, the subtitle, which indicates the intertwining of personal and professional relationships in the history of anthropology, or, more particularly, a focus on relationships that were simultaneously deeply personal and professionally important for particular anthropologists’ careers. The relationship between anthropologists and their informants or consultants is obviously an important 1. In his preface to the republication of Edward Sapir’s long out-of-print essay on “Time Perspective in Aboriginal Culture” (1916), David Mandelbaum tells “the story of a winsome and intelligent young lady who used to do typing for [an anthropologist] . . . when he was a graduate student . On his birthday she brought him a sheaf of typescript in gift wrappings. It was the whole of ‘Time Perspective,’ which she had meticulously copied. He married her” (1949:387). 3 one, and has received much scholarly attention. West’s paper on the Diases focuses also on the anthropologist-informant relationship—indeed, on a particularly complicated instance of it, as West, in the field in Mozambique, worked with Rafael Mwakala, who had worked a generation earlier with Jorge and Margot Dias, authors of the “classic” ethnographies in the area. The teacher-student (or patron- or mentor-student) relationship is also one in which personal and professional commitments can become intertwined. The papers by Brightman, Rohde, Schumaker, and Silverstein are concerned, at least in part, with established or senior professionals directing, mentoring, or even obstructing junior colleagues and students. We should note that in all the cases they examine, more or less enterprising junior partners often try to wrest control of the relationship for their own ends. These stories about senior and junior interlocutors are often also stories in which the juniors become a cohort of significant others to one another, as in the case of Gluckman’s students in the field (in Schumaker’s essay) or various generations of Boas’ students (in Silverstein ’s and Brightman’s essays). Teacher-student relationships are often discussed in a language of kinship, with mentors figured as ancestors—[fore]fathers and [fore]mothers of the “ego” in question. There has also been much discussion of “sibling,” or samegeneration , relationships—that of cohorts—and, now, increasing attention to the history of anthropological husbands and wives (including “conjugal” relationships between same-sex partners [see Grinker 2000]). But, looking down the genealogical tree, historians of anthropology have had less to say about anthropologists ’ relationships to their children (but see Cassell, 1987, Sutton and Fernandez 1998). One such relationship, that of A. I. Hallowell to his son, is at the heart of Stocking’s paper, which compares influences of a “real” kinship relationship (Hallowell and his adopted son) to those exerted on the anthropologist by various “fictive” ancestors, his teachers and the traditions they fostered. The paper concludes with an extended meditation on the question of influence in anthropology and in scholarship more generally, and the relationship of “influence ” to one’s place in history—or in disciplinary genealogies, the anthropological family tree. Given Stocking’s discussion of influence, and more generally, the volume theme—“significant others”—I cannot help but...

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