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A. I. HALLOWELL’S BOASIAN EVOLUTIONISM Human Ir/rationality in Cross-Cultural, Evolutionary, and Personal Context GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR. [This essay was originally conceived as one part of a monograph, since abandoned , entitled “Anne Roe’s Anthropologists”—itself part of a larger project on “Anthropology Yesterday: From the Science of Man in the World Crisis to the Crisis of Anthropology: 1945–72.” Early in that postwar period, the social psychologist Anne Roe (wife of George Gaylord Simpson, the paleontologist) published a book called The Making of a Scientist (1953), based on research she carried on in the late 1940s on sixty-four “elite” scientists in four disciplines (biology , physics, psychology and anthropology). The eight anthropologists selected represented three of the “four fields” of anthropology: cultural anthropology (Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, Clyde Kluckhohn, A. I. Hallowell); archeology (Duncan Strong and Gordon Willey); and physical anthropology (Carleton Coon and Harry Shapiro).1 In pursuing the project, I began with the cultural George W. Stocking, Jr. , the founding editor of History of Anthropology, is Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago, and is currently at work on a series of essays on anthropology in the United States in the post–World War II period. 196 1. Of the eight, five (Shapiro and the four cultural anthropologists) were presidents of the American Anthropological Association between 1944 and 1949. Although apparently one indicator of “elite” status, this office was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for inclusion in Roe’s sample: Neil Judd, president in 1945, was not chosen, nor was Ruth Benedict, who was president for six months before the reorganization of 1947. Judd was by no standards “elite”; Benedict, who had died by the time Roe got to the anthropologists, would have been eliminated by Roe’s prior anthropologists, taken in order of birth, beginning with Hallowell. As will be evident below, however, his selection was over-determined, and the essay took on a life of its own. The present version is dedicated to the memory of Hallowell, and to Murray Murphey, who were respectively my anthropological and historiographical mentors at Penn, and both members of my dissertation committee.] When Anne Roe wrote inviting him to participate in her study, Alfred Irving Hallowell (then known to colleagues as “Pete”) had six weeks before given his presidential address to the American Anthropological Association.2 Entitled “Personality Structure and the Evolution of Man” (AH 1949c), it was the first of a series of essays on the psychobiological and cultural evolution of the human species that Hallowell, who had studied with Franz Boas, contributed to the neo-evolutionary movement in American anthropology during the 1950s. Since Boas is characteristically (and not without reason) thought to have been anti-evolutionary, and since the most vocal of the neo-evolutionists, Leslie White, was staunchly, even obsessively, anti-Boasian (White 1966), it is worth emphasizing this Boasian component of 1950s evolutionism. Manifest in the work of Julian Steward, the leading proponent of “multilinear” cultural evolutionism (Hanc 1982), it is perhaps most strikingly evident in the later work of Margaret Mead, whose early ethnography has been critiqued from a neoevolutionary point of view (Freeman 1993), but whose participation in the Behavior and Evolution Symposium organized by Roe and Simpson in 1955 A. I. Hallowell’s Boasian Evolutionism 197 decision to exclude women and the foreign born, in order to reduce the number of variables that might affect comparison (i. e. , “sexual” and “cultural” variation [Roe 1953a: 22–29; cf. GS2000a]). Sampling considerations aside, the all male and overwhelmingly “waspish” nature of this group seems worth noting, as perhaps reflecting more general cultural tendencies in a period when traditional gender roles and notions of American identity were being reasserted—the more so in a disciplinary tradition that has emphasized both its openness to women and its proximate origin among persons of immigrant background. 2. Contemporary correspondence suggests that Hallowell began to be so addressed in the later 1930s. However, when I took two courses with him as a graduate student in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in the later 1950s, I did not call him “Pete.” Born in the same year as my own father, Hallowell was to become a kind of anthropological godfather to me. He was an enthusiastic second reader of my doctoral dissertation on “American Social Scientists and Race Theory, 1890–1915” (GS 1960) and...

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