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Visionary Observers
Anthropological Inquiry and Education
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
Introduction
This book explores the relationship between anthropology and public policy in the United States. Anthropologists in this country have been attentive to issues of race, democracy, and education since the discipline's early years. In the period from just before World War I to the 1960s, anthropologists emerged as public intellectuals as a consequence of their awareness of the diversity of human societies. Applying their knowledge to domestic policy, they promoted tolerance, racial equality, and social justice.
This volume assembles essays about nine twentieth-century anthropologists-Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Hortense Powdermaker, Gene Weltfish, Sol Kimball, Jules Henry, Ruth Landes, and Eleanor Leacock-who did research in the areas of socialization, enculturation, and education. They also were public policy activists, who applied what they learned to broader social issues, using illustrations from fieldwork as a basis for alternatives.
During this time the most obvious change in the discipline of anthropology was its expansion-in numbers of practitioners, in the number of academic departments, and in the types, methods, and topics of anthropological inquiry (for overviews, see Darnell 1997, Darnell and Gleach 2002, Goodenough 2002, Nader 2002, Patterson 2001, and Silverman 2004). The expansion was in part the result of new sources of fundingfrom corporate foundations and government agencies. For example, the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation, founded in 1918, was the sponsor of the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University and the Social Science Research Council in New York City. Both establishments and others like them encouraged growing numbers of American students to pursue graduate studies.
With new sources of funding for social sciences came a movement away from the tradition of recording vestiges of past behavior to a new emphasis on contemporary problems and new interdisciplinary approaches. The influence of psychology led to the culture-and-personality theorists exemplified by Benedict and Mead. Contact with sociologists, as well as with British social anthropology, encouraged anthropologists like Powdermaker and Kimball to pursue community studies. Both approaches extended the field through the use of new methods and the study of new populations-children, Europeans, African Americans-enlarging the record of human diversity.
These changes did not affect the anthropological tool kit-the concept of culture, the comparative method, neutrality not ethnocentrism, and participant-observation. The holistic approach to cultural analysis remained the same, even as some of the underlying premises changed. Race became a social, not a biological, category. Culture became ideational, no longer material and object-oriented, but based largely on the transmission of values, symbols, and behaviors. Dissertation research came to mean fieldwork instead of library investigations.
Similarly, after Boas, the units of cultural analysis changed. Boas looked for culture traits. His students Benedict, Mead, and Weltfish tried to find themes and patterns. Powdermaker and Kimball, heirs to a different tradition, uncovered structures and systems. Landers, Benedict's student, was associated with the culture-and-personality approach. Henry and Leacock focused on systemic power relations and a dialectical concept of culture in their research about institutions; their work reflected the emerging concern with economics and power.
New approaches and topics of inquiry led to new specialties. The Depression in the early 1930s made jobs scarce for the increasing number of newly trained anthropologists until the New Deal, when plans for work projects included them in the larger goal of job creation. Both the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture had major programs. The Department of the Interior was searching for ways to return to Native Americans "a degree of political and economic control" (Kelly 1985:126). The Department of Agriculture devoted its staff to matters of conservation and help for farm laborers.
As World War II became inevitable, many anthropologists became more involved in the public arena. Some worked directly for the government. Others spoke and wrote against Fascist and racist doctrines. Still others joined leftist political organizations. Most volunteered to help with the war effort once war was declared. After the war, enrollment in universities increased greatly, spurred by the entry of returning veterans, for whom the GI Bill of 1944 provided financial aid. Existing university programs expanded, and new programs were begun. Applied anthropology was bypassed as an appropriate field of study, as university positions opened for PhDs, and because the atmosphere of Cold War politics discouraged active involvement in programs for the disadvantaged.
However, at the same time the expansion of the field of social studies in general even at the primary and secondary educational levels led to the training of teachers and the creation of curriculum materials by anthropologists. Early anthropological interest in the socialization and enculturation of children in diverse cultural settings was a precursor to research interests more directly concerned with education (see Eddy 1987; Pelissier 1991; Yon 2003). In 1954 George Spindler organized the four-day Stanford University Conference on Education and Anthropology funded by the Carnegie Foundation. Among those taking part were Henry, Mead, and Kimball. The landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka outlawing "separate but equal" school segregation had been handed down earlier that year.
The role of education as a vehicle of acculturation and integration, and as a means of making real the ideal of equal opportunity, made it a natural concern of many anthropologists, even before the area emerged as the specialized area of inquiry it has become. In the 1920s and 1930s anthropologists concentrated on the process of educating citizens for democracy, in the context of assimilating immigrants and of the fight against European Fascism. They identified education with progress. In the 1940s they developed curriculum materials designed to combat racial prejudice at home, such as Powdermaker's Probing Our Prejudices (1944b) and Benedict and Weltfish's In Henry's Backyard (1948).
After World War II, for reasons having to do with the increased numbers of Americans enrolled in school at all levels, with the waning of colonialism, and with the emerging civil rights movement, some turned their attention directly to schools and schooling. Beginning with Jules Henry in the 1950s and increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s, more anthropologists became directly involved in observing and influencing behavior in schools (see Gearing and Tindall 1973). Landes and then Alexander Moore worked on teacher education projects (Moore 1967). Throughout the 1960s American anthropologists increasingly turned to investigations of problems at home, including schooling. Others such as Kimball and Leacock joined Henry in using schools as field sites, and like him, they saw the educational system, not as a vehicle of progress, but as a socialization mechanism for maintaining the status quo.
Organization of the Book
Following the model of Sydel Silverman's Totems and Teachers (1981, 2003), four contributors describe the work of individuals with whom they were personally acquainted. Three were students of their subjects (Young of Benedict, Niehaus of Weltfish, and Hochwald of Leacock), and the fourth was a colleague (Moore of Kimball). Some of the essays originally were presented at sessions of the American Anthropological Association meetings. Others were written specifically for this volume. Only one (McDermott on Mead) has been previously published. This book is not intended to be comprehensive. The relationship between anthropology and public policy is complex and could be illustrated in many ways. We have limited the topic by concentrating on anthropologists a great deal of whose work concerned aspects of anthropology and education. Even so, other equally compelling scholars had to be omitted as a concession to the demand of reasonable length.
The chapters are arranged chronologically, in the order of the dates the subjects received their PhDs. Arranging the chapters in this way is intended to show the expansion of the discipline, as it responded to new ideas, methods, and areas of inquiry. Each chapter contains an editors' preface, placing the subject's life in context.
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