Reminiscences of Anthropological Currents in America Half a Century Ago

Abstract

T HE Editor of the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST has asked me to offer "some discussion and analysis of the intellectual ferment, the various ideas and interests, and the important factual discoveries in their relationship to these ideas, that were current during the period of your early years as an anthropolo gist."In responding I shall have to go far afield.The task suggested implies nevertheless two noteworthy restrictions.Factual discoveries are irrelevant (except as they influenced ideas), as is administrative promotion of scientific interests.Accordingly, though sharing Sapir's judgment that as a field worker J. O. Dorsey was "ahead of his age," I must ignore him for present purposes.Again, there will be only brief references to Frederic Ward Putnam and to Frederic Webb Hodge ; as to Powell and McGee, only their thinking demands extended notice.It is well to recall that in 1904, when I began graduate work, only Columbia, Harvard, and California had full-fledged academic departments of anthropol ogy, but the Field Museum, a descendant of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, had been fostering research, as had the Bureau of American Ethnology and the United States National Museum.The anthropological departments of Colum bia and of the American Museum of Natural History were still intimately con nected; even closer was the bond between the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco and the department in Berkeley, both of them being parts of the University of California.Thus, New York, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco-Berkeley were the chief centers of anthropological activity.If the following pages seem to give disproportionate mention of my own university, this is not due to parochialism on my part.In 1904 Columbia indis putably provided the most comprehensive training to be obtained in the coun try.My first seminar there was attended by Alfred M. Tozzer, already a Ph.D. from Harvard.When John R. Swanton had presented a linguistic dissertation at Harvard, the Columbia professor was invited to examine him.Before George A. Dorsey sent Fay-Cooper Cole to the Philippines, he had him spend a semes ter with Boas, and after his return from the field Cole returned to take his degree in New York.In the present essay I shall begin by sketching the orientation of men whose thinking developed independently of this particular academic tradition.I shall then attempt to indicate the intellectual movements that impinged on my generation and presumably in large measure on our teachers'.It is hardly necessary to emphasize that even among the small number of prospective pro fessionals at the time the reactions to these impulses varied considerably, in accordance with our greatly varying individualities and equally diverse back grounds.

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