Month: May 2023

Sapir and Goldenweiser, White and Redfield

Rex

Investigating the biographies of Leslie White, Robert Redfield, Edward Sapir, and Alexander Goldenweiser. White studied with Goldenweiser in New York. Goldenweiser and Sapir were exact contemporaries in New York. White, Redfield, and Sapir were all at Chicago.

Also attaching image of the overlapping lives of Sapir and Goldenweiser. Born 4 years apart, they got their Ph.D.s within a year of each other, and died within a year of each other as well. Boas hoped they would both faculty at Columbia when he retired.

in 1925 Goldenweiser was teaching a course at the New School on ‘new evolutionism’. When you move past pat stereotypes of ‘particularist Boasian’ anthropology in the 1920s looks a lot different!

Copious Free Time: Evans-Pritchard Edition

Rex

Here are some pieces that I want to read but almost definitely will not get around to. Perhaps you will have better luck?

Sean Kingston has an amazing book on Evans-Pritchard entitled A Touch of Genius: The Life, Work, and Influence of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. It is just part of SK’s new open access initiative so you will not have to pay the usual US$15,000 that the average SK hardback costs. I’ve skimmed through it. The book is an edited volume, but not an average dull one. It is a sort of group biography of Evans-Pritchard which featured numerous, short, incredibly detailed articles. Many of them are just collections of long quotes from E-P’s associates and friends remembering him. It also includes a high amount of new E-P images, including not just photos from his youth, but of his groceries. It really looks like an amazing postmodern collaborative biography. Highly recommended.

The 1970 volume Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives has reflexive piece by Charles and Betty Lou Valentine on fieldwork called “making the scene, digging the action, and telling it like it is: anthropologists at work in a dark ghetto”. Charles was a white reformed Melanesianist, Betty Lou a Black American, and the article recounts raising their young child during fieldwork. This couple deserves more attention in the history of anthropology.

Bashkow and Shaffner’s obituary of Roy “Coyote Anthropology” Wagner in American Anthropologist is excellent and on an important figure (ok I read this one).

Mediastudies Press have an open access reprint of Irving Goffman’s dissertation, Communication and Conduct in an Island Community. 

Of Course Wikipedia has a list of foods named after people

Saleem Ali has a new book on aluminium: From Soil to Foil: Aluminium and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability. He’s an impressive guy, full of energy. 

Internet history books often don’t age well, but I think Ben Smith’s Traffic will be an exception. His ability to flood my socials is unprecedented. Also, he discusses what I think of as the ‘Savage Minds’ period in Internet History, so it is especially relevant to me.

That’s it for now! Take care.

Sahlin Biography May 2023 Update

Rex

As most of my friends and colleagues already know, the project I will take during my sabbatical in the (boreal) fall of 2023 is a biography of Marshall Sahlins. I’ll begin in the summer and since that time is almost upon my, I wanted to write the first of what I hope will be several updates about the project.

I’m excited to be working on a project of this importance and size — whether you liked Sahlins or not, he was a major force in anthropology for a long time and his story is a lens to tell the story of anthropology after World War II more generally.

I’m also horned to have the support of many people and institutions. I undertook this research after Marshall’s son Peter approached me about it at the memorial conference in Sahlins’s honor on 4 April 2022. It’s an honor and also quite intimidating as Peter is himself a very distinguished historian who knows more about Marshall’s life than I do! I am also very lucky to be conducting this research with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation as well as a Bordin/Gillette Fellowship from the University of Michigan.

The research for the book will be mostly library based, and I plan on doing work in the libraries and archives of the universities Sahlins was associated with: Michigan, Chicago, and Columbia. In addition to working in Hawai‘i through most of the 1970s, Sahlins was also a visiting professor at Mānoa in the 1980-1981 school year, and I’ve done a bit of work on his time here. Our department secretary still has his syllabi on hand!

I also plan to interview people who knew Sahlins, so if I reach out to you soon, don’t be surprised!

Finally, this research will take me to Fiji, where I hope to do some research in the library and archives to improve my extremely basic understanding of that country. Then I’d like to go to Moala, Sahlins’s fieldwork site, to see what sort of relationship people there have with him, his memory and influence, and his book Moala.

The one place I cannot get to at the moment is Paris. Sahlins’s two years in France were central to his intellectual development, but at the moment I don’t have the funds to visit the city and do the sort of in-situ interviewing and library research work I’d like to do. Perhaps I’ll apply for some funding later. Or… if anyone wants to fly me out for a talk… let me know!

Finally, I want to be clear from the beginning that I do not intend this book to be a hagiography. Sahlins loved competition and found it boring to be worshipped. Also, I live in Hawai‘i, where I’ve listened to a lot of voices that are critical of his work. My goal in writing this book is to reveal the complexity of his life and to see it from a variety of angles. If I present him as only a great sage or only a grumpy, obsolete dinosaur, then I will have failed. How well I succeed in this task is something that will only become clear as I move forward with this project. More soon.