Uncommon Anthropologist

My interview with Nancy Mattina on Gladys Reichard, ‘America’s least appreciated anthropologist’ is now live over at the New Books Network. Go take a listen! Nancy’s carefully-researched book re-captures the achievements of Gladys Reichard, a woman whose achievements, Nancy persuasively argues, was erased by her contemporaries. Perhaps the closest discipline of both Franz Boas and Elsie Clews Parsons, Nancy presents an image of an incredibly productive scholar with a zest for living whose work was disparaged by the sexism of men like Edward Sapir and Clyde Kluckhohn and the classism of blue-blooded women such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. It’s easy to be put off by Sapir’s misogyny today, but what I thought made this book and our interview so fascinating was Nancy’s portrayal Benedict and Mead not as feminist heroes but as envious of and less-successful than Reichard. In the middle we ask the question: What would have happened to American ethnography if Reichard, carrying Boas’s and Parsons’s style forward, had become hegemonic. It’s a fascinating question! And with Reichard’s wonderful ethnography Spider Woman now available for free download, hopefully more people will be able not only to ask this question, but answer it.