This paper assesses the historical and institutional origins of anthropology in the United States in order to understand the development of the four-field model, the persistence of which is considered distinctive of anthropology in the United States. An Atlantic Enlightenment saw the origins of anthropology in the United States. The four fields of anthropology can be traced to the Enlightenment. The four fields were brought together in the context of museums and learned societies in the 19th century United States. The focus of anthropology changed in the early 20th century with the placement of anthropology in the context of the university and the German concept of the defended dissertation as the principal gateway to professionalization (introduced by Boas). Four-field anthropology programs also existed in diverse countries, but did not persist except in the US beyond the early years of the 20th century. Anthropology in the US as a four-field discipline grew throughout the 1930s. After World War II, the discipline expanded greatly in the United States, partly due to the G.I. Bill as well as to increased demand for anthropology courses. Anthropology continued to grow in terms of numbers of institutions offering the PhD and numbers of new doctorates in the field into the 1970s, stabilizing around 400 per year. The usual rank order in number of doctorates per field per year continues to be the same in the early 2000s as it was thirty years ago: cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology. The four field unity of the discipline came under critical scrutiny in the late 20th century, with the principal criticism being that the holism of the four fields appears to be a function of 19th century museum mentality, but the four fields regardless of cleavages have nevertheless remained together in the same departments in most universities. That trend appears to be continuing in general at the present time in the United States.
Keywords: four fields of anthropology, history of anthropology, US university system.
Esse artigo avalia as origens históricas e institucionais da antropologia nos Estados Unidos de maneira a entender o desenvolvimento do modelo dos quatro campos, cuja persistência é considerada distintiva da antropologia nos Estados Unidos. O Iluminismo Atlântico assistiu às origens da antropologia nos Estados Unidos. Os quatro campos da antropologia podem ser procurados no Iluminismo. Os quatro campos surgiram juntos no contexto de museus e sociedades filomáticas nos Estados Unidos no século XIX. O foco da antropologia mudou no começo do século XX com o estabelecimento da antropologia no contexto universitário e o conceito alemão da defesa da tese como a via principal para a profissionalização (introduzida por Boas).
Programas de antropologia nos quatro campos também existiram em diversos países, mas não persistiram, exceto nos Estados Unidos depois dos primeiros anos do século XX. A antropologia nos Estados Unidos como uma disciplina de quatro campos cresceu através durante os anos 1930. Após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a disciplina se expandiu grandemente nos Estados Unidos, parcialmente devido ao projeto de Lei G.I. (G.I. Bill), assim como a crescente demanda por cursos de antropologia. A antropologia continuou a crescer em termos de número de instituições oferecendo o Ph.D. e número de novos doutores no campo até os anos 1970, estabilizando-se em torno de 400 por ano.
A figura usual no número de doutorados por disciplina por ano continuou a ser a mesma no começo deste século tanto quanto era há 30 anos: antropologia cultural, arqueologia, antropologia física, lingüística antropológica. A unidade dos quatro campos da disciplina passou por um escrutínio crítico no final do século XX, quando a principal crítica era que o holismo dos quatro campos parecia ser uma função da mentalidade dos museus do século XIX, mas os quatro campos, independente das separações tem entretanto permanecido juntos dentro dos mesmos departamentos nas mesmas universidades. Essa tendência parece ter continuidade em geral atualmente nos estados Unidos.
Palavras-chave: quatro campos da antropologia, história da Antropologia, sistema universitário.
Ce document évalue les origines historiques et institutionnelles de l'anthropologie aux États-Unis afin de comprendre le développement de la modèle de quatre domaines, la persistance de ce qui est considéré comme distinctif de l'anthropologie aux États-Unis. Un Atlantique des Lumières a vu les origines de l'anthropologie aux États-Unis. Les quatre domaines de l'anthropologie peut être attribuée à la philosophie des Lumières. Les quatre domaines ont été rassemblés dans le cadre de musées et de sociétés savantes dans le 19ème siècle aux Etats-Unis. L'objet de l'anthropologie a changé au début du 20e siècle avec la mise en place de l'anthropologie dans le cadre de l'université et le concept allemand de la thèse défendue comme la principale porte d'entrée vers la professionnalisation (introduit par Boas). Les quatre domaines de l'anthropologie ont existés également des programmes dans divers pays, mais ne persistent pas, sauf dans les États-Unis dans la première moitié du 20e siècle. L'anthropologie aux États-Unis ont augmenté tout au long des années 1930. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, jusqu'a les années 1960, la discipline a pris beaucoup d'ampleur aux États-Unis, en partie à cause de l'abordabilité de l'enseignement supérieur en raison de la GI Le projet de loi (G.I. Bill) ainsi que l'augmentation de la demande pour des cours d'anthropologie. Anthropologie continué de croître en termes de nombre d'établissements offrant de doctorat et le nombre de nouveaux doctorats dans les années 1970. L'ordre de classement habituel dans nombre de doctorats par an par domaine continue d'être la même au début des années 2000 comme il était il y a trente ans: l'anthropologie culturelle, l'archéologie, l'anthropologie physique,et l'anthropologie linguistique. Les quatre domaines d'unité de la discipline relève un examen critique à la fin du 20e siècle, avec la principale critique est que le holisme des quatre domaines semble être fonction du 19e siècle, de la mentalité de musée, mais les quatre domaines indépendamment de clivages ont néanmoins resté ensemble dans les mêmes départements dans la plupart des universités et que la tendance semble être la poursuite de la discipline de l'anthropologie en général, à l'heure actuelle aux États-Unis.
Mots clés: les quatre domaines de l'anthropologie, l'histoire de l'anthropologie, système universitaire americain
In this paper, I discuss the historical and institutional origins of anthropology in the United States with an eye to understanding the four-field model and its dominance in the 20th century. Anthropology in the United States is historically distinctive because of the tenacity of its four-field model. The four fields, of course, are sociocultural anthropology (also called cultural anthropology or more seldom ethnology), archaeology or archaeological anthropology, physical or biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology or simply linguistics. The term “anthropology” indeed has traditionally meant something different, specifically, in the anthropological tradition of the United States 1 from its cognate terms in other languages of other national traditions. In the first edition of a popular dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese, for example, antropologia originally referred to physical anthropology and it was specifically described as a "natural science" (ciência natural) (Holanda Ferreira n.d.: 108; see Lima et al. 2005: 29-30), whereas in the third edition of the same dictionary (Holanda Ferreira 2004),the term has come to encompass the four fields (see also Instituto Houaiss 2007: 240 for an even broader, contemporary definition).2 Generally speaking, the term "anthropology" has tended to be restricted in its range of meaning in German and French, as well as in the English spoken in the British Isles and the Republic of Ireland for most the 20th century, where it appears to have usually also meant physical anthropology (OED 2008) or some sort of anthropology firmly rooted in natural history. Social anthropology, the hallmark of Britain, was seen as a separate field after about 1920.
The four-field model of anthropology reflects institutional arrangements as these developed over time as well as concepts about how to study the subject matter. Marvin Harris (1968: 9) [1927-2001] was often quoted on having written "all that is new in anthropological theory begins with the Enlightenment." Harris was referring to theory concerning culture per se. The intellectual foundations of the four fields themselves are arguably also laid in the Enlightenment, dating roughly from 1690 to the end of the French Revolution in 1793. In 1786, the British Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746-1794), in an address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, determined a relationship among Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit that for him evinced what today linguists would call the prior existence of a mother tongue, common to all three (Cannon 1990: 245). That mother tongue, of course, was Proto-Indo-European, and the "family" Jones identified by using that term is Indo-European. The discovery marked the beginning of linguistics as we know it (Hallowell 1976: 58-59). In the same period, physical anthropology may be said to begin with Linnaeus himself in 1735, in classifying the human species as an animal under the binomial rubric Homo sapiens (Hallowell 1976: 94). Linnaeus and later Blumenbach (1776) divided the human species into a total of five "races," according to geography and minimalist criteria like skull shape and skin color, which would lead to collection of skulls of American Indians and other groups in the United States during the next century (Hallowell 1976: 94-101).
The Enlightenment included the educated elite of the United States, or what was colonial British North America before 1776, in a broader "Atlantic Enlightenment" (Shuffelton 1993). In his work on Indian mounds in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) carried out the first, basically modern stratigraphic excavations (Renfrew and Bahn 1996: 21) (though he was largely ignored by subsequent archaeologists for some time), which may be considered the beginnings of archaeology in what would become the United States. Jefferson inquired into linguistics and ethnology of American Indians as well. Jefferson considered American Indians to be people who could be objectified in order to understand humanity; he directed Lewis and Clark before their exploration of the Louisiana Purchase of 1804-06 to both understand and, to a certain extent, appreciate the Indian (Adams 1999: 226; Worster 2001: 397). Such an attitude had precursors in earlier Enlightenment figures. All had been influenced by the Jesuit missionaries of the previous century who in their support of primitivism had created the idea of North American Indians as representing the "Noble Savage."3 That doctrine served as a call to freedom and equality for people everywhere, including in France, where it helped lay the groundwork of the French Revolution (Bidney 1954), a war supported by Jefferson.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson (1999: 107) observed that the comparison of American Indian languages "would be the most certain evidence of their derivation which could be produced . . .it [such comparison] is the best proof of the affinity of nations." Jefferson also would later read Sir Jones' linguistic work on languages of Asia in the 1790s (Cannon 1990). Both Jefferson and Jones personally knew Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who had founded in 1769 the American Philosophical Society (Mitra 1933: 197), an academy of scholars that existed for the exchange of learning rooted in Enlightenment ideals, to which Jefferson and several other signers of the Declaration of Independence had been elected in 1780, and to which Jones no doubt would have been admitted after the American Revolution had he not died relatively young (Cannon 1990: 328). Early members of the American Philosophical Society studied languages of American Indians; the Society recognized the field of linguistics in 1815 in founding a committee called "Historical and Literary Committee when Duponceau had succeeded Jefferson." That committee was charged with linguistics as well as other anthropological matters (Hallowell 1976: 61).
The American Philosophical Society was modeled on the British Royal Society, which had been founded in 1660; it is the oldest such society in existence (Mitra 1933: 197), of which Sir William Jones was an elected member also. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, likewise inspired by the Royal Society, had as its specific mission the discussion of "Man and nature: whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other" (Cannon 1990: 203). The Asiatic Society of Bengal was concerned, in other words, with general anthropology (the four fields of anthropology), before any such lexeme existed. The origins of learned societies, as we know them today, like the American Philosophical Society and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, date from the Enlightenment, and are critical to the birth of the four-field model.
Anthropology in the United States comes about in the context of learned societies and museums in the 19th century (Hallowell 1976, Hinsley 1981, Mitra 1933). The learned societies, with some antiquarianism or related interest in anthropology or the study of Indians (called "Indianology" by Adams [1999]), included, in addition to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, founded during the American Revolution), the American Antiquarian Society (1812), the Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia, 1817), the New York Academy of Sciences (1817), the American Ethnological Society (1842), and the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) [1847] (Meltzer 1985: 250; Mitra 1933: 196-205). Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) would be the first chair of the anthropology section of the AAAS in 1851 (Mitra 1933: 203). Despite its name, the American Ethnological Society, which would undergo several changes, was originally not dedicated to the study of ethnology as we know it today but rather to the "origin, progress and characteristics of various races of man" (Mitra 1933: 202), reflecting the 19th century conflation of "race" with "culture" that predated Boasian cultural relativism as well as European social anthropology. The American Ethnological Society was revived by Boas in 1900 (Stocking 1974: 304, Stocking 1988: 18) to represent the interests of what today we would call cultural or social anthropology.
The principal museums of anthropological note of the United States arose in the 19th century also. These bore the makings of the four-field model because of their collections. They included crania due to the agenda of raciological anthropology and the polygenist authors of the early 19th century, especially Samuel Morton (1799-1851), who invented phrenology, which essentially confused cranial form with intangible characteristics, including linguistic and cultural ones (Hallowell 1976: 96).4 They also included "curious objects in natural history, Indian antiquities, foreign and native works of art," as was described specifically for the Charleston Museum (South Carolina) in 1826, which is the oldest museum in the country, dating from 1777 at the latest, having been destroyed by fire in 1778 with earlier records lost (Mitra 1933: 183). Other museums with anthropological interests included the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution) [1847], the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale) [1866], the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology (Harvard [1866], the American Museum of Natural History (New York, 1869), the Bernice Bishop Museum (Honolulu, 1889), and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, 1893) [Mitra 1933: 183-196]. Museums were important to the discipline because of the role these played in development of the study of material items, mostly collected in the course of Indianology (Adams 1999). These materials were arranged and examined by ethnographers, physical anthropologists, and archaeologists. They were central to the paradigm of unilinear evolutionism also, dominant in the 19th century until it was deconstructed by Boas and his students.
Otis Mason (1838-1908), following the lead of his mentor John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), who in turn had been influenced directly by Lewis Henry Morgan's cultural evolutionism (Hallowell 1976, 90), had arranged North American indigenous artifacts at the National Museum (the Smithsonian) in an exhibit of 1887, showing what he believed to be inevitable progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization (Stocking 1974: 57; Worster 2001: 457). Daniel Brinton (1837-1899) in Philadelphia, a professor of linguistics and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and at one time affiliated with the Academy of Natural Sciences, also arranged native objects according to supposedly "natural laws" of cultural evolution (Bunzl 1996: 56; also see Stocking 1974: 21, 30 ). A young, recently arrived immigrant from Germany named Franz Boas (1858-1942) found fault with Mason's exhibit, to the chagrin both of Mason and Powell (Bunzl 1996: 56-58; Worster 2001: 457-458). The exhibit was mainly criticized from Boas' principle that different causes may result in the same effects; everything cannot be explained by evolutionism in a single line of inevitable progress (Bunzl 1996; Hinsley 1981: 98; Stocking 1974: 61-67). Powell, who was also a member of the American Philosophical Society, had been instrumental in hiring amateur anthropologists who were veterans of either the US Civil War or Indian Wars of the late 19th century at the Smithsonian and orchestrating support for them by the Bureau of American Ethnology, of which he was the first Director in 1879 (Meltzer 1985: 250; Worster 2001: 398). His intellectual goal was to found a "science of man" on the basis of research on Indians of the United States, who were seen as being no longer enemies by the late 19th century, but rather wards of the state who needed protection and understanding (Worster 2001: 398). Powell evidently had an applied agenda as well for he had his soldier-anthropologists gather information on American Indians in order to more effectively implement military and political control of tribes already vanquished by the US army (Hinsley 1999: 183-184).
Anthropology for Powell was the linking of many distinct fields around the subject matter of the Indian (Darnell 1977; Meltzer 1985: 25). This phase of proto-anthropology in the United States was characterized, then, by what has been called "military ethnography" (Pels and Salemink 1999: 36-37), though it is probably more often referred to as the "museum period" (Stocking 1988: 20). Anthropology included linguistics also, as originally enjoined upon Lewis and Clark by Jefferson and prominent in Powell's own work (Hallowell 1976: 67; Hinsley 1981: 158-162; Bunzl 1996: 63-65), as in his guidebook for fieldworkers from 1877, and as in the philological work of William Whitney [1827-1894] (Hinsley 1981:158-161; Worster 2001: 399).
In the 19th century, anthropology in the United States had developed in the context of societies and museums. It became professionalized in the university setting from 1901 to about 1920, and in this period of professionalization, museum research actually grew at a faster rate than it had before (Leslie 1963: 486; Darnell 1977: 401), perhaps because of the new Ph.D.s that were being minted in anthropology. The Anthropological Museum at the University of California was founded in 1901 with a focus on the ethnology of California, North America, South America, and Pacific; the South West Museum of Los Angeles was founded in 1907 with a focus on archaeology; the Oakland Public Museum with a focus on Indians of the Pacific Coast was founded in 1909; and the Museum of the American Indian was founded in 1916 in New York City (Mitra 1933: 195-196) . Its collections are now part of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2004.
Although anthropology includes a field dedicated to the study of human social institutions: sociocultural or social and cultural anthropology, it is interesting to note that whereas museums are critical to understanding anthropology in the United States, they were of no consequence in the development of sociology, the sister field of sociocultural anthropology (Leslie 1963: 486)5. That is because anthropologists were concerned with the things people made in addition to their institutions; things people made were part of the learned experience of living in society, which was culture. That concept of culture, and cultural evolution in the 19th century, appears to have fit better with natural history than other academic consolidations. The anthropology section of the AAAS was originally assigned to section B "Natural History" in 1856 not without sense in the way people conceived of it at the time in the United States.6 As such, the artifacts collected by anthropologists were separated from the "art" collected by galleries for the display of Western painting, sculpture, and the like. For that reason, anthropology museums are distinct from art museums. Anthropologists of the 19th century were essentially natural historians and their work "was shaped in the atmosphere of museums of natural history" (Leslie 1963: 486). Part of the problem, from the relativistic perspective of Boasian anthropology, was that these museums also existed to show progress. In the late 19th century, art museums and industrial museums showed the progress of Western civilization, whereas museum anthropology was intended to exhibit the "inferiority of other peoples" (Hinsley 1981: 83).
The four-field model is tenacious in the United States, but not historically unique. Certain other countries where anthropology originated also once had four fields. The four-field model, which is simply the institutional juxtaposition of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, anthropological archaeology, and physical anthropology, was not initially unique to the United States (Adams 1999: 367-368). Indeed, in terms of pedagogy, the Board of Studies in Anthropology at the University of London as early as the first decade of the 20th century proposed, as a guide for the “study and teaching of anthropology,” courses in essentially what are the four fields as we know them now, including “physical anthropology” and “cultural anthropology,” which, in fact, explicitly subsumed courses of study in "ethnology," "archaeology," and "linguistics" (Haddon 1910: xiii-xiv). Boas showed conscious awareness of the existence of the four-field model, which had already congealed in museums and learned societies in the US by the 1870s (Massin 1996: 82, n. 2), in an address to the International Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis (itself part of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition--Stocking 1974: 21), by declaring that anthropology constituted "the biological history of mankind in all its varieties; linguistics applied to people without written languages; the ethnology of people without historic records; and prehistoric archaeology" (quoted in Stocking 1988: 18).
Regardless of where it occurred, the four-field approach seems to have been often connected to previously extant museum concerns as well as classical evolutionism. Ostensibly, a four-field approach (at least physical anthropology and ethnology) existed in Brazil in the late 19th century at the Museu Nacional (since 1892 located at Quinta da Boa Vista in Rio de Janeiro), given the joint ethnographic and anthropometric interests of Edgard Roquette-Pinto (Lima et al. 2005: 29-30). It also existed in Germany at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin, founded in 1886; that museum together with the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (organized in 1869 by Rudolph Virchow and Adolf Bastian) and its associated journal, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Lowie 1937: 30), were essentially the background of physical anthropology and ethnology in Germany to which Boas had been exposed before he became an anthropologist in the United States. Virchow (1821-1902) was a pathologist and Bastian (1826-1905), who at one time studied law, natural science, and medicine had been his student (Lowie 1937, 30). Boas met Virchow at the Berlin Anthropological Society meetings in 1882 and was much impressed with his empiricism in physical anthropology (Stocking 1974: 22). After Boas did fieldwork with the Inuit of Baffin Island in 1883-1884, which convinced him to become an anthropologist, he served from 1885-86 as assistant to Bastian at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin and slightly later for a short time as Privatdocent at the University of Berlin, working with Virchow, who was intimately involved with the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (Lowie 1937: 129). It is interesting to note that both Bastian and Virchow were opposed to evolution by natural selection (they opposed Darwin) [Lowie 1937: 31-36; Stocking 1974: 22] on the basis that because transformation of one species into another had not been observed per se, it could not be proven to have occurred. Virchow and Bastian were in the tradition of German empiricism dating from Kant and Herder and their thinking along these lines appears to have been neo-Kantian, in keeping with their generation of German scholarship.
The next generation of scholars, including Boas and his first few PhDs, tended to accept Darwin and evolution by natural selection, even if they rejected unilinear cultural evolutionism or the so-called comparative method of the 19th century. Boas' dismissal of classical evolutionism, and of cultural typologies in general, has its roots in German neo-Kantian philosophy, history, and empiricism (Bunzel 1996). Certain scholars, especially the anthropologists outside the Columbia ambit, however, maintained a link to this period, however fragile, into the early 20th century. This would include Darwinists who continued to accept aspects of classical cultural evolutionism in the sense of Tylor and Morgan.
By 1902, the year of the founding of the American Anthropological Association, anthropology was taught in 31 universities and colleges in various cities of the world; in Europe, these were found in France (Paris)7, Germany (Munich, Berlin, Marbourg), and Britain (Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh) [Mitra 1933, 142]. In Britain, a four-field approach to the subject matter of anthropology was clear from R.R. Marett, who in his textbook (1912:7-8) had written:
“Anthropology is the whole history of man as fired and pervaded by the idea of evolution. Man in evolution—that is the subject in its full reach. Anthropology studies man as he occurs at all known times. It studies him as he occurs in all known parts of the world. It studies him body and soul together—as a bodily organism, subject to conditions operating in time and space, which bodily organism is in intimate relation with a soul-life, also subject to those same conditions”. |
For Marett, the unifying factor of a four-field approach was Darwin and evolution: “Anthropology is the child of Darwin. Darwinism makes it possible. Reject the Darwinian point of view, and you must reject anthropology also” (Marett 1912, 8). Marett was also a lecturer at Oxford, home of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (the oldest university museum in the world) and the Pitt-Rivers Museum, dating from 1884, an ethnological and archaeological collection organized explicitly in 19th century evolutionary terms (Stocking 1987: 264). Marett's textbook (1912) included chapters entitled "antiquity of man," "race and geographical distribution," "social organization and law," and, under "miscellaneous," he had sections on language, art, and economics.
The four-field model thrived in museum contexts. However much Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection were accepted by modern British social anthropologists of the next generation, however, they nevertheless dispensed with the overall classical evolutionist paradigm itself, and with it, the institutionalization of the four fields of anthropology. After Haddon and Marett, a four-field approach ceased to exist in the UK (Adams 1999: 368-369).
I would arbitrarily define the beginning of professional, general anthropology in the US with the granting of Alfred Kroeber’s Ph.D. degree at Columbia in 1901, under the supervision of Franz Boas. Professionalization of various physical and natural sciences was also occurring around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries (Chester 2002: 175). The American Anthropological Association was founded on 30 June 1902 (Mitra 1933: 204). Although since that time the American Anthropologist has been associated as the flagship journal of the AAA (Stocking 1974: 304), it had been published originally since 1888 by the Anthropological Society of Washington (Worster 2001: 439; cf. Stocking 1988: 17), the learned society of the Washington "School" of anthropologists, itself founded in 1879 (Mitra 1933: 126; Worster 2001: 439). Powell had been its first president, serving nine terms, and by the end of the 19th century it still had a membership of around 500 people, including many women, though it had fallen on economically hard times (Stocking 1974: 304; Hinsley 1981: 234; Worster 2001: 439).
In 1902, the American Anthropological Association, as a learned society, represented, in fact, two groups with quite different ideologies about what the field should be. There were those with the view of anthropology as a discipline with a doctorate as the sine qua non of full competence in it, such as Boas and his Columbia students and there were those who held the pre-professional view characterized by the museum, amateur anthropologists, veterans of military ethnography, centered in Washington, D.C. (Hinsley 1981: 234; Stocking 1974: 285). The culmination of antagonism between these two groups would come with Boas' censure in 1919 by the American Anthropological Association for opposing, in a letter to The Nation, the activities of anonymous American anthropologists working as spies for the United States government in Central America (Stocking 1976: 2). Boas and his students, especially Robert Lowie, would retake control of the organization and the American Anthropologist, which had been temporarily under control of the Washington anthropologists, again by around 1923 (Stocking 1976: 3). Perhaps the Washington anthropologists were bound to lose in the ideological dispute between cultural evolutionism and cultural relativism in their confrontation with Boas, if for no other reason than they, unlike Boas, had "left no academic progeny of their own" (Stocking 1988: 18). They were government employees, not university professors.
Anthropology in the United States became entrenched in university life mainly though not solely because of Boas and the Columbia training program he had organized. Before that, and after the Enlightenment, it was confined to academic societies and, most of all, museums (Hinsley 1981; Mitra 1933; Stocking 1976: 13). It would be in museums that many of the first professionally trained anthropologists in the early 20th century would find work (Eggan 1963: 410). Kroeber actually founded a new department, University of California at Berkeley in addition to becoming Director of that university's new Anthropological Museum, financed by Phoebe Hearst (Mitra 1933: 195), in the first decade of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the fewer than ten anthropology departments in the United States in 1920 were associated in one way or another with an anthropological museum (Stocking 1976: 13).
Some claim to founding anthropology in American higher education can be laid also by Harvard, which had a strong museum program in archaeology (the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, since 1866—Mitra 1933: 189). In fact, at least in an ideological sense, there were three principal nuclei of anthropology by the early 20th century, these being New York (at Columbia), Washington, D.C. (at the Bureau of American Ethnology and the U.S. National Museum), and Cambridge (at Harvard) [Stocking 1976: 13; Stocking 1988: 17]. In Cambridge, Charles Peabody (whose PhD was in philology) taught North American archaeology at Harvard from the 1890s into the early 20th century. The first PhD at Harvard in this field was awarded in 1894 in the field of “American archaeology and ethnology” to George Dorsey (Williams 1998). Harvard’s strength for many years was essentially in archaeology , and it now appears that Boas at Columbia did maintain contacts there with important figures in American archaeology (cf. Stocking 1976: 2), such as Frederic Ward Putnam (Director of the Peabody Museum , 1876-1915) and Alfred Marston Tozzer (PhD in anthropology, 1904) [Williams 1998]; archaeology was Boas’ least significant field8.
The first PhD in anthropology per se at Harvard, coming two years after Alfred Kroeber’s PhD at Columbia under Boas, was granted to William Curtis Farabee (1903) (Williams 1998), who would later work at the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania and carry out wide-ranging, though brief, ethnographic work in northern South America. Farabee (1865-1925) had not been exposed to the Boasian emphasis on long-term fieldwork, which of course developed independently in British social anthropology after Haddon's generation had passed, and this perhaps is reflected in Lowie's curt dismissal of Farabee's research on South American marriage customs as "meager or confused reports" (1937: 6). For Boas' ethnography, Lowie (1937: 132) had this to say: "Boas raised field work to an entirely new level by demanding that the ethnographer's technique must equal that of a student of Chinese, Greek, or Islamic civilization."
The Peabody Museum at Harvard and the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania were, together with the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution) (Meltzer 1985: 249), earlier institutions in the field of anthropology than Columbia dating from Boas' initial appointment in 1896 (Stocking 1974: 284), even though museums such as these hired the PhDs produced by the universities (Eggan 1963: 410). Clearly Harvard and Pennsylvania were far less influential in the initial development and professionalization of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology than Columbia.
Table 1. PhDs Granted in Anthropology in the United States, Selected Yearsa
1962 |
36 |
-- |
AAA 1962 |
1967 |
60 |
142 |
AAA 1967 |
1978 |
62 |
406 |
Cimino 1979; AAA 1978, 412 |
1987 |
87 |
369 |
AAA 1987 |
2007 |
94 |
524 |
AAA 2007 |
a. The institutions are from the United States only, and only Ph.D.s earned in the United States are counted, though member institutions granting PhDs in the AAA sources are found also outside the United States. For that reason, the numbers in these columns do not necessarily agree with the totals given in similar tabular data in those sources.
The profession of anthropologist, apart from its dictionary meaning of the early 19th century (see note 1), really begins with Boas because of the introduction of the German system of the Ph.D. dissertation and its defense as the requirement for admission to full professional status (Eggan 1963: 410). Anthropology began at the graduate level in the US university system, and it only became a standard part of the undergraduate curriculum much later (Eggan 1963: 409). The profession grew slowly until an "acceleration" of training occurred in the 1930s (Eggan 1963: 410); at that time, the field expanded evidently due to the Great Depression and the rise of structural-functionalism in social anthropology. In the United States, applied anthropology, which is often considered the fifth field of anthropology (Darnell 2002: 2), began in the 1930s with the Great Depression, and the opening up of job opportunities from the New Deal for anthropologists (Stocking 1976: 49). Most of this work was centered on projects with American Indians in reservation life and focused on education, nutrition, culture contact, and land issues (van Willigen 1993: 23-24).
In this period of the Great Depression, anthropology also became entrenched more in universities than museums (Eggan 1963: 410; Stocking 1976: 16). New graduate programs at large state universities (such as Michigan and Wisconsin) and some private universities (such as Washington and Northwestern) were also formed in this period (Stocking 1976: 16); the number of institutions granting the PhD doubled from what it had been in 1920, the year when the field may be considered to have been consolidated and fully professionalized (Darnell 1977), and the number of PhDs increased fivefold (Eggan 1963: 410). The field in general expanded its reach beyond the traditional Indianology of North America to the Pacific, Africa, and Central and South America (Stocking 1976: 16-17). More specialization took place; modern archaeology, for example, comes into existence at about this time (Eggan 1963: 410), with the founding of the Society for American Archaeology in 1934 (Meltzer 1985).
Applied anthropology began to grow exponentially during World War II. The Society for Applied Anthropology was founded in 1941 (Stocking 1976: 51). After the United States entered World War II, more than 90% of American anthropologists were involved in some professional capacity in support of the Allied war effort (Gardner and Lewis 1996: 32; van Willigen 1993: 25; cf. Stocking 1988:20). By 1943, more than half of American anthropologists were devoting full-time to the Allied war effort, and around a quarter were engaged part-time in that capacity (Stocking 1976: 51). The end of the war would see a significant alignment of anthropology toward full integration within university life, with less and less emphasis on practice.
In the period 1945-1954, the number of PhD-granting institutions doubled again, and the field increased the number of PhDs by more than had been minted in the preceding fifty years (Eggan 1963: 410-411), due largely to the 1944 G.I. Bill, which afforded 2.2 million soldiers returning from the European and Pacific theaters of World War II an essentially free undergraduate education; many chose to attend Ivy League universities and first-rate liberal arts colleges (Field et al. 2008).9 In succeeding years, therefore, it became necessary to increase the number of institutions awarding the anthropology PhD and to hire more PhDs in order to teach the swelling ranks of undergraduate students at both private and public universities. The increase in teaching responsibilities, and embeddedness of anthropology in the university, by this time led to a marginalization of applied anthropology, which had flourished during World War II, and to the reification of an intellectualist or "pure" anthropology that did not need to have practical effects or applications on the world beyond the Ivory Tower (e.g., Pels and Salemink 1999: 3). For the most part, therefore, the dissemination of the undergraduate major in anthropology can also be traced to World War II and its aftermath.
By the late 1960s, much of the professoriate itself had been trained partly from the GI Bill. There were only 36 PhD degree-granting institutions in 1962, but that number had waxed by two-thirds to 60 in only five years (Table 1). But of these some 60 or 70 institutions, a few were clearly dominant, in terms of where the employed professors had received their degrees. Harvard, Columbia, California-Berkeley, and Chicago had bestowed more than 100 PhDs each on sitting faculty in anthropology departments as of 1969 (AAA 1969: 182). On a second tier of influence, in terms of degrees held by extant faculty, were, in no particular order, Yale, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Cornell, California at Los Angeles, Arizona, and Wisconsin (AAA 1969: 182). Although the number of institutions granting PhDs in the US did not increase significantly in the next ten years, the number of PhDs granted rose by more than 200%, from 142 to 406 between 1967 and 1978 (Table 1). The number of 400 doctorates per year was first reached in 1974 (Darnell 2002, 16) and from about that time onward, the number of PhDs produced yearly has not risen or fallen significantly, and the differential apportionment of the subject fields does not seem to have changed much, either (Tables 2, 3).
Table 2. Anthropology Ph.D. Dissertations in the United States by Field, 1977-78a
Social/culturalb: 251 (62%)
Archaeology : 72 (18%)
Physical anthropology: 45 (11%)
Linguistics 19 ( 5%)
Otherb 17 ( 4%)
TOTAL 404 (100%)c
a. Source: AAA 1978.
b. This category includes subject areas self-described as social, cultural, ethnology, urban, economic, and ecology, among others.
c. This category includes areas self-described as medical anthropology, applied anthropology, physical/cultural or cultural/physical anthropology, folklore, and history of science (in the one case a biography of anthropologist Ruth Benedict at the University of Minnesota).
c. The total is less than the total number of PhDs granted as given in Table 1 because not all departments actually report the names and titles of completed dissertations at the same time, in some cases only supplying the numbers of graduates, not their names and titles of their dissertations.
In 1977-78, proportionally more PhDs were awarded in sociocultural anthropology than in 2007-08 (62% to 45%), yet in both periods, the ranking in terms of number of degrees granted per field was the same: 1) sociocultural anthropology, 2) archaeology, 3) physical anthropology, and 4) linguistics (Tables 2, 3) [also see Darnell 2002:16). Perhaps what has changed the most since 1977-78 is the category ‘other,’ in which there is a larger number of nontraditional, interdisciplinary topics that can be pursued. In fact, the largest area within the category of "other" would be practicing or applied anthropology dissertations, accounting in 1995 for about 7% of the total and representing a "growth industry" in anthropology at large (Darnell 2002: 16).
It is clear, of course, that the undergraduate curriculum in anthropology came to dominate in course offerings after World War II. In part this was due to the G.I. Bill and the expansion of university departments to accommodate teaching more students; it is logically also due to the popularity of the field of anthropology.
Table 3. Anthropology Ph.D. Dissertations in the United States by Field, 2007-08a
Social/cultural: 209 (45%)
Archaeology : 119 (25%)
Physical anthropology: 64 (14%)
Linguistics 9 ( 2%)
Otherb 68 (14%)
TOTAL 469 (100%)c
a. Source: AAA 2007
b. This category includes areas self-described as medical anthropology, applied anthropology, anthropology of digital technology, anthropology of material culture, and other subjects outside the traditional four fields per se.
c. The total is less than the total number of PhDs granted as given in Table 1 because not all departments actually report the names and titles of completed dissertations at the same time, in some cases only supplying the numbers of graduates, not their names and titles of their dissertations.
Although there are only about 94 PhD-granting departments, at 537 there were more than five times that number of total departments or programs of instruction with a major or concentration in anthropology in the US in 2007 (AAA 2007). Altogether, these programs have about 3200 faculty with the doctorate. It seems that many if not most of the departments with a major in anthropology also have classes in the four fields of anthropology and many require student majors to take a distribution requirement course in each of the four fields.
Anthropology enjoyed a sustained period of seemingly unstoppable growth after World War II and into the economic recession of the 1970s, which was itself a period of "intellectual foment and job crisis" (Darnell 2002: 15), in part because of the G.I. Bill and in part because of the breadth and depth of the subject matter. The growth rate of the field appears to have stabilized after about that time, but the production of knowledge has nevertheless kept apace in all four fields. It is often said that there was only one true general anthropologist (Boas), or at most, two (Boas and Kroeber). Indeed, of the 70 presidents of the American Anthropological Association up to 1988, perhaps only Kroeber truly commanded as many as three of the four fields (Stocking 1988: 19-20). It has long been recognized that individual PhDs had to specialize in one of the four fields (Goldschmidt 1970: 3). At a certain point, the production in the different fields became so great that they veered apart. In addition, debate over what was scientific (with most physical anthropologists adhering to the nature of their data to evolution as the principal paradigm) and what was humanities (many cultural anthropologists no longer considered ethnographic inquiry to be a scientific undertaking per se) [e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986] proved to be divisive in a few venues.
On the eve of postmodernism in the mid 1980s, perhaps the greatest disenchantment with the four-field model was that it was merely institutional and historical, and that it was not based on any compelling, contemporary theory: "Few today can seriously claim that these fields share a unified approach or object, though the dream persists . . ." (Clifford 1986: 4). In other words, even if evolution is the "elephant in the room," as William Durham (2007) recently put it, there does not seem to be a unifying theory or dataset in general anthropology: there is no paradigm. The 1960s as a period of thought in anthropology saw the development of research programs of symbolic anthropology, cultural ecology and cultural materialism, and structuralism, some of which by the 1970s had morphed into variations on Marxism (Ortner 1984; cited in Darnell 2002: 18). These paradigms, however, disappeared with the attack on positivism and the Enlightenment that came from the new movement in postmodernism, or "interepretivist trend" (Darnell 2002: 33-34), which essentially focused on the "observer effect" (Darnell 2002: 34) and problems regarding the validity of the results of ethnographic research (Clifford and Marcus 1986). The debate seemed to be between those who thought anthropology was a science and those who believed it belonged in the humanities.
Clearly a few departments had split across these lines. Duke University divided into a Department of Cultural Anthropology and Department of Biological Anthropology in 1988 (Shenk 2006). The biological wing of the anthropology department at Harvard was recently seeking separate status under a new Life Sciences division at that university, because its faculty considers their work closer to ecology, evolution, and organismal biology than the work of their colleagues in the other three fields (Shenk 2006). The crucial debate over whether anthropology was science vs. humanities was intimately related to the actual division of the Stanford University anthropology department in 1998 into a Department of Anthropology that was basically cultural anthropology and a Department of Anthropological Sciences, which was essentially a four-field department; a university dean took an executive decision and required the two departments to become one anthropology department again in 2007 (Albach 2007). Those in the short-lived Department of Anthropology of 1998-2007 at Stanford were essentially against the concept of holism as deriving from the four-field model because they saw it as out of date and associated with the anthropological museum (and evolutionist) mentality of the 19th century (e.g., Yanagisako and Segal 2006, see Hinsley 1981: 83-84).
In the first decade of the 21st century, the four-field model of anthropology is at something of a crossroads in the United States. We know where it came from, in terms of its Enlightenment origins, its development in the context of museums and learned societies, and its penetration of and expansion across the curriculum of the university system of American academia in the 20th century. What is unclear is where it is going. The critique as to continuity of a four-field approach in the academy is not simply that it represents a mere institutional artifact of 19th century evolutionism and museum pseudo-science, or that only Boas and Kroeber could have actually mastered its early 20th century American manifestation, but rather that individual research itself has tended not to incorporate data or insights drawing upon the four fields, or even two or three of them (Borofsky 2002; see critique by Calcagno 2003)9. Boas himself thought the four fields would end up as separate disciplines due to the increase of knowledge and specialization and both he and linguist Dell Hymes (1972) considered the joint existence of the four fields to be something of an historical accident (Stocking 1988, 19, 23).
Literal counterexamples to that view exist, however, such as the famous discovery of the balanced polymorphism of sickle cell anemia by physical anthropologist Frank B. Livingston (1958). That study showed that an ancient cultural practice (agriculture) led to environmental conditions (swamps) favoring the breeding of mosquitoes that, as vectors of malaria, led to microevolutionary developments in human resistance by populations living in the affected zone in the form of heterozygote survivability (Livingstone 1958). In an analysis of the infrequent appearance of the grooved fricative /f/ as a phoneme in the world's languages, Charles Hockett argued that it was due to the limited distribution of the origins of cereal grain agriculture, the human processing of which selected for a microevolutionary change in bite from an edge bite to a scissors or over bite: here were arguments based on data from archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics (Goldschmidt 2006; Hockett 1985; Darnell 2002:13).
More general statements can be gathered in favor of holism that are not simply based on the four-field model, but which do not entirely reject it, either. One can argue that both postmodern and scientific views are present in all four fields, and so the epistemological debate should not be couched as one that pits the fields against each other per se (Darnell 2002: 34). (Perhaps in an effort to escape the present conundrum, Arizona State University has recently changed the name of its Department of Anthropology to "School of Human Evolution and Social Change" though the range of interests of its full-time faculty (at 55 it is a very large department) as well as the degrees it grants and the facilities and resources it holds all seem to fall within a four-field framework (AAA 2008). There are certainly positive reasons for the four fields to remain together because, to some extent, anthropological historian George Stocking Jr.'s words of two decades ago (1988: 24) are still relevant: above and beyond whatever moral or intellectual value holism might have, there are practical issues at stake, given that the four fields represent "a small profession before the larger world of scholarship, funding agencies and the general public." For the future of the discipline, one might say there could indeed be safety in numbers. The epistemological crisis, sometimes jocularly called "science wars," in general, does not seem to have spread far and deep enough into the profession to result in a major accumulation of institutional cleavages along subdisciplinary lines (Darnell 2002: 34). In summary, whether it will remain a permanent fixture in the American academy or not, the four-field model with modifications has clearly determined research and teaching agendas at many institutions, and it is unlikely to disappear or dissolve into fragments at any time soon.
I would like to thank Harvey M. Bricker for affording me access to certain unpublished and rare sources used in this article. And I acknowledge helpful comments from both him and Victoria R. Bricker on an earlier draft of this article.
Notes
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