My intellectual training in anthropology was veddy veddy British — I managed to get a BA in anthropology without reading anything by Boas (much less Benedict!) but I did read all of The Andaman Islanders (excepting the ‘technical appendix’). As a graduate student, I studied at a department notorious for bucking the Boasian tradition and I worked with someone who was a protege of Leslie White. So perhaps you can just write off my enthusiasm for the Boasians as the zeal of a lately-converted convert.

That said, I do think the ‘retroboasian’ (neoboasian?) turn exemplified by the AAA special issue on “A New Boasian Anthropology: Theory For the 21st Century”:http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/aa/2004/106/3 and Regna Darnell’s book “Invisible Genealogies”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0803266294&id=lwqYG0VJC7UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=invisible+genealogies is extremely fruitful and right-headed. So it was with great interest that I noticed recently that Michel Verdon has set himself up as The Great Antiretroboasian. His work (as far as I know) consists of two articles, “The World Upside Down: Boas, History, Evolutionism, and Science”:http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=np47u6t84n362n51 and “Boas and Holism: A Textual Analysis”:http://pos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/3/276. Has anyone read these pieces? I know that some retroboasians frequent SM and I’d be interested in seeing what they have to say. My own impression of Verdon’s work is that it’s quite gallic in its opposition to this recent work. But it also, given the very quick reading of it that I’ve done, seems to be operating with a different jargon than that used by retroboasians, and one that seems cryptic to me.

Opinions, anyone?