I certainly won’t post it on wikipedia though.

Cheers.

I thought savageminds was a discussion board for anthropology. I also thought you were interested in one of the foundational thinkers of the discipline. I was trying to make (what I think is) useful information available to the learned folks of savageminds. I am not interested in posting this on wikipedia, because I find it sketchy. If you really think that a significant challenge to American anthropology should take place on wikipedia, then I am not surprised that you are confused.

At one point you, Alex, criticised me for not posting information on Steward when I claimed to have some knowledge about him. In approaching SM, I was simply trying to come true on my promise to post something when I could; however, I do not wish to post on wikipedia. I was simply trying to offer it here, because I thought you (vous) were interested at some level.

I simply wanted to give a kick-ass interpretation of Steward.

Here this is one of the factual errors on the wikipedia entry:

“In 1935 Steward began a long involvement with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was key in the reform of the organization known as the New Deal for the American Indian, a restructuring which involved Steward in a variety of policy and financial issues.”

When Steward first moved back to Washington and joined the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1935 he had a short stint (less than one year) working as a liaison between the BAE and the BIA. In this capacity he penned one report on Shoshone political organization and stated recommendations for the Shoshone for the implementation of Collier’s “New Deal” or the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Kerns (2003), Rusco (1999), and Blackhawk (1999) all give excellent accounts of this report.

As the quotation from Collier at the bottom will indicate, Steward had nothing to do with the IRA and in fact opposed it, he had a short-term relationship with the BIA that was confrontational, and he had a horrible relationship with the Shoshone.

Here are some quotations from the report:

“Unfortunately, it cannot be assumed that these Indians will be sufficiently solicitous of their constituents to act for the general welfare. As a matter of fact, they are usually so far removed from the native point of view and so bitterly opposed to the old generation that father is often set against son, and they are so strongly motivated by desire for personal gain that only the safeguards in the constitutions and strings held by the Federal government will protect their constituents. This may seem a strong statement. But it is important to insist that sincere devotion to the common good was completely foreign to Indian thinking, in which respect they do not differ greatly from white men. There are two reasons for this attitude in the Shoshoneans. First, their native culture made them even more individualistic than other Indians. As they possessed practically nothing which required cooperation in communal enterprises, going through the annual round of food seeking largely in family groups, their philosophy was every man for himself and family. Second, their association with white persons unfortunately has often made selfishness, even dishonesty a virtue” (Julian Steward 1936: 3-4).

“It is, therefore, futile to take measures to preserve anything native, for logic indicates that it cannot be done and observation shows that most traits have lost all functional importance. White patterns of thought and behavior are growing relentlessly and, though their progress is faltering and their acceptance fraught with grief, it is impossible to stem them. To attempt to do so with respect to social structure and basic values would be to attempt to crystalize [sic] what was natively vague and to bring into harmony with present conditions things that were lost precisely because they failed to harmonize. The non-reservation Shoshoni of Nevada seem to have made a much happier adjustment than most of their reservation kin. And I am prepared to state that the effect of segregation on a reservation would be to prolong individual maladjustment and augment the clash between conflicting types of persons.

Even if some native traits could be preserved, it is difficult to see what purpose they would serve. These people possessed virtually nothing which win them the admiration, sympathy or support of Whites. Anything distinctively Indian about them brands them as queer and “inferior” (rarely as picturesque) and enhances difficulties flowing from race prejudice. I have known the White people of this region too long and heard too much of the contempt they hold for “The squalid Indian” to have any doubt of this. The common desire of the younger generation is, moreover, to become White as soon as possible. I do not, of course, advocate enforced assimilation; nature will take its course. I do insist that segregation on reservations, where it is not necessary, would a great mistake” (Julian Steward 1936: 7).

“Assimilation to white culture is proceeding rapidly, hastened by their contact with whites on ranches where they usually live and in schools. They are confronted with race prejudice, but it is tempered by a certain kindliness which follows from the fact that the Shoshoni have attached themselves to various ranches where they are not economic competitors with the Whites.

Now, to the extent that the Shoshoni are assembled in large, land-owning groups, they will become competitors with Whites. This does not argue that it would destroy them, but there is no question that it will entail some change in the attitude of the White people towards them, sharpening race conflicts as in the south where the negroes did not become the object of attack and suppression until after the Civil War. (One also thinks of the effect of race prejudice added to economic competition in certain modern fascist nations.)” (Julian Steward 1936: 11)

The BIA’s response to the report is involved and interesting. In rejecting the report, writing to Alida Bowler, Superintendent of the Nevada Office of the BIA, Collier said

“I am tempted to excerpt other and lengthier dicta from Dr. Steward’s report, but the one which I have quoted indicates most of the reason why the report does not prepossess me as social philosophy or as factual reporting.

In determining Indian Service policies, and in attempting to evaluate human beings and to chart the future of human spirits, there are needed some endowments of enthusiasm, confidence in the human nature one is dealing with, and social philosophy.

… the shedding of light upon our complicated Indian problem needs something more [than what Steward’s report offers]. This is another case showing that achievements in a special science, anthropology or any other, provides no assurance of competency to deal with social problems” (Collier (1936), cited in Rusco 1999: 106).

The 1936 BIA-Shoshone report is important because it contains Steward’s specific statements and recommendations for Federal Indian policy. It shows that his political agenda and his scholarly work were intimately tied at the beginning of his career. Further, the report shows that his beliefs were claimed to be legitimated by his fieldwork in the area, fieldwork that contains a method that has been seriously discredited. That is, not only did he do no systematic research for the report, he explicitly denied the contribution of the women to the society, refused to talk to community leaders, and he also lied about who he was working for when he was in the Great Basin (Steward 1936: 10, Rusco 92-3). The ultimate absurdity of Steward’s claims of the acephalous nature of the Shoshone are highlighted by Crum (1999) when he notes that “in 1932, some three years before Steward’s ethnographic visit to the Great Basin, the Shoshone in northeastern Nevada formed a treaty council to press claims against the for unkept treaty promises” (121), treaties that they had signed 100 years earlier.

In fact there is – you can receive updates when the page is monitored and can revert the changes if you don\’t like them. Moreover, they are now discussing the creation of something equivalent to \”stable versions\” of software – changes can still take place, but only after everyone agrees on them does the new version become the public one. This is being done, I believe, on the German version of WIkipedia. However, this won\’t help if you don\’t actively participate. It is strange to me that you are willing to participate in this forum and not on Wikipedia. If credit and attention is what you crave, you can use your real name in Wikipedia.

Julian Steward (1902-1972) maintains a disciplinary stature in American anthropology similar to that of his contemporaries in the British school. In fact, internationally, Steward is recognised as one of the faces of American anthropology (Sponsell 2006). This is because of his ethnographic and archaeological work in the American Great Basin, work that resulted in the seminal ethnography, Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938); also because of his edited monumental six-volume collection, The Handbook of South American Indians (1946a, 1946b, 1948a, 1948b, 1949, 1950) and The People of Puerto Rico (1956); and, enhanced by of his edited three volume-collection on modernisation and development (Steward 1967a, b, c). Beyond his ethnographic purview, Steward was a prolific writer during his 44-year academic career, a characteristic demonstrated, for example, by his dozens of contributions to American Anthropologist and his text, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955).

Through his oeuvre, he developed and articulated one of the major sub-fields of anthropology, cultural ecology, a theoretical and methodological approach in which he supervised numerous prominent scholars’ PhD dissertations, sat on their graduate committees, and greatly influenced their careers (Kerns 2003, Silverman 2005). To this point, it has been reported that Steward supervised the completion of 35 doctoral dissertations in his six year tenure at Columbia University (Murphy 1981), with some of his most prominent students during this time being Eric Wolf, Elman Service, Morton Fried, Robert Murphy, Robert Manners, Stanley Diamond, Louis Faron, and Sidney Mintz (Manners 1973; Kerns 2003).

Steward’s theoretical project is presented most fully in Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955), a text that continues to be among the most influential in the discipline today. The book is the culmination of his proceeding articles, with 9 of its 12 chapters previously published, either explicitly or substantively. In fact, the text is the re-statement of his published work in reverse chronological order, with the addition of his most oft-reproduced essay, “The Concept and Method of Culture Ecology,” as Chapter 2. Republishing his essays in this manner gave Steward the chance to reformulate his work-to-date and re-cast his papers within his newly stated method, “multilinear evolution;” a concept that he explicitly states “constitutes the methodological position of the present collection of essays…” of the book (ibid: 4). This format also allowed Steward the opportunity to demonstrate how his theory and method were “elaborated” and “substantively applied” through his new operational concept, “the levels of sociocultural integration” (ibid: 5, 43-63, 101-121).

Steward’s work, as exemplified by Theory of Culture Change, has created a foundation for the discipline by purporting to offer a scientific method to the study of society in relation to environment (Haenn and Wilk 2006). This perception is represented uniformly across the discipline, and is demonstrated by accounts such as Ortner’s (1984), who recorded Steward’s influence in her period-piece, “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” stating that he

“emphasized that specific cultures evolve their specific forms in the process of adapting to specific environmental conditions, and that the apparent uniformity of evolutionary stages is actually a matter of similar adaptations to similar natural conditions in different parts of the world” (132).

Typically, Steward’s method is understood to offer an objective ethnographic portrayal of the American Great Basin. It is believed that his fieldwork led to strong, objective descriptions, and that extensive analysis, through his rigorous method of cultural ecology, generated “nomothetic” rules of culture change – a method that prompted Harris (1968), for example, to observe that

“… Steward’s ‘The Economic and Social Basis of Primitive Bands’ must be reckoned among the important achievements of modern anthropology. It constitutes the first coherent statement of how the interaction between culture and environment could be studied in causal terms without reverting to a simple geographic determinism or without lapsing into historical particularism…. Despite subsequent critical evaluations of certain aspects of Steward’s data, the strategy of Steward’s explanation continues to warrant approval” (Harris 1968: 666-7).

The cultural laws or rules of evolution that Steward devised are well recorded as foundational in the history of American anthropology because of their objective, scientific method for understanding social organisation. For example, though critical of his work, Thomas states that “Steward’s views have assumed almost monolithic proportions, particularly to general anthropologists working outside the Great Basin. This is understandable and at least in part due to Steward’s overall reputation as a cultural ecologist” (1983: 60). Notably, Trigger identifies Steward’s work as a “more empirical approach to the study of cultural evolution” (1989: 291); and Kerns, the recent award-winning biographer of Steward, describes it as having “…a propensity for the concrete,” noting that “[h]e used an impressive array of ethnographic and archaeological evidence to support a range of creative, generalizing conclusions about how, in his own words, ‘similar subsistence activities had produced similar social structures’” (2003: 3).

With similar sentiment, in reproducing Steward’s seminal essay “Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology” in High Points in Anthropology, Bohannan and Glazer (1988) introduce it with the assertion that his “is a methodology concerned with regularity in social change, the goal of which is to develop cultural laws empirically” (321), and they continue heralding that “Steward’s concepts of cultural adaptation are theoretically important in that they break the circular argument that only culture can explain culture, which in a sense remains true” (ibid.: 322). Not to be outdone, Moore (1997) effectively sums up Steward’s influence on the discipline when he states that “[t]oday Steward’s ideas are accepted as basic anthropological insight” (183), and he concludes that some of his concepts “are the anthropological equivalent of gospel” (ibid.: 188).

At a minimum, one of the foundational claims that has become canonised within the discipline is that Steward’s theoretical paradigm and the representations of Indigenous societies that flows from it are the result of objective, scientific analysis and, therefore, represent a value-free foundation for the study of society in general and of Indigenous societies in particular.

In contrast, I can provide an analysis of Steward’s testimony before the Indian Claims Commission as an expert witness and strategist for the US Department of Justice in the aid of colonialism. To demonstrate the connection of his work to colonial practices, I can discuss its relationship the Ute (Nos. 44 & 45) and Paiute (Nos. 87, 88, 17, 100) cases before the ICC. I base this analysis on my archival research of Steward’s papers and reports written during this time, an analysis that has been facilitated immeasurably by the recent biography of Steward (Kerns 2003). As well, I have performed a close-reading of his published oeuvre, with particular focus on the representation of Indigenous peoples in his theory, and the connection of these representations to the law. I have also attempted to consult all relevant contemporary and historical disciplinary commentary on Steward published in English.

It is not that there has been little written about Steward’s career. Indeed, there are numerous biographical accounts of him that serve to reinforce the general disciplinary lacuna regarding colonialism, anthropology, and North America. This misrecognition of Steward’s work for the US Department of Justice is codified, for example, in a recent 400 page biography of him, where only four scattered pages in the entire book address his work for the US Department of Justice in the ICC cases, though he performed this work for at least 7 years (Kerns 2003: 247, 259, 282-83). Moreover, the author specifically contends that his work for the Department of Justice was not to be considered political, but rather understood as “scientific,” explaining that it was Steward’s “commitment [to science], without regard to politics, helps explain his decision … to testify for the federal government in the Indian Claims Commission cases” (ibid: 247).

Kerns’ biography reinforces the generally accepted gap that has been created through authoritative sources on Steward’s life. These include the introductory essay in Steward’s festschrift, a biographical account that neglects to mention, or fails to understand, the importance of his association with the government (Shimkin 1964); and the recent entry on “Julian Steward” in the Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Sponsell 2006), where space is allotted to absolve Steward’s relationship to 19th century evolutionary theory, but none is devoted to an examination his work before the ICC. In fact, and tellingly, Sponsell alleges that “Steward focussed on traditional culture and ignored the colonial situation that oppressed indigenous societies, assuming the inevitability of their sociocultural assimilation or even extinction” (2006: 2129, emphasis mine). The topic of the ICC is also excluded in the biographies of Steward by his student, Robert Murphy (1977, 1981), neither of which mention the ICC or Steward’s work with the government. So too, is the topic overlooked in Steward’s extensive obituary, published in the American Anthropologist and written by another of his students, Robert Manners (1973). All of these omissions are significant. Firstly, because of the vast amount of time Steward spent in his relationship with the Department of Justice, employment that reasonably should be included in any biography. Secondly, because of the volumes of academic material that Steward published during while he was working for the Department of Justice that had a direct and sometimes verbatim relationship to his testimony in claims cases. Thirdly, and incredibly, because both Robert Murphy and Robert Manners, the authors of three of the biographies, worked for and appeared on behalf of the US government in ICC proceedings at Steward’s behest and under his direction.

I object to participating in wikipedia because anyone can change an entry and there is no mechanism in place to ensure that that a better entry endures and one that is incorrect gets pushed to the back. For me this was serious question when the original author of the entry admitted he had not read the new biography of Steward but felt emboldened to write an entry for him and further perpetuate this lacuna.

For me, I theorise Steward differently so I am hesitant to debate his place on that site, but I thought savageminds might be a legitimate place to discuss this alternative reading. Clearly the place to address what I allege is a complete gap in the discipline’s knowledge is not on the pages of wikipedia. I hope that is reasonable.

I am posting this little story here because I think it is important for the discipline. Some of the story will take place through the correspondence of me with Rex and the fight we’ve had over his Julian Steward entry on wikipedia.org. I am doing this because it provides the context for why: 1) I demanded that the entry be removed from wikipedia based on factual errors, as shown, primarily, by Virginia Kern’s new and award-winning biography (Kerns 2003); and 2) I am still upset at Rex.

In the original article (/2005/10/04/is-wikipedia-being-destroyed-by-its-own-success/) Rex posted these statements in reference to comments that I made on the discussion board of the Steward entry.

“..this sort of talk based either on ignorance or envy.”

“…this person complained about the content of this article as if it wasn’t in their power to change the contents of the wikipedia.”

“It is one thing to bitch and moan about the low quality of the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s articles…you can’t do anything about what’s in that book. But not the Wikipedia—if you don’t like what you read, you should edit the page yourself!”

I had came across the wikipedia entry when I did a google search of “Julian Steward” or something similar. For a long time the entry on Steward from wikipedia didn’t make the first page of hits, but it is certainly the most frequented “Julian Steward” site on the net now. At the time I first saw it, knowing that the entry was seriously flawed I asked for it be removed until a new one could be entered.

Sometime after I demanded that the entry be removed and had long-forgotten about my “bitching and moaning” to wikipedia, a friend passed along a link to savageminds and the article posted by Rex bemoaning the fact that many people haven’t bought into his project at wikipedia, and where he seems to represent me, anonymously however, as (at least what I understood) to be lazy or stupid. Rereading Rex’s original comments just now, coupled with his dismissal of me last night to address Steward’s entry in an academic discussion on the site, makes me feel insulted and slighted by savageminds. But that is personal stuff, and not that important (I think).

So, why I am really mad? Probably not for the reasons that Rex thinks… I am upset because Steward is so very important in the discipline and “we” have a complete gap in our knowledge of him, and that true “ignorance” gets side-stepped in certain approaches.

I offer a draft of an introduction to Julian Steward. It is condensed from two things I have just finished writing.

It is cool if you are not. It is your show afterall.

Cheers

I just wanted a chance to address the errors in the entry (as they still stand).

Poochiemoo claims that my article “present[s] us the alternative of accepting that the commentator to the Steward entry was stupid or lazy because he refused to correct the entry.” At best, this claim is an egregious misunderstanding of my post. At worst, it is a flat-out lie. The words ‘stupid’ and ‘lazy’ do not even appear in the article.

The Wikipedia entry has been corrected — by both myself and the anonymous commentor on my article. So there is no reason to address “relevancy of wikipedia as a source if wikipedia refuses to remove articles with factual errors” or to “offer a deconstruction of the present entry for Steward.”

So in fact I have no interest in writing an entry of the sort Poochiemoo suggests.

Finding myself to be rather theoretical too, and knowing full-well the depth of my intellect and the levels of my laziness, I promised that I would address the Steward entry on wikipdia when it was possible. I recognize that it has taken me some time to respond as I had promised. And now, moreover, I have changed my mind. I don’t want to post an entry on wikipedia, but I am interested in seeing if there is interest in discussing a few points, with some being more interesting and compelling than others, here on savageminds.

Points:

1) Offer a deconstruction of the present entry for Steward.
2) Offer an alternative entry for Steward.
3) Discuss some of the ramifications of the complete misunderstanding of Steward and his work within the discipline.
4) Offer commentary on the relevancy of wikipedia as a source if wikipedia refuses to remove articles with factual errors.

Would you be interested in such a post?