So after having it on my list for over a year, I finally managed a few months ago to polish off “Scenes From The High Desert“:http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&vid=ISBN0252027906&id=DcWGlVbHd8kC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=scenes+from+the+high+desert&prev=http://books.google.com/books%3Fq%3Dscenes%2Bfrom%2Bthe%2Bhigh%2Bdesert&sig=U2XQoRszmQvr8Md5elR77Q2qFCk, Virginia Kerns’s new(ish) biography of Julian Steward. The books has its strengths and weaknesses, but overall I highly reccomend it to anyone interested in Steward or anthropology in the 1930s. In particular, it is remarkably well researched. Steward’s life was actually much more complicated than most early work on him indicate — as one commentor on the “Wikipedia talk page for Steward”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Julian_Steward has noted. Kerns does a remarkable job of taking the incomplete picture of Steward painted of him in early obituaries and filling it out with a lot of archival and historical work, including interviews with Steward’s wives. The resulting portrait is remarkably detailed and also remarkarbly different from that presented by his earlier memorializers.

That said, Kerns’s biography has some substantial weaknesses. Kerns is clearly more than a little interested in Steward’s relationship with women and the difficulties that women anthropologists had to face in the timespan marked out by Steward’s career. Her writing on this is a valuable corrective to approaches which sees anthropology as a discrimination-free zone where women could escape prejudice and do good anthropology. The problem, however, is that this topic, while interesting, is often tangential to Steward’s career. Indeed, because the biography focuses mostly on the first half of his career, the period when he had the greatest ability to change affect the discipline and the women in it — either as students or colleagues — gets short shrift. Indeed, it’s clear at times that Kerns seems unsure about how to tie her account of womens’ careers back to Steward, and she even seems a bit apologetic about the slightly schizophrenic nature of the book. This is too bad — I personally think she should have stuck to her guns and just made this the focus of the book if it was what was really interesting to her. This is a case where being more forthcoming about the interests that motivate the author would have given the book focus and direction.

Kerns also steps gingerly around issues of (psycho)analyzing Steward’s personality — which is too bad because, again, I think the book would be stronger if she had grasped the nettle and just gone for it. Her hesitancy (which might have been editor-induced) to really provide a well-rounded presentation of Steward’s personality makes her subject come across as oddly two-dimensional compared to the more fleshed-out picutres we get in great biographies of academics such as Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein and Young-Breuhl’s portrait of Arendt. After pages and pages of reading about Steward’s insecurity, illness, and reliance on his wives it’s not at all clear how he got to be as famous as he did — indeed, it comes as a bit of a surprise two-thirds of the way through the book to find he’s become one of the most famous anthropologists in the country! More willingness to take the rehetorical and analytic risks that come with getting inside your subject’s head would have been richly rewarded.

In the book Kerns claims that there is a relationship between Steward’s writings on the patrilineal band and the central place that all-male spaces such as Deep Springs (an all-male college which he attended) had in his own personal affections. She contrasts this with his dismissal of the matrilineal band, which is connected with his experiences with his first wife, a truly remarkable woman to whom Steward played second fiddle throughout their short marriage. How exactly the relationships between these terms works is unclear, and Kerns is very carefuly not to draw a reductive relationship between Steward’s life and his work. Unfortunately a more detailed account of their relation is not forthcoming. But again, I think there is a certain failure of nerve here — Kerns clearly knows Steward inside out, and this matrilineal band bad/patrilineal band good take on him is sage, but superficial and overdrawn.

But despite these drawbacks Scence From The High Desert paints a compelling picture of anthroplogy during Steward’s coming of age and the role of women in his life that it rewards reading. Indeed, simply labelling anthropology in the 1930s as ‘depression anthropology’ rather than ‘interwar anthropolgoy’ immediately changes how one thinks about this period — or at least how I thought about it. And her detailed work really is outstanding. She doesn’t just unearth the complicated history of Steward’s parent’s marital troubles, she sites histories of the private club Steward’s father was a member of and social histories of female civil servants in Washington like her mother worked with. And her archival work often was clearly often fieldwork in the high desert that Steward himself moved through, ranging from the small towns on the eastern side of the Sierra and the small (but dusty) corners of Deep Spring’s library.

In fact Scenes From The High Desert reminds me a bit of some of Freud’s greatest case studies — although the reader may not be convinced by the author’s anaysis, the material itself is so scrupulously presented that one can read past them and draw one’s own conclusions about their subject (something that few ethnographies can claim). The picture of Steward that emerges is complex but also very tangible. While Kerns speaks of him as a transplanted easterner in the far west I’m not so sure. One gets the sense of a man not so much transplanted but uprooted — deeply unsure of himself and hungry for the approval of a peer group to which he is always, in some sense, a stranger. As the child of a broken marriage in an age when marriages simply were not broken Steward clearly saw adventures in the west — initially geographical and geological — as a way out of an east coast world that he felt alientated from.

And yet it is clear throughout the book that he went through a good deal of his life feeling he was only merely ‘passing’ as a westerner. At one point in the book, for instance, his Utah-born wife remarks that he was never able to loose his east coast accent. His own spiritual center at Deep Springs could also be viewed as a place where he never quite fit in. His close relationship with Kroeber — which I had no idea about before I read this book — shows signs not only of a mentor/parent relationship, but of Steward’s own insecurities about his status as an anthropologist who struggled financially and personally during the 1930s. His incredibly shoddy (in my opinion) fieldwork and constant illness in the field was something he was always defensive about and clearly prevented him from feeling he was a ‘real anthropologist’ in the great White Explorer mode. Even his return to the east coast, where he was taken aback by the agonistic New York comportment of his new graduate students at Columbia, threw him for a loop. His final home on the Illinois prarie was neither east nor west, a compromise that prevented him from finally returning to California. This is perhaps just as well because the mythologized frontier state of his childhood has disappeared under post-WWII development. In sum we get a glum man out of place whose programmatic work proved incredibly influential, but which he never really followed through on.

So in sum while Kerns’s book manages at time to be both too much and too little opinionated, her detailed portrayal of Steward and his age ultimately lets one draw one’s own conclusions. This enough would make it worth reading, but what is truly remarkable about the book is that it serves to correct a previous view of Steward that was remarkably unbalanced. Having attempted to synthesize the material about Steward myself without having read this book I can testify that it is in fact a valuable corrective (indeed — I stand corrected!) whose careful research and obvious dedication to the topic have resulted in a work which instantly and obviously stands as authoritative in its field.

In 2004 I suffered the strange fate of being universally misrecognized at the AAAs as Matti Bunzl. While I always knew that Matti was very successful professionally, I had no idea just how successfully as numerous people came up to me to offer their congratulations to me on this and that publication, my tenure, my directorship of a new institute, and so forth. In fact it ws not until I demurred and told someone that I had no idea what they were talking about that I was finally told who I looked like by one drunk grad student, who insisted that I was Matti Bunzl but that I was pretending not to be because I was mean and didn’t want to talk to them. The result was a very interesting conversation in which I tried to prove that I wasn’t somebody.

Although Matti’s interests are wide-ranging, I’ve always been particularly fond of essay “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture.” In History of Anthropology, which absolutely nailed down connections and genealogies that we all knew a little about and really nail them down. More recently the “issue of American Anthropologist”:http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/aa/2004/106/3 he helped put together seems to me to be the definitive statement of a younger generation’s reaction against the excesses of postmodernism — a movement I might gloss “unnew anthropology” (to steal a term from James Boon) and in which I consider myself a member.

As a result I particularly appreciated his recent article in Anthropology and Humanism entitled “Anthropology Beyond Crisis: Toward an Intellectual History of the Extended Present”:http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/aa/2004/106/3. Not only is it a piece on the history of anthropology after 1942 (/me glances at oneman) but it is a very nice potted history of some of relationships between the earlier ‘crisis of anthropology’ of Hymes, Berreman, and (I was particularly glad to see Matti pick this up) Bob Scholte and the ‘writing culture’ stuff of the late 1980s. Like Regna Darnell (in her chapter on Writing Culture in Invisible Genealogies)

Matti is concerned here to demonstrate how the ‘writing culture’ crowd exhibit continuities with earlier anthropological work such as Hymes et. al. (Darnell goes further, seeming at times to simply consider them Radin warmed over). I find his argument persuasive, and agree with him that understanding the relation of these two movements is a valuable building block in “anthropology’s post-postmodernism redisciplinization.” And frankly, at a mere nine pages long, it is also a great quick read for people trying to get upto speed on the history of anthropological theory.

While I heartily reccomend Matti’s essay, I do have one question: if Darnell gives us a ‘usable past’ by reconstruing the Boasians, and if Matti traces continuities from the 1960s forward, then when were the Bad Old Days? This is not a rhetorical question. To oversimplify the history of American anthropology way too much, I wonder what it was about anthropology in the 40s and 50s that people were so upset about? I am thinking here of Linton and Redfield in particular, but perhaps a few others as well. Was there some sort of post-Boas red-blooded technocratic Science Of Man In The World Crisis-ism that we can locate as canonical?