For many years, the standard theory textbook in anthropology was Lowie’s 1938 History of Ethnological Theory. It covered everyone — Boas, Durkheim, everyone. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the apostle of structure-functionalism, was one of the people he described. They had corresponded cordially in the past, but Lowie’s description of ‘R-B’ triggered the pretentious brit, and we wrote an eight page letter detailing  R-B’s charges against Lowie. The first sentence was: “The students of my seminar have asked me to explain how it is that you give such a distorted account of my views in your new book.” It’s all downhill after that — albeit in a very nitpicky, kinship-theory heavy way.

Lowie’s equally long response is a model of collegial, principled, methodical ruthlessness. You can read both letters on the History of Anthropology website. Radcliffe-Brown clearly wanted to have a Penis Size Contest in which each scholar carved our their own academic empire and then denounced each other as tyrants. You know, the way professors always do.

Lowie took the high road (sorta) by beginning his response insisting he didn’t hate R-B:

“Your letter of May 6th requires an extended reply, for it voices some regrettable misunderstandings. However, I must thank you for your candor, which I shall try to requite in kind. I hope you will disabuse “some persons” of the grotesque notion that my remarks are due to “personal spite or personal dislike.” Nothing in our past relations warrants this odd assumption. I have always recognized your work on social organization, and your appreciative note about my Crow book was all that I could wish. At least once I made efforts to lure you to our Summer School; and your willingness to take [W.Lloyd] Warner under your wing on my recommendation suggests some sense of common aims at the time. In short, I have no personal grievance whatsoever.

I have no disciples and want none. I am not a “leader” and I do not want my students to be led by the nose.

The letter ends with a series of humblebrags denigrating R-B’s egotism:

You have a gospel to proclaim; I make it clear to any students who seek inexpensive solutions for the riddles of the cultural universe that I do not hawk in such commodities. I do not conceive scientific work as an adolescent’s game for individual aggrandizement, but a cooperative effort that gives scope to many diverse talents and temperments. Neither in my book nor in this letter am I at all concerned about “scoring” against you: I am interested in separating dross from gold for a common exchequer. Having reread the pages devoted to you in my book, I suggest submitting them to some friendly layman remoted from the scene of anthropological feuds. Such a reader will not gather that you have “made an enemy” of me. Malice does not refer to its victim as doing some “exemplary” or “brilliant” work. The friendly layman will probably infer that you crave the servile adulation of henchmen, not the disciminating appreciation of peers, which to me is the only desirable form of recognition from fellow-workers.

The ironic thing about this letter is how the two of them have withstood the test of time. Radcliffe-Brown’s concisely, clearly written manifestos for structure-functionalism as still regularly assigned today, while Lowie’s longer works — in which he actually did what he said he would do — are pretty much forgotten. In my opinion, Lowie comes out on top in this correspondence, but in the long run his unwillingness to proclaim is gospel worked against him. On the other hand, Lowie trained a generation of students who went on to be instrumental in this discipline’s history, while R-B never had the influence that Malinowski did, institutionally speaking, in the UK. So perhaps although R-B is taught and remembered, Lowie’s legacy lives on, tacitly, in the discipline even as his work is less read.

As histories of antifascist action document, antifa is a fundamentally illiberal political movement which seeks to oppose fascism by any means necessary — including violence. For this reason, I can’t stress enough that I am opposed to antifa in the United States at the moment because I am opposed to violence, which is both against my values and tactically and strategically against our interests at this point in time given the mood of the country. But in different times and different places the threat of fascism was so dire that violent resistance was necessary. And in those moments, anthropologists acted bravely and with honor.

A good example of one such moment was the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, which pitted Republicans (i.e. pro-democracy) against the dictator Franco. The conflict had its own internal politics, but many in the world saw it as a test of the power of democracy to withstand the power of fascism, which was spreading rapidly over Europe. Thousands of  Americans volunteered to ship over to Spain and formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight in the conflict — which the fascists eventually won. Two of the volunteers were Elman Service and John V. Murra.

Service grew up in the depression. He didn’t graduate from high school because his school closed for lack of funds during his senior year. After working part time to earn money he entered university, but dropped out to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He fought and was wounded in battle, and then shipped back to the United States, where he continued to raise money for the Spanish Civil War. Then, after World War II broke out, he entered the military and returned to Europe to fight the Nazi threat. His country repaid his service with the G.I. Bill, which allowed him to get his Ph.D., and FBI surveillance to make sure he was not a communist. Apparently one reason he was never persecuted by our national security apparatus was because all of the guys in his unit told the FBI that he had their back.

Service is remembered today for his work on social evolution, and not remembered enough for classic articles like “Models for the Methodology of Mouthtalk”, which railed against the mindless use of jargon in anthropology. Service’s dislike of simple jargon and simplistic forms of explanation had deep roots in a depression-era childhood where inequality was not an abstract concept, and time on the battlefield where materialism was more than a theory. After a long and distinguished career he died at the age of 81.

John Murra’s life story is even more remarkable. A Jew from Eastern Europe, he was born Isaac Lipschitz, came to America to escape persecution, and attended college at the University of Chicago, where he studied anthropology under Robert Redfield. He finished his BA and then joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “I did not graduate from the University of Chicago,” he later said, “I graduated from the Spanish Civil War.” He helped smuggle volunteers into Spain, and when the war was lost he was interned in a refugee camp. He returned to the US and volunteered three times to fight in WWII, but was denied because of the wounds suffered in his head and chest during the Spanish campaign. Instead, he worked with Ruth Benedict and John Dollard interviewing Spanish Civil War veterans, eventually producing the book Fear in Battle, a classic piece of WWII-era applied anthropology.

At the end of the war Murra was denied US citizenship, and had to sue the government in order to get it.  This was just one of the many indignities he faced as a radical living through the McCarthy period. I think his life experiences scarred him. He was a lifelong insomniac, and kept a foam mattress behind his office door so he could sleep on it when he needed. The acknowledgments section of his dissertation thanked his psychoanalysts, without whom “the writing of this dissertation could not have been completed”. His past as a communist haunted him and made getting grants, citizenship, and a visa very difficult. But despite these obstacles he became a world expert on the Andes and a professor at Cornell. He turned his passport difficulties into an advantage, writing a historical thesis and becoming a key player in the discipline of ethnohistory. He died in 2006 at the age of 90.

Murra and Service faced a fascist threat far more severe than what we face today. They lived through hardships that most anthropologists can only dream about. Today in the United States we must decide when the fascist threat is so great that we have no choice but to use violent resistance. I think we are very, very, very far away from that day. Very far away. Very. Far. Away. The turbulent years they lived through provides a valuable reality check about how serious the threat to our country is, even as their example demonstrates  what anthropologists have done when they saw a fight they could no longer ignore.

But what does it mean to be a great ethnographer? Geertz had a style — not everyone would call it great — which made you ‘feel you were there’. He went back to the field, even when he was professionally secure enough that he didn’t have to. That counts for something. His work is detailed… although cough perhaps future historians will wonder how much his collaborators/spouses played a role in Keeping Things Rigorous. Maybe above all, Geertz was a successful ethnographer because you could read his ethnography and say: I could do that.

I wouldn’t really say that Geertz was ‘imitatable’ because that implies that those influenced by him merely reproduced him. Maybe it’s better to say that he was ‘exemplary’: He offered a model of fieldwork that you could take up and make your own. His was the ethnographies that launched a thousand culturalist ethnographies. I think this ability to be exemplary is a major force in what makes anthropologists famous to other anthropologists. It’s not just your institutional position (although this helps) or the novelty or accuracy of your ideas (which, sadly, matter less than they should). It’s your ability to fill people’s imaginations with a vision of their future self that seems feasible and desirable to them. They say: “I want to write a study like that — and I can!”

Geertz was maybe a great ethnographer in these senses, but not perhaps as great as Hal Conklin. As Michael Dove notes in his superb obituary of Conklin — and since this is a piece on Geertz, after all, I do feel it would only be appropriate to include a long em-dash bracketed phrase to indicate that I, as a professional consumer of obituaries, do consider Dove’s to be absolutely exemplary — tells the story of Conklin visiting Geertz during Geertz’s fieldwork in Morocco:

Conklin’s masterful Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao was released in 1980, the same year as Negara. The difference between the two is that the Ethnographic Atlas is the result of almost two decades of research, and that you have heard of Negara. I think there is a continuum with fame on one end and specialization on the other. The more and more you can provide genuinely new information, or advance theoretical understanding, the less and less likely people will be t read your work since it is, by definition, highly specialized. The more accessible your work is to Anthropologists Everywhere, less likely it is to have something to say to people who are really stuck into the phenomenon you are studying.

Sometimes I think Geertz was a great ethnographer because he gave people permission to be lousy fieldworkers. He was a lot like Victor Turner in this respect. The both came of age at the same time. Geertz got his Ph.D. in 1956, one year before Victor Turner. Their Ph.D. fieldwork was probably grueling. Turner’s Schism and Continuity was a masterpiece. An incredibly detailed, hyper-specific masterpiece. I sometimes wonder if Geertz, Turner, and other more ‘interpretive’ or ‘symbolic’ anthropologists didn’t just look back on their Ph.D. research and think: Heck no, I’m never doing that again. And then told their students: “You know, just don’t bother. There’s no point. No one will read it anyway.”

Was Geertz a great ethnographer? Yes. Was he a great ethnographer? Probably not. Is that fact a bad thing? Does it matter that it changed how anthropologists evaluate ethnographies altogether? I think so. After World War II, anthropologists like Douglas Oliver and Max Gluckman (sponsors of the research of Geertz and Turner respectively) were part of a giant wave of people seeking to professionalize and scientize and rigorousize anthropology. They pretty much failed. It’s a blessing and a curse that anthropology has been living with, for better and worse, ever since.

The canonical author of the canonical book, naked black people, white guy in white clothes being White  — for a lot of people, it’s totally crazy-making. But in many ways, Malinowski was far more more complicated than we given him credit for. There are many people who deserve more criticism for their role in colonialism than Malinowski (just wait for my blog post on Julian Steward). This is not to absolve Malinowski of whatever sins he committed. Rather, it’s just to ask that we remember what he actually did rather than project sins onto him.

For instance,  it’s true that Malinowski did dress like this in the field. He was terrified of the heat and carefully followed ‘expert’ advice about how Whitemen should dress in the tropics. And yes, he was carried around on a chair in order to conduct a census although, as George Stocking sniffily notes, “in a stratified society like the Trobriands (where the chief sat upon a platform so that commoners ends not crawl on the ground in passing), “social parity”… is itself a rather problematic notion.”

The thing that most people don’t get about this picture is that at least 30% of it is cosplay. What surprises me about this image is that many people view it without any sense of irony — as if it had not been posed, as if Malinowski didn’t notice the difference between himself and ‘the natives’, as if Malinowski was unaware of what his lime spatula looked like.

The microsummary of Malinowski that I learned in graduate school was: “Good fieldwork methods, embarassing theory of functionalism”. The longer version added “Annette Weiner proved Malinowski was wrong because: gender” and “his diary proves he was a perv and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”

There is a lot of truth to this micro summary, including the critiques.  But it also seriously underestimates Malinowski as a person and as a thinker. He was far more complicated.

Consider the following quotes:

“The science which claims to understand culture and to have the clue to racial problems must not remain silent on the the drama of culture conflict and of racial clash”

or

“There is no doubt that the destiny of indigenous races has been tragic in the process of contact with European invastion… The historian of the future will have to register that Europeans in the past sometimes exterminated whole island peoples; that they expropriated most of the patrimony of savage races; that they introduced slavery in a specially cruel and pernicious form; and that even if they abolished it later, they treated the expatriated Negroes as outcasts and paraiahs… The anthropologist who is unable to perceive this, unable to register the tragic errors committed at times with the best intentions, at times under the stress of dire necessity, remains an antiquarian covered with academic dust and in fool’s paradise.”

Or

“The whole concept of European culture as a cornucopia from which things are freely given is misleading. It does not take a specialist in anthropology to see that the European “give” is always highly selective. We never give any native people under our control – and we never shall, for it would be sheer folly as long as we stand on the basis of our present Realpolitik – the following elements of culture:

1. The instruments of physical power: fire-arms, bombing planes, poison gas, and all that makes an effective defence or aggression possible
2. We do not give out instruments of political mastery [i.e. sovereignty or voting rights]
3. We do not share with them the substance of economic wealth and advantages…. Even when under indirect economic exploitation… we allow the native a share of the profits, the full control of the economic organization remains in the hands of Western enterprise.
4. We do not admit them as equals to Church, Assembly, school, or drawing room… Full political, social and even religious equality is nowhere granted”

To be sure, Malinowski was a reformer, not a radical. And he was interested largely in colonial power in Africa, and he was interested in it because the Rockefeller Foundation was interested in it. But Malinowski was also Polish, and knew what it mean to have one’s country invaded by foreign powers. During his time in the Trobriands, he was technically a detained enemy combatant.

We should also not underestimate just what a freak Malinowski was. Consider, for instance, this exchange between John Comaroff and Isaac Schapera:

Schapera: I was his [Malinowski’s] research assistant… Malinowski was working on a book that he never published on the psychology of kinship, and used to lie naked, except for a modest piece of cloth covering his genitals. I had to scrub him down with medicine. There was a pail in which were various medicines, and I had a brush. It was something to do with his supposed sickness. But that is how he did his work.

Comaroff: So the relationships was more intimate with him, shall we say, than that with Radcliffe-Brown.

Schapera: Indeed.

Or consider this letter to Radcliffe-Brown himself: