Tag Archives: History of Anthropology

Bruce Trigger

Just a brief note that the archaeologist Bruce Trigger passed away this weekend. He was sixty-nine years old. His, A History of Archaeological Thought was one of the best textbooks I ever read on any subject.

A few short notices on the blogsphere are all that I found (here and here), nothing yet in the papers. However, the recent publication of the festschrift The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger did offer an occasion for some comments on his legacy:

Indiana Jones’s adventures in archaeology had nothing on McGill Professor Bruce Trigger’s, whose achievements were celebrated recently with the launch by McGill-Queen’s University Press of The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger. Armed with his keen intellect and theoretical empiricism, Trigger, in a career spanning almost 50 years, didn’t need a bullwhip or the Raiders of the Lost Ark to make his mark on how archaeology is practiced around the world.

The book, edited by Ronald F. Williamson and Michael S. Bisson, contains articles written by an international Who’s Who of archaeologists outlining Trigger’s influence. It originated in a 2004 symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archaeology. “There were at least 600 people there. I’ve attended these events for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” recalled McGill anthropologist Michael Bisson. “It was so easy to get contributors.” His co-editor, Ronald Williamson, a former student of Trigger’s and now president of Archaeological Services Inc. in Toronto, said, “Just look at Bruce Trigger’s bibliography. No other scholar has one like it. He’s a role model for all of us. An unattainable one, but a role model nonetheless.”

In a field full of almost arcane specialists, Trigger was truly a Renaissance man. His work ranges from ancient Egypt to the aboriginal cultures in northeastern North America. His two-volume The Children of Aataentsic (1976) was a revolutionary study of the Huron. It was groundbreaking because it placed the Huron at the centre of a reconstruction of the past and depicted them as a living, breathing people who were not merely the sum of their pot shards, but active participants during a process of colonization. Trigger’s ability to contextualize early cultures within European interpretations both predicted and contributed to the current thinking about including minorities who are outside the power centres of Western thought. The culmination of this approach is evident in his 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought, which traces how the discipline evolved from the politics of power. It has become the definitive textbook for students of the distant past.

Trigger, who has been seriously ill, said at the book launch hosted by MQUP publisher Philip Cercone, “This last year has been one of the happiest of my life. First of all, I’ve been able to spend time with my wife and family, which is always very pleasant. In June, I was made Professor Emeritus and now this book, The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger, is evidence in print of my colleagues’ appreciation.”

The last chapter of the book, “Retrospection,” written by Trigger himself, is a very personal autobiographical essay about how his early childhood preoccupations led to his life’s work. He writes of his sense of wonder at seeing pictures of Ancient Egypt in a book his father shared with him. When asked what it was about the ancient world that fascinated him, he replied, “I guess it was the mystery. My career has been about resolving mystery.”

Remembering Clifford Geertz: Some links

For those who are interesting in learning more about Geertz or did not get a chance to meet him or see him speak in person, I’d like to recommend Alan Macfarlane’s “video interview”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/geertz.htm with Geertz. It is part of Macfarlane’s “Interviews With Ancestors”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/audiovisual.html websire, which I’ve mentioned in the past but which I’ll link to again since it is such an incredible and wonderful resource. Macfarlane has also made the “audio of Geertz’s 2004 lecture”:https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/263 available as well as “the full video taped interview”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/DO/filmshow/geertz1_fast.htm for people who would like to watch the whole thing.

There are also some other links that we have mentioned here on SM in the past that will help people who are interested in learning more about Geertz, including his memoir “A Life In Learning”:http://www.acls.org/op45geer.htm and the exhaustive “HyperGeertz Catalog”:http://www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/gg/Geertzstarteng.htm. Many of his essays appear on the web as well.

Clifford Geertz, RIP

(UPDATE: the official release is “here from the IAS website”:http://ias.edu/Newsroom/announcements/Uploads/view.php?cmd=view&id=354)
(UPDATE UPDATE: here are obituaries from the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/01/AR2006110103273.html and “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/obituaries/01geertz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

This from a grad student of mine — I’ve no independent confirmation yet but it seems unlikely to be a hoax. It seems like one of our best-known and best-loved scholars has passed. Here’s the email I was forwarded:

To the Institute Community,
I am very sorry to have to tell you of the sad news of the passing early this morning of Professor Emeritus Clifford Geertz.
Cliff was founding professor of the School of Social Science, who joined the Faculty in September 1970. He was the Harold F. Linder Professor from 1982 until 2000, when he obtained emeritus status. His work spanned the fields of cultural anthropology, religion and social theory, and his most recent research concerned the question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world. Among his many honors, in 2002 he received the Award of Meritorious Achievements from the Indonesian government and in 1992 was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize.
Prior to joining the Institute, Cliff was Professor of Social Anthropology and Chairman of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University from 1975-2000, Eastman Professor at Oxford University from 1978-1979, and in 1984 a Fellow of the International Interchange Program of the Japan Society.
Cliff will be greatly missed, and we extend our deep sympathy to his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, and to his children, Erika and Benjamin.
Peter Goddard

Theory in anthropology since “Theory In Anthropology Since The 60s”?

One of the big problems I encounter when providing potted histories of anthropological theory is to figure out what has gone on since the late 1980s. Sherry Ortner’s article Theory in Anthropology Since The 1960s is now ubiquitous on theory syllabi and has had a weirdly hegemonic effect on our imagination of anthropology’s landscape. The other thing the late 80s were good for were strong statements in the field of political economy (Europe and The People Without History) and of course the ‘Writing Culture’ moment which was easy to clearly clustered around Writing Culture, Interpretation of Culture, and Anthropology As Cultural Critique. But since then… what? I’d like to nominate a couple of contenders for the potted-theory shortlist.

First, for a more British and less potted collection there is always Blackwell’s new Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology  edited by Moore and Sanders which came out in 2005 and is more or less brand spanking new.

Second, there is Webb Keane’s article Self-interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy which is, as far as I can tell, available on-line free of charge (as are many of his other excellent papers) which reflects on the ‘Gupta and Ferguson’ moment of 1997 featured both Anthropological Locations and Culture Power Place as well as Abu-Lughod’s Writing Against Culture which has certainly become representative of a certain approach to anthropology.

Third, there is Sherry Ortner herself, who has attempted to update her famous article in the first chapter of her book Making Gender in 1997 and it looks like her upcoming volume Anthropology and Social Theory will do the same.

Finally, there is Robert Brightman’s 1995 article Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification which presents a sort of conservative counter-thrust to authors — Abu-Lughod chief among them — who want us to ‘forget culture.’

So there it is — from 2006 to 1995, some good places to continue the potted history of anthropological theory. What would you add to this list?

Geertz, biography, and… Geertz

It has been a long time since I enjoyed reading anything by Clifford Geertz, so I was gratified last night to discover “A Life In Learning”:http://www.acls.org/op45geer.htm, the biographical reminiscences that Geertz gave the American Council of Learned Socities for their 1999 Charles Homer Haskins lecture (I guess it also appears in Available Light as well). It’s not the first autobiographical piece by him that I’ve read, but it is relatively more front-loaded than some of the other ones and I was able to find some pleasure in his prose that I just can’t locate in Balinese Cockfight or Thick Description any more. His description of the energy of Harvard’s Social Relations Department when it first got rolling — “stand back, the science is starting!” — is, for instance, very charming indeed.

Like many academic celebrities (I think here of the differently-fated Althusser) Geertz portrays his rise to hegemony as a series of accidents perpetuated on an man who just happened to stumble onto his vocation. When some people pull this trick it seems like a lousy attempt to cover up their blatant careerism, for others this sort of thing just reaffirms your faith that their work is just smoke and mirrors, while for yet others is successfully reinforces their appearence of effortless domination of their field. In this essay I get the feeling that Geertz manages to do all three of these things at once.

But compare this to a very different biographical statement — Paul Rabinow’s “Steps Towards An Anthropological Laboratory”:http://www.anthropos-lab.net/publications/doc/Rabinow_Laboratory.pdf. It’s not that Rabinow’s spare, almost noir prose style — “just the -facts- biopower, ma’am” — doesn’t ramify out into clauses in the same way Geertz’s does, but it manages to do so in a compeltely different key. And most interestingly, Rabinow’s own take on Geertz is quite a bit different from that of Geertz himself.

Or is it? Rabinow is quite blunt in accusing Geertz of bowing out of the Interpretive Turn and retreating into feuilletonism, but I suspect Geertz would be surprised that anyone expected him to do otherwise. At any rate they’re two great — and greatly different — pieces to read and think about.

Ask our readers: Is knowledge cumulative?

Here’s a question I think about a lot: Is knowledge cumulative?

It strikes me as an important question for how we think about the work that we do. Are we simply making utterances in an ongoing dialog, utterances whose echo will quickly fade, or are we adding to a general storehouse of knowledge which benefits from every additional sand of grain? I think how we answer this question underlies some of the differences between activist anthropology and what we might call “pure research” anthropology.

An activist thinks about her research as an intervention in an ongoing debate. While doing good research is important, even more important is the way that research might impact the contemporary political climate.

The “pure research” anthropologist is willing to spend their time on an obscure topic nobody is much concerned with at the moment because they are contributing to the expansion of human knowledge.

Of course, the reality is more complex than either of these caricatures. Work which is considered progressive at the time might be appropriated by conservative causes, while academic fashions may mean that the contributions of esoteric research lies in obscurity for decades or centuries before once again coming to light (i.e. when Rex blogs about it on Savage Minds).

While the promise of Google Scholar seems to speak to the fantasy of cumulative knowledge, there are some mitigating factors that must be taken into account:
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Sociologist pants!

Perhaps I am the only person on the planet that fits this profile, but if you are a major Durkheim Trufan and you have a subscription to The New Republic, you can read Daniel Bell’s review of Fournier’s biography of Mauss. Although his contemporaries remarked on his incredible style and ‘long sociologist pants’ (I’m sure this sounds better in French) Bell paints Mauss as a perpetual under-achiever and Fournier has having a pretty narrow focus. I remember when this biography appeared in French and working through some of it and while I haven’t read any of the English translation, I do agree with Bell that this is not a ‘man and his times’ biography. But if you want all the geeky details about the Année Sociologique, this is the place to go — and now, best of all, it’s in English!

Retroboasians and Antiretroboasians

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?

Between Subjectivation and Subjection: Making ‘Kinship’ Feasible

I have been working through some ‘ancient’ anthropological topics with students, in particular, variations in kinship terminologies cross-culturally, an area of research founded principally by L. H. Morgan in his Systems of consanguinity and affinity in the human family (1871), and molded into an evolutionary ‘grand theory’ in his Ancient Society (1877). Starting out a course on kinship with Victorian anthropology is, I realize, a risky gambit. In a response paper, one student suggested that the view from the windows of 19th-century anthropology was ‘rather grey.’ What could be more arcane than revisiting Iroquois or Crow-Omaha kinship terminologies? Whether or not they are a boring topic, varieties of kinship terminologies are also not easy to wrap one’s head around. To the extent that they divide up a seemingly commonsensical world in an apparently non-commensensical way (for those of us reared in so-called ‘descriptive’ systems, the ‘classificatory’ can be jarring), they challenge our assumptions quite directly. Of course, recognition of this difference is what ignited anthropological interest in the subject and has sustained it through the years. But how to give these topics a contemporary twist?

We have also visited, among other things, Trautmann’s work, especially his recent article on “The Whole History of Kinship Terminology…” There, Trautmann criticizes contemporary models of transformations in kinship terminology, and in doing so suggests that comparative kinship studies might be one avenue into studying the very longue duree of human history. A broadly regional and deeply historical comparative framework may yield advances in ethnological history: “…the deep history that lies between, say, the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Victorian era, is not thickly populated by anthropologists, especially cultural anthropologists… For all the contemporary commitment of cultural anthropology to history, the deeper past is greatly neglected.” Trautmann suggests that attention to this sort of history would help correct biases built into certain functionalist or synchronic accounts.

So that is one call to give kinship studies a contemporary cast: give kinship a deeper history.

Even so, there are other languages or rhetorics that might make kinship terminologies a hot topic. (I leave aside, for the time being, the sexy and important topics of ‘biotech’ and ‘body’ in contemporary kinship studies.) If, for example, anthropologists of contemporary governments wished to sample of forms of interpellation that precede and exceed the normative force of state power (recalling here the policeman yelling at you on the street), they could do little better than to track the distributions of kin designations in everday practice and in legal discourse. This is precisely what the earlier SM discussion on adoption and ICWA points us toward: divided sovereignties (competing regulations of forms of life) along several axes — the indigenous and liberal, the minority and the majority, ‘kindred’ versus ‘citizens,’ to say nothing of men and women. Beyond the discourse of experts that is a focus of the current analytics of governmentality (whether neo/liberal, totalitarian, or whatever), anthropologists have rich and varied models for how populations are regulated in extra-state circumstances: precisely through the interpellation of subjects in self-perpetuating systems of signification we call kinship terminologies.

It is true that citizens of Melanesian states, for example, are ‘produced’ to some extent by the legacy of foreign rule in the form of the postcolonial state (such as it is in some places). Far more consequential, however, for how people conduct themselves in everyday life and for how they sustain themselves materially are the identities iterated and reiterated in daily, habitual, commonplace encounters with each other. In places like Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) eastern highlands, title to land, for example, is secured only in and through one’s affiliation with a clan that holds in a coprorate fashion the land. ‘Membership’ in a clan is manifest, is elicited, is ‘performed’ through the eventful (ceremonial exchange, committments in battle), but also, and more thoroughly, through the everday modes of address through which people interact (the relatively uneventful). Though I lived in a village, built a house there, ate food there, for my adoptive family, the most important thing I did was to call my kin by their proper terms (e.g., mama, papa, etc. or “ieno” and “ahono” in the local language). Doing so locked me into a structure of social relations that was both utterly constraining, inaugurating all kinds of obligations and protocols pertaining to moral conduct, and enabling. I could engage in action of a consequential sort only by being called into being by ‘reciprocal’ (I mean this in a nontechnical way) address. Kinship terminologies provide examples for two varied interpretations of the productive power of discourses: either the ‘subjection’ favored by Judith Butler and others or the ‘subjectivation’ favored by James Faubion and others. (See their brilliant work in Antigone’s Claim or The Ethics of Kinship.)

Perhaps its a stretch to tie these observations to a previous discussion, but I do wonder sometimes when anthropologists struggle to find languages for thinking about social regulation in the contemporary period (as for example ‘governmentality’) why ‘the market’ springs to mind quite readily while that old workhorse of anthropology — kinship — doesn’t (so often). There are, I imagine, either intricate and important reasons why not, or perhaps simpler ones.

Anthropometry: Alive and Kicking

One of the most remarkable documents we encountered during the past two weeks immersed in the British colonial archives was the 1988 All India Anthropometric Survey, North Zone : Basic Anthropometric Data. Why, in 1988, did the late K. S. Singh oversee the publication of an anthropometric survey, full of tables listing the skull sizes and other features of the various “peoples” of India? Anthropometry has a long history in India, especially with regards to the “Criminal Tribes” we were investigating; but why was India still producing such documents in 1988?

One answer is that this was simply the last gasp of a colonial legacy. The anthropometric data was collected in the 1960s. No new data was collected for this survey. In an article explaining the survey, Singh explains that the survey was set up during the last days of British rule:

The Anthropological Survey of India was set up in December 1945, barely 20 months before the transfer of power. The reason for this has to be sought in the intensive lobbying by administrator-anthropologists – including J.P. Mills, J.H. Hutton, W.V. Grigson, W.G. Archer with anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and C. von Furer-Haimendorf – over 15 years to create a special dispensation for the tribes under the Government of India Act of 1935 and through various suggestions and proposals including those for the creation of a Crown Colony in the North East and a protectorate for the tribals.

Their special interest in the tribes derived from a romantic tradition that presented the tribes in pleasant contrast to castes, the ‘unravished’ hills and plateau where they lived which reminded the colonial rulers of their homeland, and from their appreciation of the strategic location of the tribes and the enormous resources that their lands contained. However, these proposals were shot down by the home office which felt that the British regime would be much too impoverished after the Second World War to commit its meagre resources to such ventures.

But I’m not sure Singh can get off the hook so easily. In the last chapter of her excellent book Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia Clare Anderson points out several ways in which the survey relied upon unreliable colonial ethnography in its analysis. Indeed, Singh’s more recent Peoples of India from 1995 seems to rely almost entirely upon highly questionable colonial sources for its chapters on the various Denotified Tribes (former “Criminal Tribes”).

There is a significant literature on the tremendous confusion (and corresponding need to maintain the illusion of certitude) that pervades colonial ethnography in India. In later posts I will write more about this (as I begin to read through this literature myself), suffice to say that much of what we read in these documents seemed more akin to cheap detective fiction than to ethnography. One document would say that a particular group ate jackal and that their women tended to be faithful to their husbands, whereas another would say the opposite about the same group (even when seemingly relying on the former document). We never learn on what basis this information is gleaned. But more than simply inaccurate, I would not even consider a listing of ethnic “traits” as ethnography in the first place.

So why was the Indian government still giving credence to such materials as late as the 1990s? Is it simply colonial ethnography on auto-pilot, or might it be that such forms of knowledge production are still seen as a useful means of legitimating certain kinds of state interventions amongst indigenous populations, many of which remain “troublesome“?

In the Flesh in the Museum

Representations of Indians in American Natural History Museums

Preface: The recent posts on Ota Benga and the popular museum reminded me of an essay I had wanted to post last year when Kerim posted about the Bavarian village in display in Africa. I had prepared it for posting last year, but for some reason never did. The essay deals with the display of living people, and particularly native North and South Americans, in ethnographic/educational contexts — not the sideshow, but the museum and the culture fair.

“There are Indians in the Museum of Natural History,” writes Danielle LaVaque-Manty (2000: 71) “And there aren‘t any other kinds of people.” The particular Museum of Natural History LaVaque-Manty is speaking of is the Ruthven Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan, but she could easily be describing any number of natural history museums throughout the United States—the American Museum of Natural history in New York City, the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Phoebe Hearst Museum in Berkeley, the Field Museum in Chicago, and so on. Since their respective inceptions, mostly in the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the American natural history museum has played a privileged role in the presentation and representation of American Indians1 to an American public largely defined in ambiguous counterpoint to the savage mannequins held at bay behind the plate glass of the museum display. Whether cast as the noble Redman sadly disappearing before the onslaught of civilization or as the savage heathen to be forcibly converted or eliminated entirely, the removal or disappearance of American Indians was a necessary prerequisite to the occupation by white settlers of the American land. The museum became, oft times literally so, the last refuge of the “wild” Indian, at the same time that the possession of the Indian in the museum came to stand for exactly the possession of the land that made the “wild” Indian an anachronism, an echo of a time not before the settlers came, but of a time entirely removed from the history of America, a time when America was, indeed, an entirely different and new world.

This paper deals with the presentation of Indians in the American museum. Continue reading →

Boas and the Popular Museum

I discovered a neat, fairly new blog dedicated to museums today, S.J. Redman’s Museum Madness. Redman’s most recent post addresses an interesting and (for me, anyway) new aspect of Boas’ museum work, his populism.

Most of us are familiar with the relationship between Boas and museums — the ethnographic exhibits at the Columbian Expo in 1893, his early curating work at the Field Museum, his move to the American Museum of Natural History and his involvement with the Jessup Expedition to the Pacific Northwest and Arctic coast that stocked much of the AMNH’s collection. Along with his 1889 article On Alternating Sounds (AnthroSource link), Boas’ critique of exhibition schemas that reflected the prevalent evolutionary beliefs of the time were a crucial early step towards his later cultural relativism, as was his insistence on supplementing material artifacts (shields, pots, spearheads, matates, etc.) with folklore, songs, and other non-material “artificats” (recipes, instructions, game rules, etc.) in order to create a fuller understanding of a culture “from the native’s point of view” (rather than as a pitstop on the march towards us-ness).

Redman focuses here on Boas’ role as a museum professional, though — not as an anthropologist. Continue reading →

Berkeley anthropology emeritus lecture series

I’ve been thinking about the Manchester school lately. My mantra for the fall is: Have We Really Thought Enough About Max Gluckman? (I am not the only person who thinks the answer is “no”:http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=EvensManchester)

In the course of thinking about this I ran across Berkeley’s “anthropology emeritus lecture series”:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Anthro/index.html, which has a ton of of great stuff available about prominent anthropologists. The entry on “Elizabeth Colson”:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Anthro/colson/index.html is particularly good.

Ye good olde military ethnography

The New Republic posted a lovely little piece recently on “The Food of the Iraq War”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060710&s=diarist071006 which includes folk beliefs of soldiers like the fact that Country Captain Chicken can ‘make you gay’ and Charms candies bring disaster when consumed. So much for the Iron Cage of Rationality. At any rate it’s a great teaching piece to use in class and I like it because of the way it hearkens back to the anecdotal bits written by American anthropologists after WWII based on their experience serving in the military, such as Ralph Linton’s “Totemism and the A.E.F.”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28192404%2F06%292%3A26%3A2%3C296%3ATATAEF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H and George Homans’s “The Small Warship”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28194606%2911%3A3%3C294%3ATSW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A Sort of like “Baseball Magic”:http://www.dushkin.com/olc/genarticle.mhtml?article=27128 but with guns.

Of course today the ethnography of the military is an enormous field, ranging from “Homefront”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807055093/sr=8-1/qid=1152904409/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7676725-6471050?ie=UTF8 to “Mastering Soldiers”:http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=Ben-AriMastering, but Country Captain Chicken making you gay really took me back.

Alexander Goldenweiser on intellectual property

I am newly back from the blog, having been duly Merged and Acquired. I’ll post reading notes on our next slice of Tsing soon, but just thought I’d take a second here for a hobby of mine — tracking down the Boasians as they write about intellectual property. I’ve mentioned Robert Lowie’s take on this, and many of the early textbook writers included something about IP in the ‘property’ section of their book. The other day I checked out Goldenweiser’s 1937 volume Anthropology: An Introduction To Primitive Culture from my uni’s library (the first person to do so in over thirty years!) and found this little passage on page 149…

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