Sex and Sensibility: Margaret Mead's Descriptive and Rhetorical Ethnography

Anthropologists and historians encounter similar problems of analysis when attempting to decipher situations of first contact between Europeans and Oceanians and the resulting long-term historical processes these contacts triggered. Considering intercultural contact situations in Oceania, I stress the need to integrate anthropology and history to analyze such situations effectively.     

On the Ambivalence of Orthodoxy in American Anthropology

The establishment of professional anthropology is contrasted with the flawed limits and freedom of early self-trained anthropologists working outside of the academy. The work of ethnographer and linguist Jaime de Angulo and photographer Edward S. Curtis are oppositional examples of early 20th century self-trained anthropologically informed field research. While Curtis's career illustrates how work outside of academic anthropological circles often failed to document Indian culture, de Angulo's work provides an example of a brilliant scholar producing innovative, high quality work that would have been difficult to produce under the strictures of early 20th century academic life.     

Linguistic Ideologies,Text Regulation,and the Question of Post-Structuralism

Three works are reviewed that make significant contributions to anthropological linguistics. Two address theoretical and ethnographic concerns regarding linguistic ideologies and the dilemmas they pose for speech practices such as text regulation. Such practices are harnessed to cultural projects such as language modernization and nationalism. The third, a post-structuralist reading of language-and-culture studies concerned with orality and literacy, brings post-structuralist theory into conversation with ethnographers of communication and other students of language. This article argues that such an intervention is welcome and long overdue, though it questions what form this intervention should take.     

Reconstructing Prehistoric Population Movements: Seeking Congruence in Genetics,Linguistics, and Archaeology

Books discussed here focus upon the initial peopling of the Americas and the worldwide development of food production. They examine postulated historical instances in which genes, languages, and cultural elements appear to correlate, indicating major population movements in prehistory. Recognized experts in historical linguistics, archaeology, and molecular genetics review current methodology, available data, and models of global and regional population history. A more holistic approach and a greater understanding of human population dynamics are called for to improve our reconstruction of these past events.     

Collaborative Methods: A Comparison of Subfield Styles

Collaborative research partnerships between academic anthropologists and host or descendant communities are becoming more popular in anthropology. The reviewed books demonstrate there are different understandings of what collaboration means for professional identities and expertise across subfields. Therefore, such partnerships are unlikely to promote cross-subfield integration. Nevertheless, while their collaborative styles diverge, the reviewed authors are motivated by a shared interpretation of disciplinary responsibilities and opportunities that emerges from anthropology's longstanding commitment to fieldwork and also reflects post-World War II historical transformations. Their shared interpretation raises challenging questions for the discipline at large about professional practices like evaluation.     

Two Cultures: French and American Social Science in the Twentieth Century

The development of anthropology in France and North America during the early to mid 20th century showed both similarities and pronounced differences. In both cases anthropology matured alongside sociology, a relationship that would prove increasingly problematic as the century wore on. In France, in particular, another important influence was art and literature, especially the Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s. This was less the case in North America, but in both countries, anthropology occupied a medial position between science and the humanities.     

The State of the Study of the State in Anthropology

Much has been published theorizing the origins of states, but ethnography has lagged behind in developing the conceptual tools to theorize the state, generally preferring to study the margins of states or “stateless” societies, even though they were enmeshed in or colonized by states. In recent decades states seem to have been bypassed by an interest in global and transnational phenomena that presumes states as political organizations to be increasingly irrelevant. This review examines three texts that cut across archaeological and socio-cultural anthropology to analyze contemporary research on states and propose new directions in the study of states.     

Angels,Illusions, Hydras,and Chimeras: Violence and Humanity

Gibson, Kathleen R. and Tim Ingold, eds. Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 483 pp. including index. $69.95 cloth.

Wallman, Joel. Aping Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xii + 191 pp. including notes, references, and indices. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.     

Sleep,Dreaming, and the Imagination: Psychosocial Adaptations to an Ever-Changing World

Combining psychological and anthropological work indicates that sleep, dreaming, and the imagination are involved in regulating mood and updating individual and collective knowledge. Psychologists often implicitly assume that all dreamers share their naturalistic model of dreaming while ethnographers often emphasize the spiritual explanations of dreaming inherent in the worldviews of their hosts. Applying cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion to the ethnography of dreaming and the imagination suggests that these capacities have adaptive value for learning, emotional adjustment, and the flow, revivification, and recalibration of knowledge traditions. A general anthropological approach to sleep, dreaming, and the imagination can surmount oversights that result from disciplinary and subfield foci and emphases.     

“Ill‐natured comparisons”: Racism and relativism in European representations of ni‐Vanuata from Cook's second voyage

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries