Regna Darnell is a leader in the study of the history of anthropology in America. In this book, The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in North America, Darnell draws together from diverse publications, spanning more than four decades, her crucial articles that focus on central historical figures in anthropology. Of the seventeen chapters, the earliest was published in 1970 (chapter 4) “The Emergence of Academic Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania” and the most recent in 2018 (chapter 6) “Franz Boas’s Legacy of ‘Useful Knowledge’: The APS Archives and the Future of Americanist Anthropology.” In these articles one finds the young Franz Boas dedicated to training his students, who also emerge in their complexity in the pages of this book–Edward Sapir, Alfred Lewis Kroeber, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. We also find the crucial institutionalization and professionalization of anthropology through the concerted development of professional journals (American Anthropologist, Journal of American Folklore, and American Ethnologist); and the early shifting centers of geographical concentration of suasion and control of anthropology from Washington and Philadelphia to New York at Columbia University, with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) gaining in importance. And we read of the development of the discipline of anthropology, through Boas’s work in folklore and physical anthropology, and the work of Boas and his students in linguistics.
In the introduction, Darnell provides a reflexive look into how she develops her ideas from conversation with colleagues, to teaching about the concept, to shaping the idea into a conference paper, to a book “when the pieces cohere into a more general integration” (xxii). She takes the reader through her distinguished career of many decades and her work with the leaders in developing the field of the history of anthropology—with George W. Stocking Jr., whom she refers to as “the founding guru of the HOA (history of anthropology)” (xxiv). Her teachers and mentors were the leaders in the field: A. Irving “Pete” Hallowell and Dell Hymes. She paints with an autobiographical brush, which gently brings the reader into her world: “My understanding of ‘history’ is deeply colored by fieldwork, beginning the year of my dissertation, among the Plains Cree of Northern Alberta, later enriched by work with other indigenous communities across Canada. They taught me to see history as a palimpsest of relationship that changes over time as generations succeed one another” (xxvi).
Beginning with chapter 1, “Edward Sapir, Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist,” Darnell elegantly introduces the reader to her work on Edward Sapir as she writes “with some combination of vertigo and nostalgia” (1). In a lovely, accessible way she writes about her biographical project: “A startling sense of rediscovering in Sapir an old friend evoked the ongoing relationship of myself and my career to the personhood and career of a scholar I have admired since I first met his work as an undergraduate” (1). Since this was written as the new introduction for the reissue of Darnell’s biography of Edward Sapir–first published in 1990 and reissued in 2010–the chapter is much less about Sapir and much more about how Darnell approaches writing about him over the years; it is also intriguing about biography as a genre.
With a similar biographical touch, Darnell takes the reader to the smoke-filled room at a UCB party in the 1960s when she was talking to Mary Haas without realizing who she was, to her great embarrassment (275). This biographical vignette helps set the context for her discussion of Haas’s work in linguistics at Yale. Darnell uses quotations from archival correspondence to convey the immediacy of this developing school of linguistics; and she weaves her personal recollections throughout.
Regna Darnell’s work is linked inextricably with the organization and professionalization of Americanist anthropology. In turn, the development of the discipline of anthropology is seamlessly stitched up with the scholars who worked to shape the discipline of anthropology. Darnell is gifted in blending the biographical with the history of the discipline. She draws out the complexity of it all, never yielding to the temptation to simplify, but rather to draw the complexity of the whole, always guided by the mind of Franz Boas, who worked with the compass of professionalism, cultural relativism, and grasping the “native’s point of view.” She undertakes the examination of “‘Boasian anthropology’ . . . as the clearly dominant paradigm of American anthropology” (327). Never far off are the waves of influence from Boas to his students, and to the students of his students. Witness of the opening passage of chapter 15: “Stanley Newman was one of the graduate students who followed Edward Sapir from Chicago to Yale in 1931 and became a key member of the research group that formed around him in New Haven” (289).
Regna Darnell has provided us with a key source for the documentation and analysis of the development of American anthropology. This is an important, nay, an excellent volume.
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[Review length: 819 words • Review posted on October 21, 2023]