Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology.
Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Levi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.
Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology.
Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Levi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Editorial Method
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
1. What Is History? An Anthropologist’s Eye View
2. Applied Anthropology: Disciplinary Oxymoron?
3. The Anthropological Concept of Culture at the End of the Boasian
Century
4. Calibrating Discourses across Cultures in Search of Common
Ground
5. “Keeping the Faith”: A Legacy of Native American Ethnography,
Ethnohistory, and Psychology
6. Anthropological Approaches to Human Nature, Cultural Relativism,
and Ethnocentrism
7. Text, Symbol, and Tradition in Northwest Coast Ethnology from
Franz Boas to Claude Lévi-Strauss
8. Mind, Body, and the Native Point of View: Boasian Theory at the
Centennial of The Mind of Primitive Man
9. Franz Boas as Theorist: A Mentalist Paradigm for the Study of
Mind, Body, Environment, and Culture
10. The Powell Classification of American Indian Languages
11. The Revision of the Powell Classification
12. Désveaux, Two Traditions of Anthropology in Mirror: American
Geologisms and French Biologism
13. Rationalism, the (Sapir-)Whorf Hypothesis, and Assassination by
Anachronism
14. The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss
15. Obituary for Frederica de Laguna (1906–2004)
16. Obituary for Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927–2009)
17. Obituary for George W. Stocking Jr. (1928–2013)
18. Review of Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in
Self-Deconstruction, by George W. Stocking Jr.
19. Obituary for Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015)
Index
Regna Darnell is Distinguished University Professor Emerita
of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. She is the
coeditor of The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public
Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism (Nebraska, 2015), author
of The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline
in North America (Nebraska, 2021), and author or editor of many
other works. Darnell is the recipient of the lifetime achievement
award from the American Anthropological Association.
"The overall achievement of Darnell's authoritative reader is its
critical elucidation of the intercultural and interdisciplinary
potential of North American anthropology."—Ludwig
Deringer, University of Toronto Quarterly
“Assessing and reassessing the field with fifty years of experience
and skill allows Darnell to produce sage insights and demonstrate
her progressive thinking on critical anthropological themes, such
as the effects of social networks on theory.”—N. J. Parezo,
Choice
“Regna Darnell invites the reader to listen in on the intimate,
collaborative, and frequently contentious conversations that formed
the basis for North American anthropology. We are gifted with
a clearly written and revelatory unpacking of the connections,
alliances, and discordant moments of an anthropology practice
grounded in humanistic and scholarly precepts. This timely critical
history promises to reintroduce anthropology as a fundamentally
humanistic scholarly endeavor whose practitioners continue the long
tradition of scholarship in the service of social justice.”—Bernard
Perley, author of Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent
Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada
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