Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives
re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost
figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American
anthropology: Edward Sapir, ...Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While
they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas's
early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far
less known is their shared interest in probing the representational
potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension
of their work is manifest in Sapir's critical writing on music and
literature and Mead's groundbreaking work with photography and
film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one
thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and
rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel
presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished
poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely
unexplored body of work and relevant selections of the writers'
scholarship. In addition to its expansion of early
twentieth-century literary canons, Writing Anthropologists,
Sounding Primitives contributes to current debates about the
relations between different media, sign systems, and modes of sense
perception in literature and other media. Reichel offers a unique
contribution to the history of anthropology by synthesizing and
applying insights from the history of writing, sound studies, and
intermediality studies to poetry and scholarship produced by noted
early twentieth-century U.S.-American cultural anthropologists.
Franz Boas Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy
2019, 2019-11-01
eBook
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tells the remarkable story of Franz Boas, one of the leading scholars and public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first book in a ...two-part biography, Franz Boas begins with the anthropologist’s birth in Minden, Germany, in 1858 and ends with his resignation from the American Museum of Natural History in 1906, while also examining his role in training professional anthropologists from his berth at Columbia University in New York City. Zumwalt follows the stepping-stones that led Boas to his vision of anthropology as a four-field discipline, a journey demonstrating especially his tenacity to succeed, the passions that animated his life, and the toll that the professional struggle took on him. Zumwalt guides the reader through Boas’s childhood and university education, describes his joy at finding the great love of his life, Marie Krackowizer, traces his 1883 trip to Baffin Land, and recounts his efforts to find employment in the United States. A central interest in the book is Boas’s widely influential publications on cultural relativism and issues of race, particularly his book The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), which reshaped anthropology, the social sciences, and public debates about the problem of racism in American society. Franz Boas presents the remarkable life story of an American intellectual giant as told in his own words through his unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes. Zumwalt weaves together the strands of the personal and the professional to reveal Boas’s love for his family and for the discipline of anthropology as he shaped it.  
This book breaks new ground in the history of anthropology, opening up an explicit examination of anthropology in the Cold War era. With historical distance, Cold War anthropology has begun to emerge ...as a distinct field within the discipline. This book brings a number of different approaches to bear on the questions raised by anthropology's Cold War history. The contributors show how anthropologists became both tools and victims of the Cold War state during the rise of the United States in the post-War period. Examining the intersection between science and power, this book is a compelling read for anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and anyone interested in the way in which colonial and neo-colonial knowledge is produced and constructed.
PDF
