Anthropology Among the Sciences*

Abstract

COUNT myself fortunate to be able to speak in 1960, a t the beginning of a new administration and, hopefully, a t the beginning of a period when lthropology will be livelier, theoretically, and more useful to the country and to the world than has been the case in the last decade. The loss this year of Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn has brought acutely to my consciousness, and I believe to the consciousness of many anthropologists , the special need that we have for those who never let their active allegiance to their own discipline swallow them up and isolate them from the community of scientists and scholars. Anthropologists are better fitted than members of many other disciplines to contribute actively to the growth of ordered knowledge, but we are also subject to special forms of occupational temptations which isolate us. It seems appropriate in this year, in which we have lost the last of those who must always appear as giants because they embodied-by growing up within it-more of anthropology than those younger than they, for us to reconsider these special conditions which bind us in and sometimes isolate us from the wider intellectual community. In 1932 I sat on a hilltop in New Guinea, in a village which I did not leave for seven long months, reading a letter which described the possibility that a great foundation might give $2,000,000 as a grant for a five-year field project to investigate the surviving, unstudied primitive cultures of the world. Here, from one standpoint, was a dream coming true; Franz Boas and Radcliffe-Brown had each made plan after plan for institutes which would undertake to explore whole regions systematically, each field worker's research dovetailed into each other's. The central responsibility of anthropologists to rescue and record and publish the information on these vanishing cultures and peoples would be discharged. But, as I sat there, the tiny village hemmed in by the mists which would not rise for another hour so that only an occasional papaya leaf stood out against the walls of impenetrable white, I realized sharply and acutely that there were not enough of us. There were not enough trained anthropologists in the world to spend that money quickly, wisely, and well. Either we would have to send young, untrained students into the field with commissions enormously heavy for such young shoulders-as Radcliff e-Brown sent Hogbin to Rennel Island because the chance came and there was no one else to go-or the few of us there were would have to set to work with a frantic disregard of when and how anything would ever be publishcd, filling up our