The History of Anthropology: A Critical Window on the Discipline in North America, by Regna Darnell

Abstract

"In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology's four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology's forays into contemporary public intellectual debates.The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology's historical and contemporary relevance and legacies. "-- Provided by publisher. 1. Edward Sapir -- 2. The Professionalization of American Anthropology -- 3. The Development of American Folklore Scholarship, 1880-1920 -- 4. The Emergence of Academic Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania -- 5. Documenting Disciplinary History -- 6. Franz Boas's Legacy of "Useful Knowledge" -- 7. Franz Boas -- 8. Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and the Americanist Text Tradition -- 9. The Emergence of Edward Sapir's Mature Thought -- 10. Indo-European Methodology, Bloomfield's Central Algonquian, and Sapir's Distant Genetic Relationships -- 11. Camelot at Yale -- 12. Benedictine Visionings of Southwestern Cultural Diversity -- 13. Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Boasian Foundations of Contemporary Ethnolinguistics -- 14. Mary R. Haas and the First Yale School of Linguistics -- 15. Stanley Newman and the Sapir School of Linguistics -- 16. Hallowell's "Bear Ceremonialism" and the Emergence of Boasian Anthropology -- 17. Franz Boas and the Development of Physical Anthropology in North America.