Expanding American Anthropology, 1945-1980: A Generation Reflects

By Alice Beck Kehoe, Paul L. Doughty, Mary Elmendorf and 18 more

Expanding American Anthropology, 1945–1980: A Generation Reflects takes an inside look at American anthropology’s participation in the enormous expansion of the social sciences after World War II. During this time the discipline of anthropology itself came of age, expanding into diverse subfields, frequently on the initiative of individual practitioners. The Association of Senior Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) called upon a number of its leaders to give accounts of their particular innovations in the discipline. This volume is the result of the AAA venture—a set of primary documents on the history of American anthropology at a critical juncture.
In preparing the volume, the editors endeavored to maintain the feeling of “oral history” within the chapters and to preserve the individual voices of the contributors. There are many books on the history of anthropology, but few that include personal essays from such a broad swath of different perspectives. The passing of time will make this volume increasingly valuable in understanding the development of American anthropology from a small discipline to the profession of over ten thousand practitioners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9780817385897

Book preview

Expanding American Anthropology, 1945–1980

A Generation Reflects

Edited by

Alice Beck Kehoe and Paul L. Doughty

with the assistance of Nancy K. Peske

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2012 Alice B. Kehoe

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Individual copyrights:

From Relief and Reconstruction to Development Copyright © Mary Elmendorf; An Anthropologist Helps to Create the Peace Corps in Darkest Washington Copyright © Robert B. Textor; Land Use in the Ramah Navajo Area Copyright © John Landgraf; Anthropology and Education and Me Copyright © Harry F. Wolcott; Anthropology and Alcohol Studies Copyright © Dwight B. Heath; Age Is More Than a Number Copyright © Marjorie M. Schweitzer; Involvement with Technology, Environment, and Society Copyright © Willis E. Sibley; America Had No Patrimony Copyright © Alice B. Kehoe; Back to the Future, Again Copyright © Paul L. Doughty; From Applied to Practicing Anthropology Copyright © Thomas Weaver; Eliot Chapple's Long and Lonely Road Copyright © Alice B. Kehoe and Jim Weil; Anthropology and the Business Cycle Copyright © Walter Goldschmidt; Philleo Nash Copyright © Herbert S. Lewis; American Anthropology and the Opening of the Ethnographic ‘T’ Copyright © Susan R. Trencher; What Are You Doing Here? Copyright © Norman E. Whitten Jr.; Linguistic Anthropology Copyright © Dell Hymes; Thinking Big and Thinking Small Copyright © Shepard Krech III; A Bottom-Up View of Big Anthropology Copyright © J. Anthony Paredes; My People in Washington Copyright © Nathalie F. S. Woodbury; Legitimating Peace Studies Copyright © Alice B. Kehoe; War and Peace and Margaret Mead Copyright © William O. Beeman; ‘Honey Out of the Lion’ Copyright © Robert Knox Dentan; Looking Back, and Forward Copyright © J. Anthony Paredes and Alice B. Kehoe

Typeface: Bembo

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Expanding American anthropology, 1945–1980 : a generation reflects / edited by Alice Beck Kehoe and Paul L. Doughty; with the assistance of Nancy K. Peske.

       p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978–0-8173-5688-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8589-7 (electronic)

 1. Anthropology—United States—History—20th century. 2. Anthropologists' writings, American. 3. American Anthropologist. I. Kehoe, Alice Beck, 1934– II. Doughty, Paul L. III. Peske, Nancy K., 1962–

    GN17.3.U6E97 2012

    301.0973—dc23

                           2011018078

For Walter Goldschmidt (1913–2010), tireless leader

Contents

Preface

PART I. Breaking Ground: Postwar Anthropologists

1. From Relief and Reconstruction to Development: CARE de Mexico, 1952–60, a Pilot Program Mary Elmendorf

2. An Anthropologist Helps to Create the Peace Corps in Darkest Washington Robert B. Textor

3. Land Use in the Ramah Navajo Area: An Early Anthropological Approach to Human Ecology John Landgraf

4. Anthropology and Education and Me Harry F.Wolcott

5. Anthropology and Alcohol Studies: A Similar Evolution, Both Parallel and Linked Dwight B. Heath

6. Age Is More Than a Number Marjorie M. Schweitzer

7. Involvement with Technology, Environment, and Society Willis E. Sibley

8. America Had No Patrimony Alice Beck Kehoe

9. Back to the Future, Again: From Community Development to PAR Paul L. Doughty

10. From Applied to Practicing Anthropology: An Essay on Theory and Application Thomas Weaver

11. Eliot Chapple's Long and Lonely Road Alice Beck Kehoe and Jim Weil

PART II. Expanded Anthropology Struggles with Internal Debates

12. Anthropology and the Business Cycle (or, The Rise from Student Rags to Academic Riches) Walter Goldschmidt

13. Philleo Nash: Applied Anthropologist, Activist, Cranberry Farmer Herbert S. Lewis

14. American Anthropology and the Opening of the Ethnographic I Susan R. Trencher

15. What Are You Doing Here? Norman E. Whitten Jr.

16. Linguistic Anthropology Dell Hymes

17. Thinking Big and Thinking Small: Ethnohistory in the 1970s Shepard Krech III

18. A Bottom-Up View of Big Anthropology J. Anthony Paredes

19. My People in Washington Nathalie F. S. Woodbury

PART III. Peace Studies

20. Legitimating Peace Studies Alice Beck Kehoe

21. War and Peace and Margaret Mead: In Search of a Role for Anthropology in the Reduction of International Violence William O. Beeman

22. Honey Out of the Lion: Peace Research Emerging from Mid-20th-Century Violence Robert Knox Dentan

23. Looking Back, and Forward J. Anthony Paredes and Alice Beck Kehoe

Glossary

References

Contributors

Index

Preface

We in the Association of Senior Anthropologists (ASA), affiliated with the American Anthropological Association (AAA), recognized as we entered the 21st century that our eldest members had been leaders in the expansion of anthropology following World War II. A couple of the younger members, ASA secretary Paul Doughty and president Alice Kehoe, decided that we could not afford to let slip our elders' firsthand knowledge of the postwar history of our profession. We proposed to hold a session in each of three years at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, inviting first the very oldest ASA members who had been active in midcentury, then those who had made their marks in the decade 1960–70, and lastly those (including Paul) who had launched significant projects in the 1970–80 decade. We thus covered a generation, the postwar generation, who moved anthropology from a small academic field to an increasingly outreaching discipline; we set 1980 as our terminus, for none of us can properly assess, as history, the developments of our own generation. Our AAA meeting sessions were enthusiastically received, and we felt we had realized our hope of collecting primary material from the generation that made modern anthropology. This volume presents the results of our three sessions, segments of the history of American anthropology by people who were there, then.

In a way, these chapters are oral histories, inscribed by people for whom writing is as basic as speaking. These senior anthropologists are strong personalities—else they would not have been the leaders they were. We have tried to retain our authors' individual voices, to let readers sense what manner of person prepared the chapter. In many a reader glimpses the passion of an innovator, in others a scholarly bent of mind, in a few a wry observer of foibles. For every one of our authors, anthropology has been a vocation, a calling, a way of thinking and being in the world. World War II opened doors, or in other instances gave toeholds, for many of them as a proliferation of government agencies and foreign programs required personnel willing to work outside the comfort of American middle-class communities. Other opportunities appeared to visionaries able to discern significant use for anthropological method and principles in traditional fields such as schools and health care. From these, new subfields were built. New directions were not always applauded, for they threatened the discipline's conventional distance from studying our own American-European society. Then, America's Cold War crusade against Communism raised once again, ethics issues that Franz Boas had exposed in 1919: Should anthropologists conduct wartime espionage under a mask of fieldwork? Postwar American anthropology was exciting, with an undercurrent of tension between real-world practice and heady theories. Basing the volume on the three sessions held at American Anthropological Association annual meetings resulted in what may appear to be an imbalance of the conventional four fields of American anthropology. Struggling to get better representation, we confronted what we didn't want to see, the falling-away of archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistics from the dominant subfield of sociocultural anthropology. Archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and linguists are more likely to attend the annual meetings of their (sub-)disciplines than the AAA, a trend noticed even before World War II (Frantz 1974:6). For one of our three sessions, we invited four archaeologists, with two telling us they did not attend AAA, one excusing himself by saying his wife was ill, and one coming and presenting a paper but never sending in a publishable version. We have one outstanding linguist, Dell Hymes, a president of AAA. We omit biological anthropologists innovating in the postwar period; Sherwood Washburn, the obvious choice for this volume, died five years before we began our series of sessions. Instead, then, dividing this book by subfield, we have two major sections, the first containing chapters describing major innovations in anthropology as the field expanded in the aftermath of World War II, the second with chapters discussing some of the controversies that arose as the expanded profession settled. Our final section presents papers in a subfield that did not gain as strong a place as many of us had hoped, peace studies. We the editors met in the sessions led by the late Mary LeCron Foster, described in Kehoe's chapter 20. Concluding the book is an essay by ASA's president and past president in 2009, J. Anthony Paredes and Alice Kehoe, reflecting upon a lively and candid discussion between we elders and the articulate, concerned graduate student officers of the AAA's National Association of Student Anthropologists. We offer, too, a glossary of anthropological terms, to ensure readers do not get puzzled by some of the perhaps unfamiliar usages.

We have had a model for our volume, Walter Goldschmidt's The Uses of Anthropology, published in 1979 by the American Anthropological Association. Goldschmidt was president of the association in 1976 and encouraged a committee to plan and prepare a history of anthropology between 1930 and the 1950s, in the form of a volume of papers by leaders in the profession. Much personal experience and opinion appears in the volume. Its title indicates its emphasis on practice, not theory, stemming from Goldschmidt's experience of ivory-tower academics' disdain. His own career began in the 1930s Depression, finding a use for anthropology analyzing California farmers' problems. Postwar employment as a professor did not lessen his commitment to engagement with social issues or his appreciation of colleagues grappling with pragmatic projects. Goldschmidt knew that theories need to be tested against empirical data, and that real-life experience generates, in open active minds, theoretical hypotheses. A quarter-century after The Uses of Anthropology, histories of anthropology are no more attuned to the pragmatics of the profession than they were when Goldschmidt bemoaned their nearly exclusive focus on academic theories (Goldschmidt 1979:9–10). We thus conceive of our volume as an update on Goldschmidt's The Uses of Anthropology, taking the decades from the 1950s to approximately the year his book appeared, 1979.

We dedicate this volume to Walter Goldschmidt, with admiration for his unquenchable conviction that anthropology should matter and deep gratitude for his lively participation in our sessions.

I

Breaking Ground: Postwar Anthropologists

American anthropology has always been eclectic, and it has always been discomfiting. Its leaders during its formative years, the Smithsonian's Major Powell and Columbia University's Franz Boas, were adventurers, the one having traversed the Colorado's forbidding canyons, the other Baffin Land's icy expanse. They brought into the nascent profession a motley troop—former missionaries, young Jewish female secretaries, educated American Indians, sons of refugees from the Irish famine and Europe's ghettos, plus disaffected wives and women who had refused to be dependent on their husbands and sought a career. Along with Frederick Ward Putnam of Harvard, whose recruits were somewhat more conventionally respectable according to white, middle-class American values, Powell and Boas institutionalized anthropology as a discipline integrating museum and academic work. The two great world's fairs of this generation, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, drew heavily upon anthropology, through Putnam, to contrast their celebrations of American technology with portrayals of colonized peoples' material simplicity (Rydell 1984; Parezo and Fowler 2007).

The first half of the 20th century saw a slow, steady growth of anthropology as Boas placed his students, and they in turn placed their students, in universities. While they may not have been the first to teach anthropology in many of these institutions, they were usually the first properly credentialed professors of anthropology, replacing men trained in other disciplines. The Depression of the 1930s and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal response to it seemed to call for new ideas; academics' and philanthropists' reaction was social engineering tending toward naive scientism and toward fascism, which was already becoming visible in the 1920s. Sociology, political science, and economics were favored by university leaders and grant-giving foundations, while anthropology continued to be marginalized, seen as a discipline whose sole value was to report on societies outside of white America. This is hardly surprising considering that American sociology developed from the liberal Protestant social gospel movement (Greek 1992), and that American social scientists in general—at least those who worked outside of the field of anthropology—came principally from the Protestant, white middle class (Ross 1991:304). Professionalization occurred in all the social sciences as students were channeled into the German model of authoritarian hierarchies that demanded years of apprentice research. This new professionalism also sanctioned aloofness from the common masses and acceptance of that noble dream of objective truth (Novick 1988)—a goal that in effect straitjackets thinking (Bunzl 1997:4). Anthropology's sine qua non, real-world fieldwork and rejection of experimentation kept it outside the mainstream.

Standard histories of anthropology focus on academic theories and their proponents, professors in the major research universities. Examining the theories put forth by the leaders in anthropology in the 1930s (e.g., Goldenweiser 1941:163), standard histories such as Fred Voget's 1975 A History of Ethnology note that some anthropologists seem to have been influenced by ideas in psychoanalysis, reflecting the cachet of Freud at that time (LaPiere 1959; Moskowitz 2001:152–154). Psychologists Erik Erikson, Abram Kardiner, and Abraham Maslow collaborated with Alfred Kroeber and Ruth Benedict, with Maslow even journeying out to the Montana Blackfeet Reservation at Benedict's urging. Culture-and-personality studies using fieldwork with Indians engaged Paul Radin, Irving Hallowell, Clyde Kluckhohn, Ralph Linton, Gordon Macgregor, John Honigmann, Benjamin Paul, and Victor Barnouw, to name only a few who worked with this approach. Most fashionable at this time was John Collier's 1941 Indian New Deal project Indian Personality and Administration Research, which he worked on jointly with the University of Chicago's Committee on Human Development (Voget 1975:467) until World War II aborted it. Up through the 1950s, culture-and-personality theory continued to be prominent in dissertations drawn from fieldwork with Indian communities, although the 1946 National Mental Health Act founding the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) opened up funding sources for medically oriented research (Moskowitz 2001:153–154).

Standard histories of American anthropology identify the 1936 Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation by Robert Redfield, Linton, and Melville Herskovits (Redfield et al. 1936), commissioned in 1935 by the Social Science Research Council, as the watershed between classic salvage ethnography and the modern concern with cultural dynamics. Acculturation is a dynamic term describing change, yet in the 1930s anthropologists still tended to assume indigenous communities in colonies had a static culture that they turned away from to embrace the culture of the dominant colonial power. Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits's outline for acculturation studies is meticulously detailed; it conforms to contemporary social scientists' zeitgeist with a section on psychological mechanisms including personality types; and it betrays its prewar mind- set with this stereotypically racist NOTE: The significance of physical type in determining attitudes operative in acculturation, as well as the importance of the concomitant occurrence of race-mixture or its prohibition (Redfield et al. 1936:150). Resisting the accepted model of anthropology as the study of the Other, both Hallowell (1957) and Felix Cohen (1960) published articles describing White acculturation to Indian cultures, and Ernestine Friedl, in her dissertation (1956), emphasized persistence of Ojibwa Indian values underlying the Indians' superficial adoption of Euro-American housing, clothing, and purchased food.

World War II opened up more opportunities for anthropologists than ever before. A large proportion of anthropologists enlisted in the armed forces, and others who could not do so volunteered or did intelligence work, drawing upon their expertise with foreign cultures—for example, Ruth Benedict, who analyzed Japan in her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. The war ended with the United States taking control not only of Japan but also of many of the Pacific islands, and graduate students in anthropology were sent out by their universities on government-funded projects to gather information for administering these Trust Territories. To a later generation (e.g., Kaplan and Pease, 1993; Falgout 1995), and indeed some of the same scholars at a later point in their career (Schneider 1984), these graduate students seemed naive about and even complicit in colonialism. The criticism does not take into account their dissertation directors molding classifications of data and interpretations to fit existing theory and principles, which continued to be Positivist—that is, in sync with the notion that civilization is progressing and that scientific discoveries are helping it move forward.

The field experience for this postwar generation of anthropologists focused on the ongoing dynamics of cultural behavior within societies and less on culture histories such as Boas and his earlier students had created to salvage information on preconquest indigenous societies. Structuralism, exemplified by the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose refugee residence in the United States during World War II had allowed him to develop personal relationships with some American anthropologists, became a topic of interest. Semantics grew into a field labeled semiotics, crossing into anthropology through work in ethnosciences and componential analysis, the former charting how indigenous communities classified phenomena and the latter using the basic linguistics method of compare and contrast to elucidate cultures' principles of classification. Anthropology was a lively and rapidly expanding discipline from the 1950s into the 1970s.

Part of the vigor of postwar anthropology came from the numbers and relative maturity of students. The G.I. Bill enabled hundreds of thousands to attend college; a good portion of them would not have done so without Uncle Sam's support, and initially for some, the notion that four years of drinking beer and ogling coeds sure beat working. (This is personal communication from one of that generation, Thomas F. Kehoe.) Among the multitude who went to college to get a better-paying, white-collar job were veterans excited by possibilities of learning to understand the world they'd been defending, a prospect offered by anthropology. The huge influx of G.I. Bill students and their successors from the Korean War forced colleges and universities to accommodate much greater numbers and a somewhat greater diversity of students and to broaden curricula in response to these more mature students' interests. The 1960s were fantastic for anthropologists: Anybody with a graduate degree was begged to teach, and under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, the country seemed to have a liberal atmosphere amenable to anthropological methods and perspective.

Within anthropology the fundamental tension between a focus on theory and a focus on practice did not abate. It had materialized in the 1930s, when anthropologists who formed the Society for Applied Anthropology rejected ivory-tower, armchair theorizing and simple descriptions of human behavior. They wanted to test hypotheses in the real world, doing fieldwork and gathering information. Note that this approach was, for most of its proponents, more than applying or (today's term) practicing anthropology; it was as close to scientific experiment as anthropologists could get. As Walter Goldschmidt insists (this volume and 1979), members of the Society for Applied Anthropology knew they were wrestling with theory; it was the pure academics who looked down upon practice as not much more than social work (which itself battled, in vain, to be recognized as a social science [Ross 1991:226]). Goldschmidt's edited volume, The Uses of Anthropology (1979), published by the American Anthropological Association, was a manifesto of his position on the importance of applied anthropology.

Writing anthropology for the general public was similarly looked down upon from the ivory towers. Margaret Mead was unquestionably the best-known anthropologist for two-thirds of the 20th century, and even today. She deliberately wrote clear, easy-to-understand English, her books were regularly published in inexpensive mass-market paperbacks, she traveled frequently to give lectures to PTAs and other general audiences, and when television became accessible around 1960, she appeared on a variety of programs including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Near the end of her life, in 1975, she told an interviewer in a film about her, It's a little hard, you know, to judge what impact you've had on a field. Initially, I think the most important thing I did was to introduce anthropology to the general, literate public.¹

Mead's fellow anthropologists, perhaps tinged with jealousy, were uncomfortable that the public was seduced by Mead's accounts of sexual mores in her fieldwork sites, her candid recommendations in the Redbook magazine column she coauthored for years with her late-life companion Rhoda Métraux, and by her own quite unconventional relationships. Another Columbia University anthropologist, Marvin Harris, was as successful as Mead during the 1970s, making the nonfiction best-seller lists in books explaining strange customs as cultural adaptations to ecology. Unlike Mead, Harris led a prosaic personal life, and his strong personality sometimes made him a lonely figure in professional meetings. Moreover, he lacked Mead's charisma. There has been no anthropologist like her in public life.

Ironically, Mead's prominence, and the popularity of her close friend Benedict's Patterns of Culture, did not mean anthropology as a profession welcomed women. Franz Boas, son of a women's rights advocate, was an exception in fighting for opportunities for women as well as for Jews, African Americans, and American Indians. Even he could not prevail, as when his choice of Benedict to succeed him as department head at Columbia was negated by the university administration. Our book has fewer women authors than men, because fewer women obtained career positions enabling them to develop institutional support for their work and for students. Mary Elmendorf's paper reflects the era's marginalization of married women with families, giving them a sort of default status to be called upon for projects that didn't attract career-minded men.

We, the editors, spent our careers in academia; we needed to keep abreast of theory and ensure that our colleagues recognized we were au courant. However, we also did fieldwork, which took us into indigenous American communities—Doughty in Latin America, Kehoe in the North American Plains (as well as a residence in a Bolivian Aymara village), where we felt the tension between academic suppositions and actual life. If this volume seems weighted toward applied anthropology, it's because our experience convinces us that applied anthropology more truly represents 20th-century American anthropology. Histories of the discipline charting a succession of Big Names in Theory overlook external social factors, such as the resurgence of non-Darwinian 19th-century Spencerian evolutionism following the horror of world war and Hiroshima (see Henry Adams's insight on the allure of this myth²) and also contingencies in individuals' lives when opportunity met, or obstructed, vision. Anthropologists' feet-on-the-ground experience in fieldwork keeps the door open for empirical rejoinders to theory statements. Although the self-esteemed, brilliant academician may ignore particulars, the proletariat of the profession lives face-to-face with people disinclined to kowtow to theory. As Goethe said, Theorie steckt bereits in den Tatsachen (theory lies ready in facts).

THE PAPERS

We begin with Mary Elmendorf, who found herself on a troop ship to France at the very close of World War II's European theater. The American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) brought her and other volunteers to help rehabilitate the region, for which they received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. After returning to America and entering graduate school in anthropology, Mary, with two little children, dropped out in 1950 to accompany her husband to Mexico. (She did at last earn her Ph.D., in 1972.) There, in 1952, she conceived of a peacetime role for CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe), the charity organized to deliver relief packages to war-devastated countries. She also demonstrated that a woman could manage a program requiring extensive negotiations and detailed planning—and considering that she simultaneously cared for two young children, she gave the lie to the notion that women must choose between professional work and family. For the history of anthropology, Mary's story is a beautiful case of the anthropological standpoint she gained in graduate school facilitating design of a project at once visionary and pragmatic. Fifty years later, PLACA (Premios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe) awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing her 1957 pioneer project for sustainable community-managed rural drinking water—still used today by CARE, the World Bank, USAID, and national agencies in Latin America.

Robert Textor similarly attacked convention in American society by demanding that Peace Corps volunteers receive intensive training in local languages before being sent abroad. When he was invited to assist in preparing the first contingent of the Peace Corps to work in Thailand, he was shocked (but not surprised) that the Washington staff organizing the Peace Corps did not appreciate the vital need for everyday conversational facility in local languages. His insistence on intensive language training was a radical departure for American policy, which heretofore expected only Christian missionaries to feel obliged to speak in the vernacular. The impact of young Americans eager to use a community's language, to really live with the people, was greater than the goodwill it generated in hundreds of localities: It marked the shift toward acknowledging the value of cultural diversity that strongly affected America by the end of the 20th century. This is grounded in applied anthropology.

John Landgraf is a contemporary of Mary Elmendorf who shared her orientation toward studying and working with people living on the land. He describes searching for principles, or a framework, to approach what he and his generation realized should be termed human ecology, a phrase employed by Clark Wissler, head of the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History, in a 1933 manuscript on the history of the Blackfoot, a manuscript he put aside for other writing and never published.³ Around 1933, human ecology usually referred to the University of Chicago sociologists' concept that we now call urban ecology. Walter Goldschmidt used the concept human ecology, as Wissler did, in our present sense, in his mid-1930s study of California farms. Landgraf describes how in the 1940s, anthropologists cast about to articulate an ecological perspective.

We move on to the generation of 1950s graduate students, our own generation, which was lucky enough to sally into the best job market anthropology ever enjoyed. Enough of New Deal reliance on the federal government remained to launch the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH, including NIMH for mental health), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and for archaeology, River Basin Surveys. The Soviets' Sputnik provoked large federal grants for curricular reform in the sciences, which led to a project creating curricula for studying anthropology in the middle grades of elementary school. The project was directed by Malcolm Collier, an anthropologist as well as the daughter-in-law of John Collier Sr., Roosevelt's Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The field was further enhanced by an unprecedented flood of middle- and working-class students into colleges, forcing expansion in their numbers and sizes, turning lower-ranked teachers' colleges into liberal-arts universities, and adding anthropology to each level of the educational hierarchy. As our papers reveal, our generation was fortunate to have ease in obtaining professional employment, and many of us also took advantage of the liberal social and political climate to wedge anthropology into a range of programs central to the American way of life, such as ones focused on schooling and alcohol use. Contrary to our hopes, we never supplanted, or even matched, the ethnocentric disciplines of sociology, political science, economics, and psychology, but we did get our feet into doorways.

Harry Wolcott exemplifies the opening, the wedge, during the postwar period when pragmatic visionaries such as George Spindler, his major professor, encouraged capable students to risk moving along new paths. Wolcott's tale of the American Anthropological Association refusing to make him a full member because his doctorate was not in anthropology, at the same time that the association wanted to hire him to direct anthropology-in-education programs, illustrates the disjunction between traditional academic anthropology and the zeitgeist of the 1960s, challenging conventional boundaries. Wolcott also shows us how in this decade of jobs galore, a community of innovative anthropologists did find positions for their students. He mentions briefly another facet of Spindler's vision for anthropology in education, the Case Studies paperback series that George and Louise Spindler developed with David Boynton of Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Series are considered standard fare now, but in the day, it was quite daring to publish such short accounts aimed at undergraduates. Kehoe recalls that George Spindler wanted her to write a case study in cultural anthropology drawn from her dissertation on the Ghost Dance religion in Saskatchewan, but editor Boynton nixed the invitation because, he said, the case studies were about tribes and the Ghost Dance wasn't a tribe. When Boynton retired, George Spindler immediately phoned Kehoe and reissued the invitation, explaining that with Boynton out of the way, the Spindlers could prevail. Kehoe's The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization was one of the more popular books in the series, and Waveland Press published a second edition seventeen years later.

When Spindler and his students were pulling an anthropological view into education, Dwight Heath pushed into alcohol studies. He highlights Sol Tax's organizational genius in the launch of anthropological studies of alcohol use, through the 1973 World Anthropology Congress Tax hosted in Chicago. Any history of 20th-century anthropology must acknowledge Tax's action anthropology, advocacy for a people studied as well as applying anthropology to assist them. A people needing assistance meant anthropologists, too, for Tax as he created the important international journal Current Anthropology and the massive 1973 World Anthropology Congress with its dozens of follow-up volumes of papers, not to mention editing the American Anthropologist in the early 1950s, the 1953 An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (a compendium of discussions from a 1952 international conference), several volumes on American Indians, and commemoration of the centenary of Darwin's Origin of Species. Anthropological studies of alcohol use grew as a professional interest group from Tax's planting in that landmark 1973 World Congress. Heath makes it clear that he and his anthropologist colleagues in these studies were aware of theoretical implications and inferences; he particularly notes their appreciation of the natural experiments accessed through ethnographies of diverse societies.

Marjorie Schweitzer chronicles the emergence of an anthropological perspective and methodology in the field of aging, a focus that had been primarily the domain of gerontology. Her paper assesses briefly the history of aging studies from a cross-cultural perspective, beginning with Leo Simmons's (1970) comparisons that assessed aging based on the research of others. The 1970s saw the emergence of Anthropology of Aging courses at the university level as well as the creation of the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology (AAGE). AAGE represents the pursuit of aging issues from an anthropological perspective that takes into account the cultural context in which aging occurs, abandoning previous perspectives of gerontology that lumped men and women together and ignored the cultural context. In addition to cultural dimensions of aging, AAGE introduced anthropology's comparative method, bringing in observations from different cultures around the world.

Will Sibley describes a career path not uncommon in our generation, from attending graduate school to working in non-Western communities, to professional involvement in our own society's culture. Sibley doesn't label himself an economic anthropologist, although his early inclination to study economics was fulfilled by his research and civic participation in what we might call social economics, the interplay of geographical, technological, historical, and contemporary cultural factors. Having known Sibley for many years and served with him on various committees, we have seen that he brings anthropological pragmatism to real-world problems, searching out relevant data to underpin analysis of human behavior. Fitting such empirical data into generalizations about societal behavior is a sound method for testing generalized models and developing well-grounded theory.

Kehoe brings in the radical shift in American archaeology, from a markedly colonialist point of view toward acknowledging diverse ethnicities within our patrimony, befitting the postwar New World Order of a multitude of independent nations. Congruent with this recognition of a culturally diverse world, archaeologists gradually came to understand standpoint theory, the rather straightforward notion that where you stand affects what you see. For example, a woman archaeologist accustomed to preparing food may recognize evidence of food preparation, such as stone knife blades shaped like our familiar kitchen knives. Too many of her male colleagues, unfamiliar with the little knives indispensable to their moms and wives, were likely to label all stone blades projectile points and miss the function of domestic sites. Beginning in the 1960s archaeology grew from a small profession of academics and museum curators to a billion-dollar business, CRM. Cultural Resource Management extends the idea of environmental protection to include human sites and buildings. In contrast to social anthropology, which developed through a wide scatter of practicing anthropologists infiltrating government agencies and the business world, archaeology thrived under federal mandate reinforced by state and municipal laws and regulations. With a mandate and funding to survey and record all signs of human habitation in a zone designated for development, archaeologists brought to light a wider range of sites, from Paleoindian camps to African American communities in the Midwest. Identifying, preserving, or mitigating