HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article on American Cultural Anthropologist Paul Radin and his triadic approach to the study of culture.
Szoke, Zsofia Johanna, 2024. “Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos ‘Tagungen’”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Paul Radin (1883–1959) was an American cultural anthropologist. Son of a rabbi, he was born in Poland in 1883, and he studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas. After completing his PhD in 1911, he became a prolific ethnographer who devoted a lifetime study to the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk). He was particularly interested in the matters of the mind, myth, ritual drama, religious experience, language, history and the role of the individual in “primitive” societies, a label he utilized with considerable caution. Radin became a fellow of the Bollingen Foundation, in part devoted to the dissemination of Carl Jung’s work. He was also an invited lecturer at the Eranos meetings in Ascona, Switzerland. In 1952 he moved to Lugano and lived there until 1956. During this time, he lectured at Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich. Then he joined Brandeis University in 1957, where he worked until his death in 1959. He never deserted his research on the Winnebago Tribe.
With reference to Paul Radin’s connection to the Eranos project, this article addresses a peculiar paradox: How can the place of this maverick anthropologist be obscured in disciplinary history while at the same time his core ideas and methods thrive in another milieu? Zsofia Johanna Szoke asserts that this contradiction is the result of the complex way in which Paul Radin’s ideas and praxis interacted with anticanonical academic paradigms, aimed at attaining an integral understanding of what constitutes essential human nature. She reveals that Paul Radin regarded this anthropological pursuit as the primary aim of all investigations of culture. In his own program he advanced a triadic methodology to accomplish the analysis, an approach that definitely set him apart from his fellow Boasians. The author argues that anthropologists adhering to a modern, secularized and particularistic methodological framework likewise reject the level of analysis which Paul Radin’s triadic approach entails. It is hardly a surprise then that there is a tendency in the history of anthropology to obscure this scholarly mission, one that is intertwined with apparently defeated paradigms, striving to achieve an integral perception of man’s basic existential condition.
This article is part of a series of six papers originally delivered in the panel “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” held during the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures” (4–7 December 2023, online). The conference was co-organized by the EASA’s History of Anthropology Network and the Università di Pisa with the support of Bérose and ten other history of anthropology stakeholders. The panel was convened by David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute; University College London, UK), Christine Laurière (CNRS/UMR9022 Héritages, France) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology, Portugal).
The other articles within the “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” series are:
“En torno al argumento del anacronismo y la Escuela Histórico‑Cultural en la Argentina: hacia un abordaje discrónico,”by Axel Lazzari
“Anthropology, Photography, and Painting: Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania 1951‑1952,” by Serge Reubi
“Frobenius’ Culture History in Australia: Dead Ends and New Insights,” by Richard Kuba
“Fieldwork on the Banks of the Pilcomayo River: The Place of Erland Nordenskiöld in Pre-Malinowskian Traditions of Ethnography,” by Anne Gustavsson
“How Moscow Did Not Become a World Centre of Marxist Anthropology: Liudmila V. Danilova and the Fate of Soviet ‘Revisionism’ in the 1960s‑1970s,” by Sergei Alymov
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