‘A Maverick Boasian’ by Sergei Kan

A Maverick Boasian is a biography of a distinctive and exasperating figure in early American cultural anthropology. Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940) was a lesser-known member of the first cohort of Franz Boas’s graduate students at Columbia University. A Russian émigré who did fieldwork among eastern Iroquois, he was the most theoretically oriented of his eminent peer group. He was affectionately referred to as Shoora or, alternatively, as Goldie, by kith and kin—and by his biographer Sergei Kan, who claims that Goldenweiser was Papa Franz’s favorite student, but also his most disappointing one.

Goldenweiser was marvelous company to his friends, a wide-ranging, cosmopolitan conversationalist, but he disdained small talk, and his manners, Kan writes, were those of “a nineteenth century gentleman” (12). He was something of a pianist as well as a dedicated pool player and bon vivant. At the same time, he was a troubled man. Never able to secure a tenured professorship throughout his career, he was in constant financial need. Moreover, he endured lengthy bouts of turmoil due to the damage a string of infidelities did to his first marriage to Anna Hallow (also a Russian Jewish immigrant).

Born in 1880, he was raised in an upper middle-class, Jewish family in Kiev. Goldenweiser’s father had a strong commitment to social justice. It was he who sent his son to America in 1900 so he could live in a democratic society that was relatively free of antisemitism. There, he eventually enrolled in the PhD program in Anthropology at Columbia University, where he joined Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, and Edward Sapir, among other now well-known names. Goldenweiser completed his degree in 1910 with a thesis that focused on totemism and whose analytical methodology Kan labels as “thoroughly Boasian” (22). Comparing Australia and the Northwest Coast, he rejected the notion that this religion was a unitary phenomenon that could be viewed as a universal form. Moreover, totemic objects and ideas were not proto-divinities. Instead, he argued that they should be viewed as a composite of relations in association or combination that possess emotional value. Kan endorses Warren Shapiro’s claim (1991) that Goldenweiser’s approach to totemism in his thesis “prefigured” nothing less than Levi-Straussian structuralism (22).

Boas employed Goldenweiser as a lecturer and he went on to teach anthropology courses for the next ten years at Columbia where students admired his erudition and availability. Meanwhile, he undertook key informant-based fieldwork on Iroquois social organization and mythology, largely from the perspectives of senior men who honored him with a name, “Great Sky.” Although a series of papers appeared in the aftermath of fieldwork on various Boasian topics, no monograph was ever published, such were the demands, according to Kan, that teaching imposed on him.

The biography is divided into just a handful of chapters whose density and length make them a bit of a chore to follow. But at the same time, one of the book’s strengths lies in Kan’s useful sketches of relevant contextual material, such as Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler’s antisemitism, which apparently contributed to Goldenweiser’s dismissal in 1919.

Leaving Columbia, he went on to teach at the Rand School of Social Science, which had been founded in 1906 by members of the Socialist Party of America to offer politically-informed courses to workers. He also taught at the New School for Social Research (where Elsie Clews Parsons paid his salary that Boas also subsidized). Leslie White, Melville Herskovits, Abram Kardiner, Ruth Landes, and Irving Hallowell attended his classes from time to time, as did Ruth Benedict to whom he suggested a PhD topic and introduced her to the notion of cultural “pattern.” In return, so she said, Goldenweiser was a “rare teacher” (93). Meanwhile, he organized discussion groups and wrote papers, which Kan dutifully summarizes, on topics like culture-history, independent invention, Levi-Bruhl and primitive thought, and, not least, the individual in culture (psychoanalysis absorbed him during these years). He was also known as a progressive public intellectual who gave guest lectures and wrote for liberal publications, such as The Nation and The New Statesman, on such topics as racism, immigration, and education.

A complicated turning point in the biography then ensues. Falling victim to what Kan calls his “own weakness and poor judgment” in the early 1920s (127), Goldenweiser began an intense affair with a young secretary with whom he was working at the New School. In a rage, his first wife, Anna, refused to agree to a divorce that he wanted in order to marry his lover, Anne Cooper. When Goldenweiser left for Mexico to get a divorce, his wife filed a lawsuit against him for separation, alimony, and child support (and the story was reported in the New York Times). Hearing about the mess, which left Goldenweiser stranded in Mexico unable to afford a return ticket, Boas raised money from friends, including Lowie and Benedict, to bring him back and then provide him with a weekly allowance. Once in the US, Mrs. Goldenweiser had her wayward husband indicted for failing to provide child support for their daughter, Alice. He was arrested a few weeks later and jailed in Maryland, where he had been staying with a brother. Boas insisted that he would only continue to help pay his ex-wife (and thus have him released from jail) if Goldenweiser agreed to plead guilty, desist from all further contact with Anna Goldenweiser, and never return to New York. Should he refuse to comply, Boas vowed to do nothing further on his behalf. Apparently, following his release, he was re-arrested only a few months later, when his ex-wife filed a second suit against him accusing him of a “series of infidelities” (134). She wanted him back in jail because she did not trust him to stay in the country. He was incarcerated once again before he was finally freed with the proviso that he pay her on a weekly basis. In the event, of course, Goldenweiser’s relationship with Anne Cooper soon fell apart.

The scandal basically left him as persona non grata in eastern US academic circles, so that even Boas felt that he had reached the end of the line with his former student. Goldenweiser decamped to the West Coast. He ended up in Portland, where he held temporary positions for several years at the University of Oregon extension program and at Reed College. He married a rabbi’s daughter during this time and renewed his relationship with his daughter, Alice, and with another brother, Alexei. Once again, students appreciated his teaching style. However, he found attending faculty meetings, keeping office hours, or submitting grades on time to be a challenge. Although no permanent job emerged at Reed, his position at the University of Oregon did become full time. But he hated it and, viewing Portland as little more than a provincial backwater, wanted desperately to return to New York City.

Goldenweiser published several books during his time in Oregon that included an anthropology textbook and a collection of essays. He also kept in touch with Benedict and reestablished relationships with Lowie and Kroeber. He turned 60 in 1940 and was planning to do more books and essays when he died of a heart attack. Boas wrote Ethel, his widow, wishing that better circumstances might have permitted her husband to have been more productive; and elsewhere, he admitted to feeling “bitter about his wasted life” (194).

During its early years, American cultural anthropology was populated by larger-than-life characters, and what Kan’s biography makes clear is that Goldenweiser was very much among them. However, to his credit, Kan neither lionizes nor belittles his subject. On the one hand, he applauds Goldenweiser’s Iroquois fieldwork and, over and again, we hear how he anticipated important theoretical trends in the discipline and what an enchanting teacher he could be. On the other, Kan is more equivocal about Goldenweiser the man. The familiar terms he repeatedly uses to refer to him (e.g., “Goldie,” etc.) would seem to imply that he holds him up to be a sympathetic equal. But, at the same time, Kan readily acknowledges Goldenweiser’s lifelong inability to get a permanent job, the consequent financial problems he faced, how exasperating colleagues found him and, not least, the infidelities that eventually landed him in jail.

Kan never arrives at an overall stance, or comes to any conclusion, really, about the relationship of Goldenweiser’s inadequacies and flaws to the whole, contradictory picture of both the scholar and the man that emerges in the biography. Instead, he leaves him under a cloud of ambiguity—which, at least in my view, suits his troubled but brilliant subject to a tee. All in all, I would say that the biography of this maverick Boasian makes an absorbing contribution to the literature on this initial phase of American cultural anthropology.

Works Cited

Shapiro, Warren. 1991. “Claude Lévi-Strauss meets Alexander Goldenweiser: Boasian anthropology and the study of totemism.” American Anthropologist 93 (30): 599-610. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1991.93.3.02a00040.