A PhD recipient from Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology (1963) with an extended and unfolding record of ethnographic research in the West Indies, Ethiopia, Israel, and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, an extensive publication record, and a teaching career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Herbert S. Lewis is a distinguished anthropologist and in recent years he has been a generous interlocutor for those of us trying to learn more of the history of anthropology. His purpose in Correcting the Record is to debunk the “half-century of mythology” that insinuates a) that American anthropologists were comfortably complicit in the practices of colonialism; b) that their efforts to “salvage” culture by documenting languages and cultural practices were in fact profoundly alienating to the people with whom they worked; and, c) that they were indifferent to the harsh circumstances facing the people they were studying. Lewis demonstrates emphatically: a) that very few American anthropologists contributed in any way to anything that might be reasonably labeled colonialism; b) that “salvage anthropology” produced an invaluable record of cultural practices that is increasingly used by descendant communities in linguistic and cultural revitalization efforts; and, c) that in general individual anthropologists established relationships with members of the communities with whom they conducted research and engaged in a variety of forms of reciprocity. Indeed, the vast majority of what he terms “classical anthropologists” were committed to challenging ethnocentrism and following scientific methods of inquiry that revealed the integrity of local life and exposed the arbitrary character of colonial rule.

Correcting the Record covers a remarkable swath of disciplinary history, is engaging throughout, and in broad terms is persuasive. Lewis shows that the “mythology” which has developed around the history of the field is almost entirely unmoored. Nevertheless, this reader is not left with the impression that classical anthropology, a version of anthropology that many of us continue to practice as best as we can in our changing world, is free to proceed without critical reflection. Indeed, while the issues are not nearly as simple as they have been depicted in the “mythology,” critical self-reflexivity is integral to ethnography in order to meet the fundamental standards of ethical inquiry required of social sciences in the rapidly changing environment in which people live, and to achieve a modicum of scientific ethnographic inquiry in our mediatized and politicized environment.

Lewis opens the book by presenting instances of the mythological discourse whose inclusion has become obligatory in courses, professional meetings, and publications:

A specter is haunting American anthropology—the phantom of earlier American anthropology. Many of today’s students fear the possibility of “complicity,” of “appropriation,” and of causing harm through their research and writing. They are obsessed with the image of anthropology as the playground of white males leering at “savages” and conspiring with colonialists. And worse. As a Princeton professor of anthropology, Julia Elyachar, wrote (30 June 2023), “Anthropology carries into the present inexorable and bloody traces of the past. Can the discipline be divested of its entanglements with colonialism, anti-Blackness, imperialism, and civilizational discourse?” (1).

Lewis then addresses “the more general questions of American anthropology’s relation to colonialism” (190) in several chapters: 1) Does a Decolonized Anthropology Require Reinterpreting the Past?; 2) American Anthropology and Colonialism: A Factual Account; 4) American Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History; and, 5) Anthropology’s Camelot Myth and What We Can Learn From It. “The distressing paradox,” he observes, “is that the horror stories emanate from an imagined past that the students and their instructors do not study and only know through an accretion of a half century of anthropological legends and folklore” (1-2). Even if one already knows the material reasonably well, it is a helpful exercise to go through the foundations of sociocultural theory and practice again. Lewis substantiates four points:

1. Fewer than a dozen American anthropologists carried out research in areas controlled by colonial powers before World War II and those who did had little or nothing to do with imperialism or colonial governing or governmentality.
2. Most of the positive and useful literature on Indigenous peoples around the world was written by anthropologists and anthropological linguists from North America and elsewhere.
3. Far from anti-Blackness, American (Boasian) anthropologists constantly fought anti-Black racism in their teachings and writings, and as public intellectuals.
4. There are no more powerful intellectual opponents of the idea of the superiority of one “civilization” over another than Boas and his students.

In the next set of chapters (including chapter 3), particularly compelling in my view, Lewis explores the interdependency among scholarship, public service, and service to the communities in the biographies of four remarkable anthropologists. Each of the four have at least a degree of personal connection with Lewis himself. From Alfred L. Kroeber, Lewis took a college course at Brandeis. Though they met briefly at a party at an American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Lewis developed a relationship with Philleo Nash during his time at the University of Wisconsin, Nash being a cranberry farming Wisconsinite and a once Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin. The papers of Haviland Scudder Mekeel, a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin some time prior to Lewis’s term of employment were transferred to Lewis’s hands for appraisal. What Lewis learned from them impressed and moved him. As an Africanist of an early wave of African anthropology, Lewis was invited to write Walter R. Goldschmidt’s obituary. As I found these cases of special interest I will briefly review each below.

Among modern anthropologists, Alfred L. Kroeber is known today mostly because of a statement he made in 1925 that many believe may have contributed materially to the dispossession of Native Californians. In the Handbook of the Indians of California, he wrote that the Ohlone are “extinct so far as all practical purposes are concerned” (Kroeber 1925, 464). Lewis’s short biography makes clear that blaming Kroeber for the tragedy of Native dispossession is both an overassment of Kroeber’s influence and an underassessment of his understanding of Native perspectives. Lewis’s defense of Kroeber’s legacy is nowhere near as detailed but is consistent with the account provided by linguist Andrew Garrett in his important corrective work, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (Garrett 2023).

Kroeber devoted his career to documenting the integrity of Native American life as it had been prior to the slaughter, displacement, and marginalization carried out by successive waves of European colonialism, whether in the form of Spanish missionization or American fortune seeking. Following the lead of his teacher, Franz Boas, he was committed to the possibility that Native Californians were not impediments to progress but rather human beings with the same capacity as all other humans. They were people who formerly lived rich and meaningful lives as members of organized societies, often more advanced than other societies in one respect or another. Kroeber’s assessment that the Ohlone no longer functioned as the socio-political group they had been prior to European contact represents a professional opinion based on extensive field-experience across California. In the 1920s, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) of the US government decided not to secure rancheria land for the Verona Band. Though some claim that Kroeber’s published statement was a deciding factor, the OIA’s long term policy was assimilation; if taken into account at all, Kroeber’s statement was one more excuse for the same (Barron 2022). Given present-day critiques of Kroeber’s motives, it is worth considering the prevailing view among mainstream Americans at the time on government interventions designed to re-establish Native communities on designated rancherias or reservations with what was likely Kroeber’s position—and contrast both to the ideology on ethnic revival that arose in the 1960s and has continued to transform itself on through the present (Appiah 2018, Smith 1981, Taylor 1994). The prevailing position among mainstream Americans in the 1920s was that Native Americans remained impediments to progress and that they should either be removed to enclaves and kept at a distance from American society until they disappeared or were placed in assimilation programs.

Boas and many in his greater network demonstrated that Native Americans were as capable as any other people and did not deserve to be treated as second-class citizens. Boas was opposed to both incarceration in enclaves and forced assimilation. However, given his sense that Native communities had long been rapidly re-orienting within American society and that those who were availed of opportunities were achieving remarkable degrees of mobility, he focused his efforts on fighting discrimination. He was not optimistic that reservations would effectively revive culture. This was the Jim Crow era and Kroeber and his network openly opposed segregation in the US South. They were open to mixed-race marriages and changes in ways of life. Also, keep in mind that apartheid was instituted in South Africa beginning with the Natives Land Act of 1913. Indigenous African populations had their ownership and residence rights reduced or eliminated and were removed from areas that were dedicated to the official white minority and they were placed on reserves known as Bantu-stans (Ray 2016, 173-206). Members of the anglophone anthropological community, including A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, were against segregation.^[1]For chronological purposes it is important to know that Radcliffe-Brown first expressed his anti-segregationist view in South Africa in 1921. Yet the volkerkundiges, an Afrikaner school of anthropology with roots in German universities who developed their own interpretations of Herderian ideas (Herder’s legacy cuts in radically different directions), advocated isolating racial-cultural groups as an essential technology of cultural preservation (Ray 2016, 177). The point is that while it is certain that Kroeber’s 1920s views did not align with contemporary ethnic ideology, they were formulated with awareness of the complexity of the issues and were enlightened for the time. Kroeber is not responsible for dispossession. He is responsible for inscribing Indigenous people for all time on maps of their Indigenous territories as they themselves understood them.

Beyond the gotcha discourse surrounding the 1925 statement, Kroeber has also been critically evaluated—as are a growing number of anthropologists (Boasians!) often without even the specificity of personal names—for being indifferent to the circumstances in which contemporary Native Americans lived and for utilizing appropriative methodologies. In reality, as Lewis shows, Kroeber was keenly aware of the tragedy surrounding the depopulation of Native peoples in California. Not only did he testify in favor of compensation due to Native Californians for lost territory in the Indian Claims Commission (see Ray 2016, 29-66 for a fuller account), he used such terms as “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “warfare of extermination” in his anthropological writings. A remarkably humane, intelligent, and energetic man, Kroeber devoted himself to establishing the historical presence of Native Americans in California through careful transcription and description based on interviews.

Philleo Nash received a PhD in 1937 and was invited to join the Bureau of Intelligence, the research arm of the US Office of Facts and Figures, where he was charged with monitoring rumors such as hostile fantasies regarding Black and Hispanic populations. With African-American journalist Ted Poston, Nash established a regular liason with African American groups and leaders (133-34). Due to his effectiveness, he was appointed Special Assistant to the Director, White House Liason, Office of the War Director from 1942-46. After Roosevelt died, Nash was appointed Special Assistant and then Administrative Assistant to President Harry S. Truman (1946-52). Based on his close relations with leading political actors in the African-American community such as Thurgood Marshall and A. Philip Randolph, Nash played a major role in the formulation of President Truman’s ground-breaking civil rights policies and speeches. Later, John F. Kennedy appointed Nash to a task force on the problems facing Native Americans. As Lewis describes it, the Task Force:

• recommended that bureau goals be shifted from custodial care to increased federal aid for economic development;
• urged greater respect for Indian rights through maximum Indian participation in the formulation and implementation of the programs;
• and, encouraged the removal of “termination” per se as a major objective of the Federal Indian program.

An advisor to Roosevelt and Truman on racial issues, and to Kennedy in support of shifting the focus of the Bureau of Indian Affairs away from termination, as well as being a onetime Lieutenant Governor of the State of Wisconsin, Nash also played a crucial role in the reinstatement of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.

In A Modern Indian Community in the Light of its Past: A Study of Cultural Change (1932), Haviland Scudder Mekeel completed one of the first intensive acculturation studies among Native Americans. Mekeel’s advisor was Edward Sapir, whose influence can be seen in Mekeel’s careful attention to the semiotics of experience in times of change:

A study of change as a process of culture, for instance, inevitably leads to a consideration of the transformations in concepts, attitudes, values—in short, the complete psychological aurae—surrounding those culture traits which are in flux. People do not react to object-in-itself reality, but rather to its symbolic derivatives (Mekeel 1932b).

Mekeel’s dissertation, including its focus on the impact of government programs on the Sioux Nation, caught the attention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier. Mekeel was subsequently appointed director of the Applied Anthropology Unit in the Office of Indian Affairs. He served as Collier’s anthropological consultant and personal representative as the Indian New Deal was operationalized (154). And yet, Mekeel, like Julian Steward (see Kerns 2003, 197-99, 247), grew disenchanted with the Indian Service and many of those working in it because of their ignorance and insensitivity to Native culture. After resigning in 1938 he wrote an insightful critique of the program, the gist of which was that the new reorganization disadvantaged Native peoples and, sadly, thereby effectively undermined their ability to determine their own lives, a key goal of the program (Mekeel 1944). Mekeel subsequently took an academic position at the University of Wisconsin and turned his attention to the causes of race prejudice. His thesis that economic insecurity heightened race prejudice is widely supported by contemporary circumstances across much of the United States today. He died prematurely in 1945 at the age of 47.

Walter Goldschmidt’s research varied in terms of theoretical frame, but it always included an applied component. Ethnographic foci included California farming and agribusiness; Californian and Alaskan Native rights; East African mixed agriculturalists and pastoralists; and class and stratification. His dissertation focused on California agricultural communities composed of Euro-Americans, Mexican, and African Americans. Goldschmidt conducted ethnographic work in the Wasco community and then developed a controlled comparison of two agricultural communities, Dinuba and Arvin. While the farms were larger in Arvin and farm revenue was greater there, Dinuba had higher median incomes, more self-employment, and a more stable population of farmers rather than hired laborers. Dinuba has less marked class differentiation than Wasco. The results of the study were published in As You Sow (1947), a book, Lewis observes, was still taught “more than seventy-five years after its publication” (166).  In the late 1940s, Goldschmidt was sent by the Office of Indian Affairs to investigate Alaska Native land claims. He and his collaborators, including Tlingit interpreter Joe Kahklen, compiled documentation that served as the primary basis for the pursuit of Alaska Native land claims (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998). In the early 1950s, he shifted his attention to Uganda, Africa, and conducted an ethnography of Sebei pastoralists. He eventually expanded the scope of his study in Africa to contrast the relative influence of culture and subsistence ecology. Among a host of other studies and publications, in 1979 he published The Uses of Anthropology, an edited collection of essays exploring ways that anthropology could be applied beyond the university. I found these ready-to-hand cases of scholarship and service fascinating and inspiring. Though I know few such cases as well as I should, I know there are uncountable many more.

The big question I am left with after digesting Lewis’s important book is whether his effort to tell the story of classical anthropologists and their idealistic commitment to a general science of humanity, to anthropological ideas, and to well-intended and effective applied work, represents a sufficient approach to the history of anthropology. In my view, given that insisting on anthropology’s colonial complicity (without concrete examples) has become de rigeur in “summations” of the history of anthropology, done apparently to exemplify the virtuous character of the author, Lewis’s account, which is consistent with other respected accounts, provides a working sketch of anthropological practice across time essential for opening the complex sort of conversation necessary for thinking critically about the challenges of the present. To his credit, Lewis does not make any such claim for his account, and this version of the history of anthropology is not anywhere close to comprehensive, definitive, or standard. No single metanarrative encompasses the many different frames of anthropological practice, the frames of historical interpretation, this more classical take, or the current largely unchallenged historical metanarrative justifying on moral grounds the pursuit of an unending array of narrow and not particularly Hegelian conceptions of the politics of recognition outside of and inside of the discipline, and also justifying the insistence on a departure from documentary social science as necessary precondition.

There are, as we know, many circumstances, unfortunately, in which well-intended anthropology done expressly for the purposes of principled documentation or of alleviating social problems, or even of both, has had unforeseen impacts including in some cases undermining self-determination for specific populations. To use a case that Lewis discusses: after leaving government service, Mekeel registered his disappointment in the operationalization of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). In retrospect, he saw that the IRA to which he had devoted every ounce of his energy and good will with the hope of improving the circumstances of Native American life, undermined self-determination for the most conservative Native Americans—which is to say, for that element which more than any other served as the justification for the entire project. Through his criticism of the very program he did everything in his power to bring into being, Mekeel made clear that this particular collaboration with the American government reproduced paternalistic governance in new forms (1944). For those of us that hope that principled study can bring about enlightened change, we see Mekeel’s reflections as “intrinsic significance to the scientific enterprise as such” (Lenzer 2006, xxxi). As Nick Barron has carefully articulated, the broad attempt to explore the circumstantial factors that undermine applied anthropology is that aspect of the history of anthropology that is most essential to the cultivation of critical reflexivity in unfolding ethnographic practice (Barron 2022). Nevertheless, while encouraging self-reflexivity, we need not allow criticism integral to anthropological practice to morph into a slopulist mythology that anthropological inquiry is virtually everywhere and almost always essentially colonial. On this point, we are indebted to Herbert S. Lewis for correcting the record.

---

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Liveright Publishing Company.

Barron, Nicholas. 2022. “Alfred Kroeber’s Handbook and Land Claims: Anthros, Agents, and Federal (Un) Acknowledgement in Native California.” In Berose: Encyclopédia Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie. https://www.berose.fr/article2551.html?lang=fr.

Garrett, Andrew. 2023. The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. The MIT Press.

Goldschmidt, Walter. 1947. As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness. Harcourt Brace.

Goldschmidt, Walter, ed. 1979. The Uses of Anthropology. Special Publication of the American Anthropological Association, no. 11. Washington, D.C.

Goldschmidt, Walter and Theodore H. Haas. 1998. Haa Aani, Our Land: Tlingit and Haida Land Rights and Use, edited by Thomas F. Thornton. University of Washington Press/Sealaska Heritage Foundation.

Kerns, Virginia. 2003. Scenes from the Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory. University of Illinois Press.

Kroeber, A.L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78. Government Printing Office.

_____. 1929. “Pliny Earle Goddard.” American Anthropologist 31 (1): 108. https://doi/10.1525/aa.1929.31.1.02a00020.

_____. 1931. “The Culture-Area and the Age-Area Concepts of Clark Wissler.” In Stuart A. Rice, ed., Methods in Social Science. The University of Chicago Press.

_____. 1955 “Nature of the Land-Holding Group.” Ethnohistory 2 (4): 303-314. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zb3b2vr.

Kuper, Adam. 1999. “South African Anthropology.” Paideuma 45: 83-101. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40341765.

Lenzer, Gertrud, ed. 2006. Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. With an introduction and postscript by the editor. Transaction Publishers.

Mekeel, Haviland Scudder. 1932a. A Modern Indian Community in the Light of Its Past: A Study of Cultural Change. A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, New Haven.

_____. 1932b. “A Discussion of Cultural Change as Illustrated by Material from a Teton-Dakota Community.” American Anthropologist 34: 274-285. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1932.34.2.02a00070.   

_____. 1944. “An Appraisal of the Indian Reorganization Act.” American Anthropologist 46: 209-217. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1944.46.2.02a00050.

Smith, Anthony. D. 1981. The Ethnic Revival. Cambridge University Press.

Steward, Julian. 1955. “Theory and Application in a Social Science.” Ethnohistory 2 (4): 292-301. https://doi.org/10.2307/480560.

Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Guttman. Princeton University Press.