There's more to anthropology's past than most of us know

Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman's “Decolonizing US Anthropology” is motivated by the painful observation that the world is a hot mess of racism, genocide, dispossession, neoimperialism, inequality, and environmental destruction. And what has anthropology done about it? Precious little, to judge by the results. In asking what the field would have been like if it had confronted the world's problems fittingly, the clear implication Gupta and Stoolman make is that past anthropologists did not do enough (or did not do the right things) to solve burning problems of the here and now in their research, writing, teaching, and activism. But many past anthropologists did work passionately to solve pressing problems, and we should avoid perpetuating their erasure from the discipline's historical memory. In the 1930s, for example, Allison Davis, a Black social anthropologist protégé of W. Lloyd Warner, led a multiracial team studying Jim Crow racism and social class in Natchez, Mississippi. To recruit a young St. Clair Drake to the project, Davis told him: “You can't really smash the system if you don't understand how it works” (Baber 1999, 198). The resulting ethnography, Deep South (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner [1941] 2022), was based on methodologically innovative interracial participant observation. It portrayed the town's Black elite as well as rural Black sharecroppers, and it showed how whites’ economic gain drove anti-Black violence. Davis was the first Black scholar to earn tenure at the University of Chicago and came to occupy a distinguished endowed chair in the Department of Education. His work has faded, wrongly, from most anthropologists’ memory (Varel 2018). Another little-known example is Amelia Susman Schultz, Franz Boas's last PhD student, a white Jewish Brooklynite. Corroborating Native women's accounts with archival research in federal records, Schultz's dissertation was a searing critique of the US government Indian agents, missionaries, and ranchers who committed land theft, enslavement, rape, and massacres of Native people in Round Valley, California, during and after the Gold Rush (Susman 1976). She was pressed to withdraw the dissertation, however, and it remained unpublished for decades because of the settler-colonial complicity of Ralph Linton, Boas's successor at Columbia.1 To gain her PhD, Schultz had to write a second dissertation, on a linguistics topic with Boas's encouragement, and she later worked with the Tsimshian intellectual and high chief William Beynon (Miller 2022). While Boas and other anthropologists regularly hired Beynon to do ethnographic research for works they published in their own names (Anderson and Halpin 2000; Halpern 1978; Menzies 2021), Schultz helped him prepare an article he wrote and facilitated its publication in American Anthropologist without her own name appearing in it at all (Beynon 1941). Schultz then had a career in social work and genetic counseling, where she contributed anthropological perspectives and methods (Miller 2022). Her example, like Davis's, shows that the kind of anthropology many today assume to have been untried in past eras in fact was tried, but it has been suppressed or has remained in obscurity. Yet another example is the mid-twentieth-century movement called action anthropology, started by Sol Tax. Action anthropologists devoted their research, grant writing, and organizational effort to supporting initiatives directed by Indigenous communities, mostly in the United States. Some did community-driven collaborative research; others put their skills and personal energies at the disposal of Indigenous leaders to directly aid political change-making work (see, e.g., Arndt 2019; Smith 2021). Action anthropologists sought on principle to stay out of the spotlight. Their work was often discounted by more prominent anthropologists, and so has been largely forgotten. Their interventions are important for the discipline to recall and reclaim, as they can serve as a model for us in the present. Action anthropologists were productively associated with the development of the field of Native American, Indian, and Indigenous studies (Hancock, in prep). Fortunately, their stories are currently being told by historians of anthropology Joshua Smith, Robert Hancock, and Grant Arndt. In the late 1940s, anthropologists came into the sights of the anticommunist crusades known as McCarthyism. The AAA formed a committee to protect the individuals targeted by the McCarthyist witch hunts, but it was quickly undermined by the ultraconservative anthropologist George Peter Murdock, who got himself appointed as chair.2 Murdock denounced his own colleagues in a letter he wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to David Price's (2004) historical research, we now know the identities of ten of the twelve anthropologists Murdock betrayed: Irving Goldman, Jules Henry, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Oscar Lewis, Richard Morgan, John Murra, Morris Siegel, Morris Swadesh, and Gene Weltfish. All but one was Jewish, and all were involved in antiracist activism, either by public writing, speaking, and broadcasting or by political advocacy and direct service (e.g., Gene Weltfish wrote an antiracist pamphlet with Ruth Benedict that was mass distributed and adapted in a union-produced short film; Richard Morgan, an archaeologist, was an NAACP member and active campaigner against race-restrictive real estate covenants in Columbus, Ohio). The McCarthyists and FBI also persecuted Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Clair Drake, along with many other white anthropologists, such as Robert Armstrong, Cora Du Bois, Kathleen Gough, Jack Harris, Ruth Landes, Ashley Montagu, Philleo Nash, Marvin Opler, Paul Radin, Jerome Rauch, Earle Reynolds, Vera Rubin, Bernhard Stern, and George Stocking. Many lost their jobs and left anthropology. Many suffered distress, humiliation, and often financial ruin. Armstrong and Swadesh emigrated from the United States. Their examples spread fear, leading other anthropologists to censor themselves and steer clear of activism. This is undoubtedly part of why antiracist causes were largely “silenced” in US anthropology for years to come (Price 2004, 64, 71–75, 79, 110ff., 344–45; 2019, 15; see also Maxwell 2015; Stocking 2006, 129–31, 158–82).3 Remembering this can help us grasp the importance of preparing now to protect our fellow anthropologists, this time skillfully, from the neo-McCarthyist attacks being launched today against antiracist initiatives and teachers in US schools, universities, and companies. When we teach foundational courses about anthropology's past, there is no need for hagiography. A syllabus should never be confused with a gallery of saints. Indeed, our students should know about and learn from predecessors’ shortcomings as well as their contributions. I am a white Jewish man, but when I teach about Franz Boas, I draw out his faults, like the failings of his liberal assimilationist solutions to racism (so familiar from my own upbringing) that solidify racism in ways he did not see—but that future generations must recognize.4 I also communicate my deep admiration for his accomplishments, intellectual astuteness and bravery, and mentoring of unprecedently diverse and unconventional students (Bashkow 2020). Much of this is not well conveyed by the stale selections of his writings found in standard anthologies; I update these by including more of Boas's public writings attacking white supremacy and imperialist nationalism, writings that are, sadly, pertinent today. As an intellectual ancestor, Boas is worthy of every anthropology student's attention. It is worth noting that it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that he came to be generally considered a founding figure, thanks in part to the work of my late teacher George Stocking.5 I will close by reporting on one of my own efforts to respond to a question that Gupta and Stoolman raise about how decolonizing anthropology can avoid “ending up re-centering the United States.” I recently began teaching undergraduates about US racism in global comparative perspective. Though the specificities of racism in the United States are striking, they stand out against a background of commonalities with the forms of racism experienced by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, religious and ethnic minorities, and others in societies in many parts of the world. Many of these commonalities stem from shared settler-colonial dynamics, imperialism, or other historical relationships. This comparative inquiry opens a space of learning-across-places that balances students’ experience and knowledge of the United States with centering others. It also shows students the power of comparison, an anthropological staple. Building on my own research on racism and the construction of race in Papua New Guinea (Bashkow 2006), the course lets me examine other present-day and historical examples of racism in the Pacific, Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America and to compare anti-Black and anti-Jewish racism, which are tightly linked in white supremacy (Loeffler 2022). It has allowed me to make anthropology relevant to the experience of many students of color and provided them with positive models for change. It is one way I have tried to contribute to decolonizing anthropology. Others will have their own ways that I could not begin to imagine. There is no end to the ways anthropologists can work to repair the world, each according to our gifts, and I maintain hope that our efforts will lessen the problems and leave a better world to our successors. But the opposing forces are no joke. They are well-resourced, and they are not content to sit still. I will not be surprised if things become worse, and maybe much worse, before they get better. In that case, anthropologists of the future will still be asking why their predecessors failed to repair the world, with all its urgent, evident, murderous problems. I am grateful to Grant Arndt, Nicholas Barron, Tracie Canada, Elizabeth Chin, Lise Dobrin, Tessa Farmer, Robert Hancock, Richard Handler, James Igoe, Rena Lederman, Herb Lewis, Sean Mallin, Peter Metcalf, Jay Miller, David Price, and Joshua Smith for reading drafts of this comment.

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