A Social History of Anthropology in the United States

Thomas C. Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182217
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the social history of anthropology in the United States, examining the circumstances that gave rise to the discipline and illuminating the role of anthropology in the modern world.

Thomas C. Patterson considers the shifting social and political-economic conditions in which anthropological knowledge has been produced and deployed, the appearance of practices focused on particular regions or groups, the place of anthropology in structures of power, and the role of the educator in forging, perpetuating, and changing representations of past and contemporary peoples. The book addresses the negative reputation that anthropology took on as an offspring of imperialism, and provides fascinating insight into the social history of America.

In this second edition, the material has been revised and updated, including a new chapter that covers anthropological theory and practice during the turmoil created by multiple ongoing crises at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is valuable reading for students and scholars interested in the origins, development, and theory of anthropology.

1 Nation-building on the edge of empires, 1600–1877

The European countries established more than fifty colonies in the Americas. The thirteen English-speaking colonies along the Atlantic coast that rebelled against British authority in 1774 were not the only ones in North America. There was nearly a dozen more in Canada and around the Caribbean in addition to the Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese colonies. As important was the fact that the British colonies were not homogeneous societies. They were class-stratified from their inception, and there were sharp distinctions between large property owners, servants, indentured workers, freeholders who barely scraped out a livelihood, and slaves.

By 1700, the British colonists had claimed much more land than they actually inhabited; most of their settlements were located within fifty miles or so of the coast. More importantly, overwhelming numbers of native peoples lived in their traditional homelands in the spaces between and beyond the European settlements—e.g., the Iroquois, Wabanaki, and Creek confederacies in the East or the Comanche empire in the Southwest. The colonists and Indian peoples were interconnected through shared economic and political interests, on the one hand, and occasionally through marital and family ties, on the other. This web of interdependence was contingent and shifted continuously. How both understood and experienced the linkages and the milieu in which they lived depended in significant ways on the places they occupied in the larger fabric. Every group made use of anthropological information to shed light on what had happened, what was taking place, and the potential implications of alternative courses of action in the future.

Since the people who produced anthropology were themselves the products of colonial expansion and capitalism, they were already quite familiar with the arguments of the European advocates and critics of those circumstances. They drew on the same bodies of social thought, and participated in the same debates as their contemporaries in Europe (Patterson 1997). They drew from their experiences of living in class-stratified societies in some instances. They also drew inspiration variously from the Bible as a source of historical information and from writers who proclaimed the immaturity or degeneration of the New World and its inhabitants; the irrationality and inferiority of slaves and peoples without property; and ideas about the development of human society through a succession of different modes of subsistence culminating in the commercialism of an industrial capitalist civilization. Like many of their European contemporaries, they came to see peoples or nations distinguished from one another by differences in language, customs, and physical condition.

The participants in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 on the margins of the Virginia colony used the language of social class. The governor and the large planters referred to the lower-class rebels as human excrement; the rebels referred to them as land-grabbers (Isenberg 2016:36–9). Literate Indian peoples who spoke, read, and wrote English (among other languages)—like Alexander McGillivray (Creek) and Joseph Brant (Mohawk)—petitioned the Spanish and French kings, seeking their support to oppose further American land seizures and expansion into their traditional homelands. In a letter written to the King of Spain in 1785, McGillivray and the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw chiefs deployed the natural rights argument of John Locke (1632–1704), claiming that the Americans were “stripping us of our natural rights by depriving us of that inheritance which belonged to our ancestors and hath descended from them to us since the beginning of time” (Kathleen DuVal, personal communication).

After the revolution, the Americans had three major concerns: to create a distinctive national identity; to expand settlement and land claims into the Indian territories; and to consolidate a slave-based economy in the South. Let us consider these in more detail.

Establishing a national identity and the dialectics of anthropology

Asserting that they had a distinctive national identity also involved the Indian peoples demonstrating that they had the capacity to develop a civil and political society that was morally superior to those of the European countries. It meant that they had to refute the arguments of influential European writers—like Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788)—who asserted the natural inferiority of the New World, its inhabitants, and their societies. Buffon and his followers raised an important political question: Would the American experiment fail because of obstructions imposed by Nature? It was essential for Americans envoys—such as Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), James Madison (1751–1836), or Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)—to rebut Buffon’s arguments in the 1770s and 1780s if they were to obtain sorely needed financial assistance and credit in Europe. They had to show that Nature was neither hostile nor immutable in the Americas, and that the United States was indeed a good risk (Chinard 1947; Gerbi 1973).

In Natural History (1749), Buffon had claimed that the main difference between the Old and New Worlds lay in the geological age. The American continents were younger; Nature was simultaneously less active and more severe; their mountains were higher, their environments wilder and more inaccessible, and their animals smaller. Even domesticated animals transported from Europe became smaller with time. The American continents were

an unprolific land, thinly peopled with wandering savages, who, instead of using this territory, who, instead of using this territory as a master, had no property or empire; and having subjected neither the animals nor the elements, nor conquered the seas, nor directed the motion of the rivers, nor cultivated the earth, held only the first rank among animate beings … incapable of improving or fecunding her [i.e., Nature’s] intentions.

It is easy to discover the cause of the scattered life of savages, and of their estrangement from society. They have been refused the most precious of Nature’s fire (Buffon quoted by Chinard 1947:31).

For Buffon, the American Indians failed to develop civil and political institutions—i.e., civilization—because of their own weakly developed nature and passive acceptance of their surroundings. However, the European settlers in the Americas were already beginning to conquer and transform Nature. Subsequent writers frequently misrepresented Buffon’s views by focusing exclusively on the indifference and harshness of Nature in the New World. It was their opinions as much as Buffon’s that politicians, scientists, and natural philosophers in the United States sought to refute.

Many of the more prominent critics of Buffon and his followers were affiliated with the American Philosophical Society, which had been founded at the urging of Benjamin Franklin in 1743 to promote “useful knowledge among the British plantations in America” (Freeman 1967; van Doren 1943). While Franklin countered their arguments, citing evidence of rapid growth of the English population in North America in the eighteenth century, and Madison commented on climatic changes brought about by clearing land in Virginia, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1982[1785]) was a lengthy, detailed response which brought to bear a wide range of evidence, including the discovery of mammoth bones in Ohio as well as ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological information that he and others had collected over the years to support his claims (Chinard 1947:40–52).

Jefferson argued that Nature was equal in the Old and New Worlds. Since Nature was bountiful in the Americas, both the English settlers and the Indians, who were essentially the same race in his eyes, were able to realize their potential. His response was based on a theory of Nature that resembled those of Enlightenment writers such as Claude Helvétius (1715–1771) in France and Adam Smith (1723–1790) in Scotland (Curti 1980:71–103; Meek 1976; Miller (1988:56–90; Weyant 1973). He believed that human beings possessed the same innate moral sense, capacity to reason, and biological needs: “all men were created equal,” and human nature was the same on both sides of the Atlantic (Jefferson 1982[1785]:121). While human nature was the same everywhere, it was only realized in society. Consequently, the differences between societies resulted from their environmental circumstances and the stage they had achieved in the development of civilization. In Jefferson’s view, the Indians’ level of social development resembled that of Europeans living north of the Alps at the time of the Roman Empire. However, since human nature was plastic, if the Indians adopted agriculture, then their cultures could meet, intermix, and blend with the more highly developed culture of the European settlers. In 1784, legislation was proposed in Virginia that promised free education, tax relief, and monetary credits to promote marriage between Americans of European descent and indigenous peoples (Miller 1991:65).

The Americans were aware of the cultural and physical diversity of the peoples who lived in the New Republic. A number of them sought to identify who the Americans were and who they were becoming in ways that would enhance the nation’s standing in the eyes of the European countries. These were questions of about slavery, morality, and politics as much as they were about race and environment. Slavery had a profound effect on political debate before, during, and after the revolution—and most especially after the slave revolt in Haiti (1793) and the formation of the first free Black country in the Americas. The Sons of Liberty’s calls for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property) were also heard by slave populations in Virginia and the Carolinas—but heard differently. On the eve of the war, slave owners feared a slave uprising; fuel was added to these fears in 1775, when the Royal Governor of Virginia issued a proclamation granting lifelong freedom to any slaves who could escape and would bear arms against the American rebels. Most of the escaped slaves fought for the British; the rest took shelter with Indian tribes in the mountains and beyond. Perhaps 20 percent of American slaves gained their freedom during the war, many of whom emigrated to Nova Scotia after the war because of the political climate that prevailed in the new country (Nash 1986:271–5).

In 1782, writer Hector de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813) claimed that the Americans were a “new race of men,” partly because of the strange mixture of blood that existed in no other country and partly because of the new mode of life they embraced (Crèvecoeur 1904[1782]:46). In 1787, Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751–1819), moral philosopher and president of Princeton University, wrote that the new nation or race was not so much a product of intermixing as it was of Negroes and Indians being transformed into Whites because of the new habits of living they were adopting (Smith 1810[1787]:100). In his view, the descendants of the Europeans, Indians, and Negroes belonged to the same species; the variability in their appearance resulted from the influence of climate and differences in their state of society and habits of living. Given the plasticity of the human species, the climate and culture of America would make the members of all races of the new nation, including the descendants of European workers and peasants, whiter. Thus, the state of society would augment or correct the influence of climate; however, it would not overcome the inequalities brought by slavery and laws.

Samuel Stanhope Smith’s An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787) was a common explanation of the corporeal plasticity of human beings into the 1830s (Horsman 1981:98–115; Jordan 1965; Spencer 1997). He argued that—given similar climatic conditions, “states of society,” and “manners of living” (i.e., level of cultural development)—human beings would come to look like one another. In his view, the original state of humankind was civilized: that is, people were socially stratified food-producers (farmers and herders) who engaged in commerce and whose “commerce, arts, religion, habits of thinking, and ideas of all kinds naturally arising out of this state” reproduced the existing social order (Smith 1810[1787]:109). Thus, both the state of society and the appearance of human beings were disrupted when they moved into unfavorable climates like the Siberian Arctic or tropical Africa; the effects of the environment “were most pronounced among the laboring classes who were most exposed to it” (Jordan 1965:xxix). Smith also presumed that Americans were becoming a new race of men, not because of intermixing but rather because Blacks and Indians were being transformed into Whites as they adopted new habits of living. Smith’s account, like that of Jefferson, resonated with the biblical account of human origins, dispersal, and differentiation; with the notion of a world that was not very old, with patriarchy; and with the idea of a hierarchy of races—an older, original White race and more recent, derivative or the “cursed” races of Exodus IX (Haynes 2002). It also provided a justification for slavery.

Not everyone accepted the views that America was or should become a nation of mixed races (Jordan 1968). In 1773, Benjamin Rush (1745–1813)—a Philadelphia physician, prominent politician, and anti-slavery advocate—recognized the racial diversity of America. He combined “natural rights” and environmental arguments to portray the differences. Indians, for example, exhibited no madness and lacked envy because of the equality of power and property in their societies, although they lacked a future because of their intemperance with alcohol. Furthermore,

All the vices which are charged on Negroes in the southern colonies and the West Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery and serve as an argument to prove that they were not intended (Rush 1773:2–3).

In contrast, Jefferson’s views about race and sex differences were inconsistent. While Jefferson believed that the differences between the Indians and the Europeans were superficial—a matter of environment and history rather than biology—he did not extend the same argument to either women or Blacks. He claimed—like St. Paul and the Puritans, and unlike Helvétius and Mary Wollstonecraft—that woman as a group possessed less reasoning power than men, and therefore should be encouraged to refine their aesthetic and moral endowments (Curti 1980:81–2). Jefferson, the slave owner, was ever fearful of slave revolt, especially after the one in Haiti. In his early years, he condemned slavery as an institution, and recognized that the condition of slaves was miserable. He also suspected that Blacks, whom he believed were the moral equals of Whites, lacked the latter’s power of reason and imagination. Black slaves, he argued, were less creative and innovative than Roman slaves who lived under even more odious conditions. The only difference he could discern was that the slaves of Rome were White. His conclusion, usually hedged with qualifications, was that the conditions of women and Blacks were innate, a consequence of their nature and biology rather than of the circumstances in which they lived (Jefferson 1982[1785]:139–42, 163; Jordan 1968:429–81). If Jefferson implied in his discussions of Indians and Whites, not to mention in his political writings, that all human beings belonged to the same species, then his writings about Blacks implied that races of humanity existed, and that they existed in a hierarchy if they were not actually separate species. If his discussions of the Indians and their accomplishments vindicated the American environment, then his remarks about African-Americans justified slavery, and his comments about women condoned inequality by excluding them from political debate.

Still others followed the argument of physician Charles White (1728–1813), who applied the idea of a “great chains of being” in his Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799), which claimed that there was a hierarchy of races defined partly in terms of their geographical history (Lovejoy 1960[1936]). Europeans were the highest, most advanced grade, while Africans were the least developed. Buttressed by anti-miscegenation laws, this argument underwrote widespread calls in Virginia in the 1790s for the removal of freed Negroes. By 1805, any freed man or woman who did not leave the state within a year faced re-enslavement. Neighboring states—Ohio, Maryland, Kentucky, and Delaware—enacted legislation banning African-Americans from entering to take up permanent residence. From the standpoint of these legislatures, the new republic would be a White nation. Former slaves could return to Africa, which many of them did when Liberia was established in 1847 (Jordan 1968:553).

Jefferson and his contemporaries in the American Philosophical Society held a highly political view of language: It was a distinctively human attribute that made communication possible. Some linked the origin of language to the Old Testament, and saw it originating when Adam gave names to various animals and diversifying when God confounded the tongue spoken by the people who built Babel and dispersed them across the face of the Earth (Genesis XI). For others, such as Jefferson and lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843) who followed the views of John Locke, languages were not God-given but merely assemblages of utterances that signified particular ideas for their speakers. More importantly, however, they reflected the unique social and intellectual experiences of those speakers. Thus, a nation’s language reflected its history—and studying things pertaining to its words were a way of gaining insight into both the history of nations and humanity itself (Aarsleff 1982:108–10; Gray 1999:87–111); Smith 1979).

Jefferson believed that a knowledge of American Indian languages would provide evidence of their origins:

How many ages have eclipsed since the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss, the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes have separated from their common stock? Yet how many must elapse before proofs of their common origin, which exist in their several languages will disappear? It is to be lamented then … that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Nation-building on the edge of empires, 1600–1877
• 2 Anthropology in the Age of the Robber Barons, 1860–1929
• 3 Anthropology and the search for social order, 1929–1945
• 4 Decolonization, the Cold War, and McCarthyism, 1945–1973
• 5 Crises, neoliberalism, and globalization, 1973–2000
• 6 Anthropology in the New Gilded Age, 1990–2019
• Bibliography
• Index