1. Introduction: Anthropology in the American Century

The United States emerged from World War Two as a Super Power at the dawn of what is sometimes called The American Century: a world dominated by American military, economic, and political power. True enough, it was a bipolar world. For most of the next half century, a Cold War would be waged. The Cold War pitted the Western liberal democracies – chiefly the United States, Great Britain, and France – against the authoritarian communist regimes, primarily the Soviet Union. In most cases, the wars were by proxy, fought via oblique interventions – through the deployment of “advisors” and “trainers” and shipments of arms and munitions. But occasionally the big powers became directly involved: Britain in Kenya, France in Algeria and Indochina, with the United States entering Vietnam after the French retreated.

Almost overnight, geopolitical maps of the world shifted and globes became dated. But it was mostly a change of names, as the boundaries of colonial administrative units became the boundaries of new, independent nations. In this world sans direct colonial rule, anthropologists – and especially American anthropologists – became globe-trotting internationalists. American anthropologists rapidly expanded their geographic range beyond North America and the Western hemisphere, and began entering Africa, the Pacific, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia in large numbers. If in 1930 the modal American dissertation focused on Native North America, by 1960 American anthropologists could be found in Papua New Guinea, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Ghana, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Turkey … everywhere it was relatively safe for an American to go. And that did matter. By 1960, Cuba, Eastern Europe, North Korea, and the Soviet Bloc behind the Iron Curtain were off-limits. During this era of expanding American geopolitical power, area studies programs were funded by the U.S. military and other federal agencies. Alongside political scientists, sociologists, and historians, anthropologists received support to develop expertise on areas of strategic national interest around the globe (Guyer, 2004).  We will have more to say about this in a later chapter.

In contrast to the American situation, for social anthropologists in Britain and France, the end of direct colonial rule produced a crisis. Well into the 1950s, many British social anthropologists built on the foundation established by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski. For many, anthropology continued to be the intensive, long-term study of local communities in small-scale “primitive” societies. But that tradition seemed entirely ill-suited to the new post-colonial political landscape. For a time, there was hope that French structural anthropology – and later yet French structural Marxism – would somehow make anthropology fit the post-colonial order. But by  the end of the decade, investment in social anthropology in Britain declined, and the most innovative anthropologists were emigrating to the United States. Within a decade, outside of introductory textbooks, many anthropologists would begin referring to their field as sociocultural anthropology, which represented the merger of American, British, and French traditions. As for Germany, as we have noted, World War Two marked the end of a previously rich anthropological tradition. To this day, German anthropology still has not regained the prominence it held from the Enlightenment to World War One.

In the United States, by contrast, anthropology flourished. But as it flourished, it also changed. For one thing, dissertations were completed at an accelerating pace, and annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association soon had thousands of attendees. Although still dominated by cultural anthropology, growth occurred across all four sub-fields (cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics). For a time, as we will see, anthropology seemed to be genuinely integrating as a holistic discipline. A New Archeology (yes, the spelling is correct!), and a new physical anthropology emerged, grounded in perspectives that were compatible with the scientific ambitions of cultural materialism in cultural anthropology. But not everyone was onboard. In cultural anthropology, a Neo-Boasian tradition emerged, that eventually rejected science in favor of a humanistic anthropology. And some archaeologists and physical anthropologists rejected new approaches to their fields. As a result, by the early 1970s the discipline would divide into two hostile camps: scientific materialists and humanistic idealists.

1.1 Boom Times in American Anthropology (1945-1975)

In the decades following the end of World War Two, a new generation of anthropologists rose to prominence in the United States. They developed what they saw as new approaches to anthropology in a new institutional framework. But there were, as one might expect, many continuities. Before examining that more closely, let’s examine growth in this hopeful age.

It was a period of academic prosperity. Enrollments at American universities surged in the post war era. In 1930, 122,000 bachelor degrees and 2,300 doctorates were awarded in the United States across all academic disciplines. Two decades later, the educational benefits provided by the G. I. Bill of Rights pushed those numbers much higher: to 432,000 bachelor degrees and 6,600 doctorates in 1950. And just as the G.I. Bill began slowing, the “baby boom” generation – the children of the veterans – reached college age. As a result, the number of bachelor degrees awarded doubled again in just two decades, reaching 827,000 in 1970. More remarkably, during the same two decades the number of doctoral degrees awarded more than quadrupled, to almost 30,000 (Bureau of the Census, 2011).

For three decades – from 1945 to 1975 – taxpayer support for public higher education was strong. State funding was generous and college was not yet a matter of student loans needing repayment. Fees were low, and new grant programs paid the fees of many students. Equally important, new colleges and universities opened at a rapid clip. Growth was everywhere. It was in this context that anthropology achieved broad legitimacy and public support. By 1970 anthropology was a recognized discipline, welcome on almost every campus. Equally significant, introductory courses in anthropological archaeology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology quickly became part of the liberal arts curriculum at almost all public colleges and universities, as well as most private colleges. Unsurprisingly, students who earned anthropology PhDs during these years obtained academic positions before the ink on their diplomas was dry.

Of equal importance, federal investment in research – including social and behavioral research – also grew rapidly during the same decades. In 1950, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was established, and by the 1960s anthropologists were receiving funding from the NSF as well as other federal programs. For cultural anthropologists, funding by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) program – a division of the National Institutes of Health – was especially important (Kaiser and Kohrt, 2019). In addition, new federal initiatives tied to the War on Poverty employed many anthropologists. You might be thinking: Okay, but what about protests against the Vietnam War? What about the counter-culture? You are correct, those currents also mattered, and we will get to them in later chapters. The story to focus on now, however, it this: Although it represented a comparatively small piece of the higher educational pie, between 1945 and 1975 anthropology successfully transitioned to a new institutional reality, and for a time, it flourished.

1.2 How Growth Produced Declining Diversity

Racism did not magically disappear from the United States nor the wider world after the defeat of the Nazi racial state and the Axis powers. Nor did it end with Brown v. the Board of Education and school desegregation. Despite important steps to empower racial minorities and reduce racial segregation, by some measures the United States was more segregated in 1960 than it had been in 1940. The activism of the Civil Rights Movement encountered a new era of segregation driven by the rise of suburban communities and the abandonment of urban centers. As a predominantly white middle class moved to the suburbs, protests against segregation from Mississippi to South Boston felt far away.

During the Boasian era, as we have discussed, Anthropology at Columbia University admitted Native American, Black, immigrant, and Jewish students, resulting in a remarkably diverse profession in the context of the wider society. The same thing holds for gender. After Boas shifted his undergraduate lectures from Columbia to Barnard College, nearly all of his doctoral students were women. By 1940 – at Columbia, in anthropology – women were earning doctoral degrees at a faster pace than men. In 1942 Elsie Clews Parsons would become the first female President of the American Anthropology Association. But the Boasian island of diversity and intellectual freedom that Charles King has so eloquently described (King, 2020) was a very small island indeed. As we saw in prior chapters, earning a PhD under Boas did not translate into employment. None of Boas’s female or minority students founded departments, and very few obtained tenured appointments.

The lack of employment opportunities became a memory after 1945, but the opportunities were narrow, and applications from women and minorities were few. How did this happen? The growth we have noted above was mostly homogenizing: a higher ed parallel to suburban white flight. Ironically, as anthropology quickly grew larger after 1945, it also grew whiter.

Boas described his efforts as a struggle against social prejudice, but often the workings of prejudice were structural and oblique. For example, the tremendous increase in university enrollment fueled by G.I. Bill of Rights benefits was unevenly distributed. Black Americans and women largely failed to receive these benefits, for different reasons. Black G.I. ‘s leaving the military faced multiple barriers. Confined to poorly funded districts, their schooling prior to their service was often insufficient to prepare them for university admission and professional advancement. Their home communities were often severely segregated and lacked public services and jobs. And on departing the military, they were much more likely to receive less than honorable discharges, making them ineligible for G.I. benefits. For example, in Connecticut, Blacks made up 18% of enlisted men in the armed forces , but bore 30% of all less than honorable discharges. Thus the big boom in higher education largely by-passed people of color.

Women were also largely excluded from the G.I. Bill. It is true that women served in record numbers during and after World War Two – 360,000 women entered the military during the war. But their presence was small compared to that of men: 16 million men served. As a result, as American universities expanded male veterans were positioned to enter the classroom as students and then faculty, and during these boom years, both students and faculty were predominant white and male. They were also predominantly American born, and their immigrant roots were third or fourth generation. Again, this reflected the alignment of high education and anthropology with the larger society. In 1910 – when Boas was at the peak of his influence – 15% of Americans were immigrants. By 1950, that figure was 7%, and by 1970 it was well below 5%. As a result, women and minority students who entered anthropology departments during the 1960s and early 1970s  found themselves in departments that looked very different from the Boasian cohorts at Columbia University during the 1920s.

One group did benefit: males descended from eastern and southern European immigrants. Readers will recall Boas’s massive study of the head form of immigrants from Europe and their American born children. His work failed to defeat immigration quotas. But larger political forces – namely growing numbers – shaped a newly expansive definitions of who was white – a definition that included for the first time immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe (Jacobson, 1999).

2. Post-Boasian Anthropology and the Committee on Un-American Activities

It is important to note that anthropologists who had rallied to challenge Nazi racial anthropology continued their activism at home after 1945. Although the 1960s are often discussed as a decade of rebellion and social activism in contrast to the 1950s – which are portrayed as a decade of conformity – that perception is faulty. Labor union membership was much higher in the 1950s, strikes were much more common. And although anti-racist activism was more risky, the risks were taken.

Consider the case of Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish. Both were accomplished students of Franz Boas. Despite their scholarly accomplishments, as female faculty they served as adjuncts at Columbia University for decades. In 1943 – within months of Boas’ death – Benedict and Weltfish wrote a pamphlet together titled The Races of Mankind. Funded by the Public Affairs Committee – a non-profit organization whose mission was to  counter the influence of Nazi propaganda in the United States – the pamphlet was intended for wide public distribution. It’s purpose was to communicate anthropological arguments for human unity and racial equality. Initially, it was a success. The United States military ordered 55,000 copies and intended to distribute copies to all service personnel. Those plans were scuttled however. In part this reflected the fact that the US Armed Forces remained segregated until 1948, when President Truman signed Executive Order 9981. But many Americans were unhappy about efforts to dismantle segregation. Many members of commerce – and not just southerners – equated opposition to racism with communism. The pamphlet drew the ire of powerful politicians, and the Department of Defense canceled their requests for additional copies and ceased distribution.

Benedict died in 1948, but Gene Weltfish continued her activism. Weltfish helped produce a short film titled The Brotherhood of Man through a collaboration with General Motors. She also published a story for children titled In Henry’s Backyard (Weltfish, 1948).  The film and the book made the same argument: humanity is one species, biological races are fictions, and racial inequality is the political outcome of social prejudice.

By 1953 The Races of Mankind was declared subversive literature by Senator Joe McCarthy, who had ascended to a leadership role on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The Committee had been formed in 1938, but it became prominent after 1950. It appears that Ralph Linton, who replaced Boas as Chair of the Anthropology Department at Columbia University,  was responsible for bringing Weltfish and her  “subversive” activities to the attention of McCarthy. When Weltfish was called to testify before the HUAC, Columbia University, wishing to avoid controversy, fired Weltfish before she made her first appearance. On the stand, Weltfish refused to name “other communists in her circle.” Like other academics, artists, and writers of the era, Weltfish was blacklisted, ultimately along with everyone involved in the making The Brotherhood of Man for General Motors. She was unable to secure academic employment again until 1961. Weltfish was not alone in being targeted as a subversive during this era, nor was Linton the only anthropologist who denounced their colleagues (Price, 2004).

3. The Culture Question IN POST-WAR ANTHROPOLOGY

The first Boasian – Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) – is today remembered primarily for his research in Native California (Kroeber, 1925). We will return to that aspect of his work in a later chapter.  But for much of his career, Kroeber was best known for his voluminous writings on the concept of culture (Kroeber, 1952). Among Boasian anthropologists, culture was the most fundamental concept, and Kroeber – among others – invested much effort developing a theoretical framework for thinking about culture. Kroeber explored a wide range of approaches, including the geography of cultural variation, Freudian psychotherapy (Burnham, 2012), the quantitative analysis of cultural change (Richardson and Kroeber, 1940), and cultural history on a global scale (Kroeber, 1962). After retiring Kroeber traveled and served as a visiting Professor in a variety of departments, including the University of Chicago. He died in 1960 while traveling in Europe, working on a new vision for the future of the continent that anticipated the European Union (EU).

All of this is shared to make a point: one might expect Kroeber’s work on culture to have had a lasting influence. But in fact, the ground was shifting in the 1950s, and Kroeber would soon be largely forgotten outside of California. His name would be revived in the twenty-first century largely in relation to posthumous ethical scandals that would diminish his California accomplishments (Lewis, 2022).

But in two collaborations near the end of his life, Kroeber expressed misgivings about the coherence of the anthropological concept of culture that proved prophetic.

In 1952, Kroeber collaborated with Clyde Kluckhohn, who was a leader in thinking about anthropological theory, to produce the book titled Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, et al, 1952). The volume traced the history of the concept and painstakingly surveyed the highly varied ways that it had been defined and applied. Kroeber and Kluckhohn concluded that the concept was overly complex, and badly needed to be unified and simplified. It was an omnibus concept that embraced too much to have analytical utility.

A few years later, shortly before his death, Kroeber collaborated with Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). Parsons had recently founded the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, a place where anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists studied together. Parsons was already the most influential social theorist in the United States, and he would retain a central position until his death, when he, too, would quickly be forgotten. But at the time, the collaboration of Kroeber and Parsons promised to be something of a pivotal encounter. Parsons would later refer to co-authoring the paper with Kroeber as a career high point (Parsons, 1972). Ensconced at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, they sought to establish a common framework that would enable sociologists and anthropologists to work together, each contributing their distinctive perspective.

From the early twentieth century forward, American anthropologists wrote about culture, and American sociologists wrote about society. They rarely cited one another, even though they often seemed to be talking about the same thing. In addition, anthropologists often borrowed the conceptual language of social theory in their work, while sociologists frequently wrote about culture without mentioning anthropology. Kroeber and Parsons sought to clarify this relationship – by cutting the culture concept down to size.

The result of their efforts was less dramatic than one might expect. Culture, they decided, refers to patterns of symbolic meanings, while society has to do with structures of social relations (Kroeber & Parsons, 1958). This proposal did not go entirely unnoticed. Most notably, the distinction between symbolic meanings and social relations was adopted and creatively applied by Clifford Geertz (e.g., Geertz, 1957). Geertz studied with Parsons and Kluckhohn at Harvard, and he  put their framework into print even before their own paper came out. Geertz would go on to become one of the most prominent cultural theorists of the era, and he would define culture as symbolic meaning for the remainder of his career, but in a late life retrospective Geertz made no mention of either Kroeber or Parsons (Geertz, 1984). Nor did anyone else seem interested.

In the end, Kroeber’s most important contribution was his insight that the concept of culture was too complex and unwieldy to reach the level of theory. To have value, the culture concept had to be cut down to size. In the next decade, anthropologists would work on that problem. Culture would be reduced according to two very different visions. The first approach – led by Geertz – restricted culture to symbolic meanings. An opposing approach – led by Marvin Harris – reduced culture to material processes. By 1970, the debate between cultural materialists and cultural idealists would become the most consequential issue in American cultural anthropology. That too, would soon change, as we will see in a later chapter.

summary

American anthropology emerged as the most influential anthropological tradition after 1945. For the next three decades, it was a rapidly growing discipline whose geographic scope rapidly expanded. It was well funded and increasingly integrated into a research complex that drew heavily on federally funded programs. By 1970, courses and textbooks introducing cultural anthropology, archaeology, and physical anthropology were standard, and anthropologists were respected, accepted contributors to the general education of surging numbers of undergraduates at accredited universities. Many thousands of American college students would study cultural relativism, learn that the hominid lineage extended millions of years into the past, realize that English was just one of over 5,000 mutually unintelligible languages, and recognize that the modern diet of Europeans had origins in the Americas (including maize, peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes, just for starters).

The core theoretical issue of this period was the concept of culture. The chapters that follow will introduce and compare materialist and idealist concepts of culture; and also address the development of the New Archaeology and the New Physical Anthropology.

Supplemental Open Educational Resources

Executive Order 9981: Desegregation of the Armed Forces (1948)

House Un American Activities Committee. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.

References Cited

Guyer, Jane I. 2004. “Anthropology in Area Studies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (1): 499–523.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1999. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press.

Kaiser, Bonnie N., and Brandon A. Kohrt. 2019. “Why Psychiatry Needs the Anthropologist: A Reflection on 80 Years of Culture in Mental Health.” Psychiatry 82(3): 205–15.

King, Charles. 2020. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Price, David H. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Duke University Press.

Weltfish, Gene. 1948. In Henry’s Backyard. Schuman