Ruth Landes (1908-91) is now recognized as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations. Ahead of her time in many respects, Landes worked with issues that defined the central debates in the discipline at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In Ruth Landes, Sally Cole reconsiders Landes's life, work, and career, and places her at the heart of anthropology. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Landes studied under the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas and was mentored by Ruth Benedict. Landes's rejection of domestic life led to an early divorce. Her ideas regarding gender roles...

Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge is the first full-scale biography of the trailblazing anthropologist of African and African American cultures. Born into a world of racial hierarchy, Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963) employed physical anthropology and ethnography to undermine racist and hierarchical ways of thinking about humanity and to underscore the value of cultural diversity. His research in West Africa, the West Indies, and South America documented the far-reaching influence of African cultures in the Americas. He founded the first major interdisciplinary...

Anthropologists have long sought to extricate their work from the policies and agendas of those who dominate and often oppress their native subjects. Looking through Taiwan is an uncompromising look at a troubling chapter in American anthropology that reveals what happens when anthropologists fail to make fundamental ethnic and political distinctions in their work. Keelung Hong and Stephen O. Murray examine how Taiwanese realities have been represented and misrepresented in American social science literature, especially anthropology, in the post World War II period. They trace...

In August of 1838 the United States Exploring Expedition set sail from Norfolk Navy Yard with six ships and more than seven hundred crewmen, including technicians and scientists. Over the course of four years the expedition made stops on the east and west coasts of South America; visited Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, and Tahiti; discovered the Antarctic land mass; and explored the Fiji Islands, Tonga, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Pacific Coast of North America. In The Shaping of American Ethnography Barry Alan Joyce illuminates the process by which the Americans on the expedition filtered...

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans charts American anthropology in the 1920s through the life and work of one of the amateur scholars of the time, Jaime de Angulo (1887 1950). Although he earned a medical degree, de Angulo chose to live on an isolated ranch in Big Sur, California, where he participated fully in the lives of the people who were his ethnographic informants. The period of his most extensive research coincides almost perfectly with the professionalization of anthropology, and de Angulo provides a link between those who are generally recognized as the most important figures of...

World's fairs and industrial expositions constituted a phenomenally successful popular culture movement during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the newest technological innovations, each exposition showcased commercial and cultural exhibits, entertainment concessions, national and corporate displays of wealth, and indigenous peoples from the colonial empires of the host country. As scientists claiming specialized knowledge about indigenous peoples, especially American Indians, anthropologists used expositions to promote their quest for professional status and authority....

Considered one of the most influential and articulate figures in American anthropology, Ruth Benedict (1887 1948) was trained by Franz Boas and Elsie Clews Parsons and collaborated with the equally renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, a student of hers with whom she was for a time romantically involved. When Benedict died suddenly at the age of sixty-one, she was popularly known for two best-selling works: Patterns of Culture, which became an exemplary model of the integration of societies, and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of Japanese culture commissioned by the...

Visionary Observers explores the relationship between anthropology and public policy, examining the careers of nine twentieth-century American anthropologists who made important contributions to debates about race, ethnicity, socialization, and education. Included are Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology; Ruth Benedict, who analyzed modern societies during and after World War II; Margaret Mead, anthropology's most recognized public educator; Gene Weltfish, whose "pragmatic anthropology" positioned education at the core of culture; Hortense Powdermaker, whose fieldwork embraced...

Invisible Genealogies is a landmark reinterpretation of the history of anthropology in North America. During the past two decades, theorizing by many American anthropologists has called for an "experimental moment" grounded in explicit self-reflexive scholarship and experimentation with alternate forms of presentation. Such postmodern anthropology has effectively downplayed connections with past luminaries in the field, whose scholarship is perceived to be uncomfortably colonialist and nonreflexive. Ironically, as the American Anthropological Association nears its one hundredth anniversary...

Irregular Connections traces the anthropological study of sex from the eighteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on social and cultural anthropology and the work done by researchers in North America and Great Britain. Andrew P. and Harriet D. Lyons argue that the sexuality of those whom anthropologists studied has been conscripted into Western discourses about sex, including debates about prostitution, homosexuality, divorce, premarital relations, and hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Because sex is the most private of activities and often carries a high emotional charge, it...