Reminiscences of Anthropological Currents in America Half a Century Ago

THE Editor of the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST has asked me to offer “some discussion and analysis of the intellectual ferment, the various ideas and interests, and the important factual discoveries in their relationship to these ideas, that were current during the period of your early years as an anthropologist.” In responding I shall have to go far afield. The task suggested implies nevertheless two noteworthy restrictions. Factual discoveries are irrelevant (except as they influenced ideas), as is administrative promotion of scientific interests. Accordingly, though sharing Sapir’s judgment that as a field worker J. O. Dorsey was “ahead of his age,” I must ignore him for present purposes. Again, there will be only brief references to Frederic Ward Putnam (1839-1915) and to Frederic Webb Hodge (18641956); as to Powell and McGee, only their thinking demands extended notice. It is well to recall that in 1904, when I began graduate work, only Columbia, Harvard, and California had full-fledged academic departments of anthropology, but the Field Museum, a descendant of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, had been fostering research, as had