BOOK REVIEWS 195

7. Staughton Lynd, “Robert S. Lynd: The Elk Basin Experience,” p. 14. 8. Robert S. Lynd. “Done in Oil,” pp. 23-40; originally published in The Survey 49 (November 1922): 136-

146. 9. This and statements below are based on my own research in Rockefeller archives. Donald Fisher of

Simon Fraser University is working on the influence of Rockefeller philanthropy on social science. A provocative study is James Peter Mulherin’s “The Sociology of Work and Organizations; Historical Context and Pattern of Development” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1980), which uses Rockefeller materials. 10. I I . 12. court, Brace & World, 1969), pp. 395-396.

Mark C. Smith, “Robert Lynd and Consumerism in the 1930s,” pp. 99-121. Theodore Caplow, “The Changing Middletown Family,” p. 88. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Modern American Poerry, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Har-

Editor’s Note: Professor Lindt was invited to respond, was necessary.

but she did not feel that a reply

Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846-1910. Washington, D.C.: Smithson- ian Institution Press, 1981. 319 pp. $19.95 (Reviewed by RAYMOND J. DE MALLIE)

In recent years there has been a steady development of interest in the history of anthropology as a focus of scholarly attention. Curtis Hinsley, Jr., an historian, represents this trend and in many ways summarizes the progress made to date. This book lists among its sources ten unpublished Ph.D. dissertations on various topics in the history of anthropology. In part, the author’s ability to encompass such a wide range of material over a long time span derives from the cumulative work of many scholars. This volume, then, is a synthesis of recent studies in the history of anthropology.

Savages and Scientists is a detailed chronicle of the development of government anthropology from its beginnings in the natural history studies of the Smithsonian Institution (founded in 1846), through the establishment of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology (1879)--later known as the Bureau of American Ethnology (1894)-until 19 10, by which time professional anthropology, centered in the universities and led by Franz Boas, had unquestionably gained the ascendancy, both intellectually and in terms of power and prestige. Hinsley does not limit himself to a narrow institutional history, however; his survey is broad, encompassing all developments in the field of anthropology that affected the nascent discipline at large. Nonetheless, the book focuses on govern- ment anthropology and portrays it as the major influence in the progressive definition of the boundaries of the discipline.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, anthropology as a unified area of study was as yet unborn. Following in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, there have always been people interested in recording the antiquities of America, including under this rubric the lifeways of American Indians past and present. There are many reasons why this should be. Native Americans have long been viewed as part of the uniquely American past, an essential ingredient in the shaping of America. Thus, as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, one of the first American ethnologists, expressed it in 1846, “their history is, to some extent, our

196 BOOK REVIEWS

history,” making it a national obligation to preserve a record of the American aborigines. That year he composed a “Plan for the Investigation of American Ethnology” that included the study of native languages, archaeological remains, and material collections from living tribes to establish a “Museum of Mankind” (p. 20). This plan Schoolcraft submitted to the new Smithsonian Institution. Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian’s first secretary, gave an important place to ethnology among the subjects to be investigated under government auspices.

From that time forward, government anthropology was less a self-motivated dis- cipline, pushing forward by its own collective initiative, than an undirected, poorly defined tradition progressing by fits and starts according to the whim of the individual ethnologists who directed it. For the history of anthropology, as Hinsley presents it, is fundamentally an individual obsession with the study of aboriginal America. Those per- sons who could muster political power led the development of the field; those who were not in power followed grumblingly behind.

Of those who gained control in the new field, none was more powerful over a longer period than John Wesley Powell, founder of the Bureau of Ethnology. Not only did he centralize and organize the study of ethnology, but he dictated the areas to be studied, subordinating the interests of individual members to the needs of the Bureau as a whole. Originally promising to be of practical assistance to the Congress in the organization of American Indian reservations and the direction of relationships with the tribes, Powell set as the first goal a systematic classification of the native Americans. This the Bureau had accomplished by 189 1, with the publication of the linguistic classification. To justify the Bureau’s continued existence, Powell promised a “Cyclopedia of the American In- dians” that would serve as a synthesis of knowledge. However, Powell seems to have felt that too much was still unknown to produce such a synthesis in the near future. He devoted the later years of his anthropological career to grandiose pronouncements on the history of cultural development, little more than philosophical rationalization of the supremacy of American civilization. After his death in 1902, his successors carried on the general work, again subverting the individual studies of Bureau ethnologists in the in- terests of the popular synthesis. Hinsley ends his study in 1910, with the final publication of the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Useful as the Handbook has been over the years as a reference work, Hinsley’s study suggests that it was less impor- tant than the ethnological salvage work that necessarily was sacrificed in order to produce it. The case of James Mooney’s unfinished studies of the southern plains tribes dramatizes the high cost to anthropology of the Bureau’s sense of priorities.

At the outset of the book, Hinsley asks the question, “Why, after all, study the American Indian?’ Ethnologists faced all kinds of hardships in the field as well as the derision of their more practical-minded colleagues at home to devote their lives to the study of cultures that they firmly believed to be disappearing. Hinsley writes

Why did they bother? The argument presented here is that anthropology was reflexive, an exercise in self-study by Americans who sensed but were unable to con- front directly the tragic dimensions of their culture and of their own lives. The utility of anthropology was moral. [p. 81

This view of the history of anthropology has much to recommend it. Surely it is com- forting to assure ourselves that our forebears had at least an intuitive appreciation of the irony of progress-that the cost of civilization’s technological development was the loss of basic human values. But perhaps this is only hindsight. There is little of such critical reflection suggested in the sketches of careers of the succession of government

BOOK REVIEWS 197

anthropologists that compose the bulk of the book. Using quotes from the autobiography of Henry Adams as effective counterpoint, Hinsley highlights the theme of progressive development in American culture in evolutionary terms toward unity, order, centralization, and mechanization, as reflected in the development of anthropology. The individual, humanistic approach of early ethnologists gradually was replaced by the collective, scientific approach guided by Powell’s firm hand through his Bureau of Ethnology. And Hinsley leaves us no doubt that the demise of government anthropology was caused exactly by its self-satisfied scientism, which choked out the im- pulse to individual scholarship that produced the idea of anthropology in the first place. Perhaps one might argue that this is the inevitable cost of subordinating science to government.

As anthropology came to flower during the Gilded Age, those men and women who were its ongoing inventors and practitioners expressed no doubts as to the moral superiority of American civilization. Their ethnological studies, which made earlier, less developed stages of culture as represented by the American Indians understandable, served more to bolster their ethnocentric security than to call it into question. For them the study of American Indians was an intellectual passion, a search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake-squarely in the tradition of the Smithsonian’s mandate “For the in- crease and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Perhaps Hinsley himself has provided the insight needed to explain the urge to study native Americans, though I regret the overly facile phraseology: “It is clear that the men at the National Museum were ‘play- ing Indian’ in a presumptuous manner” (p. 105). This impulse to think in terms of the other, to try one’s hand at the techniques of the other (pottery making, arrow-point ch ip ping, fire making) as an avocation may have provided the intellectual freedom for which these ethnologists of the Victorian era hungered.

No matter how one prefers to explain the development of anthropology, Savages and Scientists provides an excellent introduction to the field. It seems very much an out- sider’s approach-the problems and issues reflect more of the historian’s background than the anthropologist’s. This is not intended as criticism, however, for anthropological self-studies tend more toward rationalization than historical explanation. Here the historian’s perspective is valuable and instructive. The volume introduces the reader to a host of characters, each of whom played a significant role on the stage of Washington anthropology. For those not already familiar with-and interested in-the history of the discipline, the mire of biographical data may prove inescapable. But for those with a desire to explore or reexplore the roots of anthropology in America, Savages and Scien- tists makes fascinating and rewarding reading.

The book itself is attractively produced, with an excellent and generous selection of illustrations. The typeface, however, is too small to be read comfortably, a complaint to be addressed to the Smithsonian Institution Press, which otherwise deserves com- pliments for publishing this valuable history of the past of its own institution. Editor’s Note: Professor Hinsley was offered an opportunity to respond to the review, but he did not feel that a reply was necessary.