The Bureau of American Ethnology: A Partial History by Neil M.

Judd
Review by: William C. Sturtevant
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Aug., 1968), pp. 774-775
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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774 American Anthropologist
Taylor further tells us that "it is we our-
selves, not nature, that have put observations
into categories" (p. 225). On the contrary, at
least every species of vertebratemust constantly
categorize its experience in order to know food
from nonfood, air (lungs) from water (gills),
friends from enemies, and to choose a proper
sexual mate in the breeding season. Although
man is superior to other species of animals in
ability to classify experience, this is not his ex-
clusive prerogative. What Taylor is actually
complaining about is bad classificationof mate-
rial into unnatural or arbitrary categories, the
kind of thing Lowie used to call logic chopping.
Few would disagree with him on this point. W.
W. Hill, in his preface to the volume (p. vii),
notes that Leslie Spier "scorned philosophical
approaches and what might be designated as in-
tuitional anthropology." Taylor's essay, there-
fore, deviates farther from Leslie Spier's posi-
tion than any other in the volume.
Amoss' sketch of culture change in a village
in Afghanistan is largely a presentation of field
data and appears to be a short summary of
much fuller material. Banks' study of a revitali-
zation movement in Burma leans so heavily on
Anthony F. C. Wallace's generalized sequence
of change that the reader is not always sure as
to whether a statement is supported by the eth-
nohistorical and field research of Banks or is
interpolated from Wallace's scheme to bolster
Banks' somewhat shaky data. Euler's principal
finding, that Sapir's Southern Paiute informant
of 1910 was able to reproduce 96 percent of
the 1910 data in response to Euler's questions
in 1956 and 1959, is reassuring to those who
have done memory ethnography.Mandelbaum's
well-written paper on the family in India gives
a series of generalizations about the entire cul-
ture area and excludes only the tribal peoples
and a few matrilineal societies that deviate
from the norms. Moore reports the many
changes in the culture of a single Navaho com-
munity from 1953 to 1961; from a question-
naire administered to many of the same infor-
mants on the two dates, he is able to report
marked changes in attitudes toward the Navaho
Tribal Council, the Federal Government, and
Navaho economic activity.
Lange's historical reconstruction of the
pueblo of Cochiti relies most heavily on arche-
ology but also uses glottochronology, and it
separates the better known facts from the less
sure speculations by means of centered head-
ings. Rands uses intensive analysis of potsherds,
including microscopic examination, to establish
settlement patterns and trade contacts of the
Mayas in the Palenque region. Rouse's review
article on seriation in archeology is the most
comprehensive to date and is especially valu-
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[70, 1968]
able to the ethnologist for the light that it
throws on processes of culture change. Robert
Spier's comparative study of work habits in
four Old World cultures suggests that traditional
nonwork habits, such as standing versus sitting,
or sitting on the floor versus on a chair, tend to
determine work postures more than do the
technical demands of the task at hand.
The editors are to be congratulated on pro-
moting and producing a volume that historical-
ly-minded ethnologists, as well as archeologists,
will find instructiveand useful.
The Bureau of American Ethnology: A Partial
History. NEIL M. JUDD.Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1967. xi, 139 pp., 9 il-
lustrations, index. $4.95.
Reviewed by WILLIAM C. STURTEVANT
Smithsonian Institution
The B.A.E. died, after a lingering illness, on
February 1, 1965, one month short of its 86th
birthday. Here is an obituary, with the warts
left off, by a member, for over 50 years, of the
Department of Anthropology of the U.S. Na-
tional Museum, the other Smithsonian anthro-
pological unit that finally endocannibalized its
better-known rival and then metamorphosed
into the Office of Anthropology. The first 34
pages of this book discuss the seven successive
chiefs of the Bureau. The final 56 pages are es-
sentially a reprint of the last List of Publica-
tions of the B.A.E., updated to 1964 (seven
more Bulletins followed this date) but omitting
the Institute of Social Anthropology Publica-
tions and the detailed index. The 41 pages in
the center contain a commentary on many of
the B.A.E. publications and their authors.
Sadly, this is neither the full-dress impartial
history the B.A.E. deserves nor the frankly par-
tial view one might expect from Judd's reminis-
cences. He does record some of the gossip so
characteristic of our view of our predecessors:
J. P. Harrington once took a bus from Mexico
to Washington, although he had a railway
ticket (p. 46); Truman Michelson often lec-
tured with one foot in a wastepaper basket (p.
47); Gerard Fowke did not wear socks (p. 69).
But more significantscandal is omitted-for ex-
ample, Judd must know more than he admits
about the reasons why McGee did not succeed
Powell, about the circumstancesof Hodge's de-
parture, and about the controversy surrounding
the accusations that Cushing faked two archeo-
logical specimens. Judd properly asks "why the
B.A.E. was abolished" (p. 35), but he is too
discrete to attempt to answer this question or
its converse, how it managed to survive so long
in the collection-oriented Smithsonian. He does
not explain the formal and informal relations
 Book Reviews
and the division of responsibilities for research
and collections between the Bureau (which was
never a part of the museum) and his own
museum department, although these were often
topics for rivalry and recriminations among
Smithsonian anthropologists and subjects of
confusion among outsiders (including some
Smithsonian administrators). The confusion is
compounded by Judd's discussion of the au-
thors of B.A.E. publications, which does not
differentiatebetween permanentB.A.E. employ-
ees, museum staff, others who were paid or un-
paid temporary "collaborators"of the Bureau,
and many who had no Smithsonian position at
all.
There are too many errors of fact and in-
terpretationin what Judd does present: e.g., the
B.A.E. did not finally disappear on July 29,
1964 (p. vii); permanent members of the
B.A.E. staff were not hired "usually for specific
tasks" (p. 30); surely Steward and Foster
should be credited with organizing the Institute
of Social Anthropology and Steward the Hand-
book of South American Indians (p. 31); the
Bureau of Indian Affairs still refers information
requests to the Smithsonian (p. 35); many will
not agree that Swanton'sworks were the best of
all B.A.E. publications (p. 37) nor that his In-
dians of the Southeastern United States and In-
dian Tribes of North America were his best
monographs (p. 43), nor that his Ph.D. thesis
on the Chinook verb was a "potboiler"(p. 43);
Boas cannot be said to have "faded away" after
1919, even in his influence on B.A.E. work (p.
45); Judd forgets that Harrington, Michelson,
and others published much outside the B.A.E.
series (pp. 47, 78); Sturtevant did not "suc-
ceed" Chafe (p. 51); Powell should not be
mentioned without qualification as the author
of the fundamental 1891 report on Indian Lin-
guistic Families (p. 74); with the three B.A.E.
publications on Hawaii should be mentioned
one on Micronesia (p. 77); Powell's question-
naire, Introduction to the Study of Indian Lan-
guages, was very effective in producing a great
quantity of irreplaceable data preserved in the
B.A.E. Archives (p. 129).
We still need a serious history of the B.A.E.
and its role and importance in the radically
changing environment of anthropological re-
search and of government and university scien-
tific institutions between 1879 and 1965. Judd's
volume will unfortunatelybe a very minor com-
ponent of the abundantpublished, archival, and
oral sources for such a study.
Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective.
PIERRE L. VAN DEN BERGHE. New York,
London, Sydney: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
775
1967. ix, 169 pp., selected bibliography, in-
dex, chapter notes, 6 tables. $4.95.
Revewed by JULIANPITT-RIVERS
University of Chicago
There is a spate of books on race relations
these days-for understandablereasons. Profes-
sor Van den Berghe is to be congratulated on
several counts: he writes his book alone rather
than as one among twenty authors, and conse-
quently it is possible to see the whole range of
the subject in a single perspective; he has the
courage to generalize; he treats the subject as a
problem of social relations, possessing its own
dimensions, and relates the characteristics he
observes to a coherent typology, set forth in the
introduction, that hinges on the distinction be-
tween paternalistic and competitive race rela-
tions. He then examines four countries in this
regard.
Mexico is seen as "havingevolved from a pa-
ternalistic type of race and ethnic relations to a
nonracial system without having gone through
a competitive phase" (p. 55). This was due to
the fact that the "casta system"had become ob-
solete before the country entered the industrial
era (p. 127).
Brazil has been moving toward a competitive
type of prejudice and race relations. With the
development of industrialization and the influx
of white immigrants in the south, competition
has increased and with it racial consciousness
and discrimination.The myth of there being no
racial problem in Brazil is rightly discounted. It
is a pity, however, that he reiterates the ill-in-
formed guess that racism was "milder" among
Iberians because they had been ruled by a
dark-skinnedaristocracy.
The discussion of race relations in the United
States places the choice between integration and
pluralism, or even separatism, in a perspective
that shows it as the end-product of two hun-
dred years of what he calls "herrenvolkdemoc-
racy." His sociological perception is welcome as
a corrective to the parochial standards that are
the common currency of public comment on
this subject.
South Africa stands at the other extreme
from Mexico: a herronvolkdemocracy attempt-
ing to reimpose colonial paternalism.
Van den Berghe ends his essay with a discus-
sion of cultural and social pluralism in the four
cases considered and derives from it some gen-
eral sociological observations.
There is quite a lot I personally would com-
plain of in a more detailed scrutiny of this
book, but in a brief review the essential must
be underlined: this is a most illuminating study,
undertaken from what I believe to be the right
point of view.