Regna Darnell, And along came Boas: Continuity and revolution in Americanist anthropology. (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, 86.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1998. Pp. xviii, 331. Hb $89.00.

Abstract

All researchers observe a balance between continuity with prior tradition (so others will know enough to understand and value the work) and innovation (such that only new contributions are generally deemed publishable). This balance can be difficult to recognize at times of disciplinary revolution, when a previously accepted paradigm is rejected in favor of a newer one – the sort of change in assumptions described by Kuhn 1962. At such times, it requires considerable subtlety for the disciplinary historian to unearth the substantial influence of previous research generations, since the rhetoric emphasizes revolution and change to the exclusion of all else. In the present book, Darnell studies one such critical point: the shift to professionalization within anthropology that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. It is to her credit that she documents substantial continuities between the research conducted in the immediately pre-professional stage by John Wesley Powell and others in the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), and that of Franz Boas and his students, despite decades of rhetoric – from the participants, as well as their students – that have emphasized only the differences. Despite the fact that “oral histories of American anthropology have generally assumed that … professional anthropology in America sprang forth full-blown about 1900 when Boas began teaching at Columbia” (p. 6), Darnell demonstrates that professionalization was a more gradual process.