Chapter 15 places Ilf and Petrov’s reaction to American Indians in the context of Soviet nationalities policy. We can see in Ilf and Petrov’s insistence that the American government made “intentional” mistakes in its treatment of Native American peoples yet another example of their tendency to apply Soviet categories to American realities. Doing so, they provided oversimplified depictions of both American Indian policy and Soviet nationalities policy. The shortcomings of their analyses notwithstanding, reconstructing Ilf and Petrov’s encounters and observations in the desert Southwest opens a revealing perspective on the role of racialized difference in Soviet and American understandings of ethnic minorities. Behind this shared sensibility lay a long history of Russian–American anthropological exchanges that was coming to an end as Ilf and Petrov crossed the United States.

The third and fourth generations consisted of Franz Boas and his prime students, Alfred L. Kroeber and Edward Sapir, reflecting a distinctly Humboldtian perspective from the century’s turn through the years before World War II. Boas had still grown up in the Humboldtian tradition of Theodor Waitz, Adolf Bastian, and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, and had even consulted Heymann Steinthal. In the United States, Boas offered the first doctoral anthropology program at Columbia University, presenting linguistics in traditional Humboldtian terms and with Kroeber and Sapir as early beneficiaries. When joining Boas’ graduate program, Sapir already brought along Humboldtian notions from his undergraduate Germanic linguistics, eventually to lead to some theoretical differences with Boas about the interpretation of language change (with Kroeber frequently taking an intermediate position). All together, the Boasian program of anthropological linguistics however reflected closely Humboldt’s ideas a century ago, although Boasians did not advertise their historical link.

This chapter is an account of my experiences as a member of the faculty in different universities. I taught at Caltech where I was a member of an interdisciplinary group of faculty in the humanities and social sciences and came to know prominent humanists in other fields as well as scientists such as Richard Feynman, Murray Gel Man, and Max Delbruck. I then moved to the University of Michigan where I joined an active group of interdisciplinary scholars, encountered the attractions and problems of cultural studies, and then began to do institutional work by creating a new interdepartmental PhD program in Anthropology and History. Because of the success of that program, I was invited to Columbia University to chair the Anthropology Department and become the Franz Boas Professor at Columbia.

Especially in North America, anthropology is dominated by the ‘four-fields’ approach. This was introduced by German immigrant Franz Boas in the late nineteenth century, and it still dominates. The idea is that anthropology consist of these elements: biological, archaeological, linguistic, and cultural components. The cultural one is dominant, and this book is basically about cultural anthropology. Other important notions include the division into ethnography and theory; the idea of a paradigm; diachronic, synchronic, and interactive perspectives; and the emphases on society and on culture.

Before the war, Franz Boas critized the notion of racial superiority. After the War, Unesco issued statements on race. The influence of Unesco in the USA diminished during the Cold War. In Europe after the war, many European and national organizations against racism were founded, such as the CRE in the UK, or MRAP in France. In the USA cotinuing police violence and other froms of systemic racism, exacerbated by Trump, was challenged by Black Lives Matter and its growing national and international sucess.