E-Book Overview
To listen to David M. Schneider is to hear the voice of American anthropology. To listen at length is to hear much of the discipline’s history, from the realities of postwar practice and theory to Schneider’s own influence on the development of symbolic and interpretive anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Schneider on Schneider offers readers this rare opportunity, and with it an engrossing introduction into a world of intellectual rigor, personal charm, and wit. In this work, based on conversations with Richard Handler, Schneider tells the story of his days devoted to anthropology—as a student of Clyde Kluckhohn and Talcott Parsons and as a writer and teacher whose work on kinship and culture theory revolutionized the discipline. With a master’s sense of the telling anecdote, he describes his education at Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap and among the Mescalero Apache, and his years teaching at the London School of Economics, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Musing on the current state and the future of anthropology, Schneider’s cast of characters reads like a who’s who of postwar social science. His reflections on anthropological field research and academic politics address some of the most pressing ethical and epistemological issues facing scholars today, while yielding tales of unexpected amusement. With its humor and irony, its wealth of information and searching questions about the state of anthropology, Schneider on Schneider not only provides an important resource for the history of twentieth-century social science, but also brings to life the entertaining voice of an engaging storyteller.
E-Book Content
Schneider
on Schneider
Schneider on Schneider The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological 5 tories David M. Schneider as told to Richard Handler Edited, Transcribed, and with an Introduction by Richard Handler
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Durham and London 1995
© 1995 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oc Typeset in Berkeley Medium by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
The field work tradition seems to have created a disciplinary bias toward oral history-as a group, anthropologists have a large stock of anecdotes about the elders of the tribe.-George W. Stocking, 'The History of Anthropology: Where, Whence, Whither?"
Contents
Editor's Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: The Origin of the Dog
Richard Handler
1
One: The Work of the Gods in Tikopia, or, A Career in Anthropology 17 Two: Youth Three: Addy
39 55
Four: Surveying the Army
61
Five: An Education in Anthropology Six: Fieldwork on Yap
69
85
Seven: From Harvard to England
121
Eight: Mescalero Apache: The Romance and Politics of Fieldwork 135 Nine: From Berkeley to Chicago Ten: Studying Kinship
171
193
David M. Schneider
219
Writings of David M. Schneider
231
Afterword Notes
Index
225
237
Editor's Acknowledgments
Many people have taken an interest in the interviews with David Schneider that led to this book. James Boon, Claire Farrer, Lynne Goldstein, Mary Handler, Charles Kaut, Adria LaViolette, Susan McKinnon, David Sapir,lonathan Schneider, Michael Schneider, Daniel Segal, Elizabeth Stassinos, George Stocking, Pauline Turner Strong, Bonnie Urciuoli, Roy Wagner, and Marlie Wasserman have provided encouragement and advice. At Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker guided the book through the review process and was always available