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Anthropology / History of Anthropology


 

Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others
Essays on Culture and Personality
Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr.

History of Anthropology (VOLUME FOUR)
Richard Handler, Series Editor


[Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others] . . . tells of the brilliant American thinkers Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and how the latter two moved into the center stage of history as planners/thinkers for American society during and after WW II. Vignettes reveal Malinowski, John Layard, Abram Kardiner, Melville Herskovits, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo. . . . This book deserves a far wider audience than its obvious target. . . . It should be held in every community college and university library, in every town and city.”
Choice

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each of which treats a theme of major importance in both the history and current practice of anthropological inquiry. Drawing its title from a poem of W. H. Auden’s, the present volume, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others focuses on the emergence of anthropological interest in “culture and personality” during the 1920s and 1930s. It also explores the historical, cultural, literary, and biological background of major figures associated with the movement, including Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Sapir, Abram Kardiner, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson.

Born in the aftermath of World War I, flowering in the years before and after World War II, severely attacked in the 1950s and 1960s, “culture and personality” was subsequently reborn as “psychological anthropology.” Whether this foreshadows the emergence of a major anthropological subdiscipline (equivalent to cultural, social, biological, or linguistic anthropology) from the current welter of “adjectival” anthropologies remain to be seen. In the meantime, the essays collected in the volume may encourage a rethinking of the historical roots of many issues of current concern.

George W. Stocking, Jr.George W. Stocking, Jr. (1928–2013) was the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. He was the author of many books, including Victorian Anthropology; After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951; and The Ethnographer’s Magic, and was the founder and long-time editor of the History of Anthropology series published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He was awarded the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service by the American Anthropological Association. His most recent book with the University of Wisconsin Press is Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction.

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Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others

November 1988

LC: 86-40061 GN
270 pp.  6 x 9,  18 illus.

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Paper $24.95 x
ISBN 978-0-299-10734-5
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Included in this volume are the contributions of Jeremy MacClancy, William C. Manson, William Jackson, Richard Handler, Regna Darnell, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, James A. Boon, and the editor.

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