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Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, eds. African American Pioneers in Anthropology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. 296 pp. ISBN 0-25202430-3, $49.95, cloth; ISBN 0-252-06736-3, $21.95, paper. Zora Neale Hurston (1901–1960) is better known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), than for her work as an anthropologist and folklorist in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). In African American Pioneers in Anthropology, editors Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison have compiled thirteen life histories about a generation of black scholars, including Hurston, who became anthropologists between 1920 and 1955. The intellectual biographies in Pioneers describe anthropology from the vantage point of its earliest African American adherents, their careers, and the theoretical and methodological interventions they brought to the discipline in

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the first half of the twentieth century. Concerned with racial ideologies, native perspectives, and the often pejorative representations of African and African American cultures, these anthropologists worked in a “vindicationist” mode to counter racial denigration with academic theory and social activism. The editors suggest that this vindicationist framework forms “the clearest continuity in African-American intellectual history over the past few centuries” (12). The biographies in Pioneers are at their best when they illustrate the strategies, including activism and vindicationist praxis, that African American anthropologists used to counter their experiences of institutional racism, gender subordination, and paternalism. These experiences stymied, and sometimes ended, the anthropological research of some pioneering African Americans working in the African Diaspora in Europe, the Caribbean, and North, South, and Central America. Some found work outside of the discipline, or left academia altogether. Others were driven to greater rigor and productivity. Though Louis Eugene King (1898–1981) was one of the first people to complete a study about rural African Americans, he never found employment in academia, and eventually worked for the Navy. Despite his significant abilities, William S. Willis, Jr. (1921–1983), referred to in both Hymes and Mullings, also found it difficult to find an academic job. In 1964, after a long and frustrating search, he became the first African American faculty member at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Expected to teach more classes than the rest of the faculty, he was strained by his treatment and finally left due to overt racial harassment by the head of his department. Willis went on to write perceptively about racism and the history of anthropology. While many of the life histories in Pioneers are marked by decades of academic marginalization and a lack of institutional support, African American anthropologists like Willis utilized their perspectives, and the theoretical rigor required to support their positions, to take a proactive stance in the discipline. During the era of de jure segregation in the United States, African Americans who acquired advanced education usually entered disciplines such as education and social work, considered to be the most useful in handling racial problems. These were also the disciplines available to the few African Americans who received training at institutions that would instruct people of color, and more importantly, these were the disciplines in which jobs would be available in a segregated society. In the early twentieth century, anthropology was a relatively new and white male dominated discipline, and its evolutionist theories and studies of people in Africa, the

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Americas, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands contributed to rationales for practices of racial subjugation (see Hymes 128–31; Mullings 32). Between the 1920s and 1940s, however, new anthropological theories about race and culture, and particularly the positions Franz Boas mobilized against anti-Semitism, appealed to African Americans who aimed to investigate the theoretical bases of “scientific racism.” Their interest coincided with tense interwar racial relations in the United States and a rising mainstream interest in the cultures of segregated African Americans. These conditions prompted several philanthropic institutions, already invested in the study of the American Indian, to extend their support to include studies of the American Negro. Influential anthropologists, including Boas, Edward Sapir, Robert Redfield, and Melville Herskovits, were funded by such institutions as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation and the Rosenwald Fellowships to conduct studies of African Americans. These anthropologists sought African Americans interested in the social sciences to assist them in their research in communities where white ethnographers would have had difficulty collecting accurate data. Black researchers were intended to be native informants for white scholars, and in most cases were used to gather data because they had access to the social and cultural codes of African America. Though they worked as their assistants, most of these African Americans were not encouraged by their white professors to attain advanced degrees in anthropology. The biographies in Pioneers tell some of the many rationalizations that white anthropologists had for their reluctance to advance their African American students. In personal communications with other anthropologists, some “mentors” lauded their students’ work on ethnographic projects; but in official letters of recommendation to fund an African American student’s independent research, their assessments often became ambivalent. Many of the pioneer African American anthropologists experienced treatment similar to that received by Charles Blooah. A West African missionary student from Liberia, Blooah was “discovered” in Chicago by linguists Sapir and Fay-Cooper Cole. Though they educated Blooah in linguistic anthropology, John H. Stanfield exposes correspondence in which Cole admitted to foundation official Leonard Outhwaite that Sapir and Cole were “not so much interested in having [Blooah] obtain a degree as to see that he has the proper equipment to do the work for which he is fitted” (85). Although he was an enhanced linguist and native anthropologist, Sapir and Cole only considered Blooah suitable to work as an assistant and interpreter for other “real” anthropologists.1 Hurston and King received similar treatment.

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Many of these “real” anthropologists, such as Alesˇ Hrdlicˇka and Melville Herskovits, were most ambivalent about the intellectual capacity of their African American students, including Hurston and Montague Cobb (1904– 1990). Herskovits suggested that African Americans such as Hurston were “too emotional” to analyze ethnographic data, though she was considered knowledgeable enough to collect it. Cobb’s mentor, physical anthropologist Hrdlicˇka, even went so far as to claim that the “Negro race” was “retarded,” although he considered Cobb, who received an M.D. from Howard University before he trained as an anthropologist, an exception (Rankin-Hill and Blakey 114). Returning to Howard University to teach for several decades, Cobb integrated, and eventually headed, numerous professional societies, including the Association of Physical Anthropology, of which he became president. He organized several major conferences, and conducted studies that disproved racist theories, including one involving Olympic athletes. Cobb published over 1,100 articles in major journals, and illustrated the impact of racism on African American health in ways that helped to change U.S. health care policy. Biographers Lesley M. Rankin-Hill and Michael Blakey note, however, that despite his rigor and productivity, Cobb’s work is rarely referenced by contemporary scholars. In Journey to Accompong (1946), Katherine Dunham records that she was the first visitor to stay in this remote Maroon village in Jamaica. As the descendants of freedom-fighting African people who had escaped enslavement during the colonial era to form autonomous communities in the mountains, the Maroons were particularly distrustful of strangers. In her biographical account of Dunham in Pioneers, Joyce Achenbrenner writes that the people of Accompong nonetheless responded to Dunham, and shared insider knowledge with her not only because of her openness and ethnographic skill, but also because they considered her one of the lost people from their African homeland (143). Born in 1901, Dunham wrote about her experiences in the African Diaspora in her autobiographies A Touch of Innocence and Island Possessed, both published in 1959. Though the influential anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote the introduction to the French edition of her seminal study Dances of Haiti (1947), most anthropological histories have ignored Dunham’s ethnographies. She eventually moved away from academia because she considered it elitist and stifling. She started a dance troupe, often using her anthropological research as the basis for her choreographies. Dunham’s internationally known troupe traveled throughout the world, performing until the early 1960s.

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Dunham’s cultural and political activism in support of the people of the African Diaspora continues. As a human rights activist in the 1990s, the nonagenarian Dunham fasted for more than a month to draw attention to the U.S. treatment of Haitian immigrants. Despite the lack of institutional support, her efforts have included the creation of an ethnographic museum in East St. Louis, Illinois, based on material gathered during her extensive travels. Dunham’s life as an anthropologist, ethnographer, dancer, humanitarian, and political activist exemplifies the achievements of the activist-scholar. Another dynamic Black woman anthropologist who contributed to both academia and her community, Irene Diggs (1906–1998) trained with ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, and received her doctorate at the University of Havana in Cuba in the 1940s. She chronicled issues of race in Afro-Latin America and Afro-Anglo America for both popular and academic magazines and journals. Diggs worked with a number of Black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, and she wrote and traveled widely, visiting many places in Africa, South America, Eurasia, and the Caribbean. Diggs’s work on racialization and racial identity anticipates and remains relevant to social anthropology and to many current issues about hybridity and social stratification. Although many anthropologists of color have contributed to the discipline, anthropology has traditionally valued the knowledge claims made from the outsider perspective of the white male stranger, and devalued the work of the native or racially similar ethnographer. This may be in part because indigenous or subjugated perspectives sometimes contradict Western epistemologies about race, society, and cultural practices. Western anthropologists have omitted many of these native perspectives by relying on an ideology of “scientific objectivity.” In his critique of the discipline, William S. Willis, Jr. argued that social scientists cannot avoid “leaning to one side,” and therefore must consider the impact such one-sided reporting has had in supporting racist domination. In the past, colonial governments mobilized anthropologists to “lean” towards the side of scientific rationalizations for racial subordination. Willis stressed that anthropology must acknowledge and attend to this part of its history. Better social theories, he suggested, could be produced if the native, subaltern, and post-colonial perspectives of “black and colored peoples” were included in anthropological perspectives (Hymes). Willis’s work is consistent with that of this first generation of Black anthropologists, who insisted on improving anthropology methodologically and hermeneutically, particularly by testing racial ideologies. Biographer

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Willie L. Baber writes in this volume about how the biases and contradictions of supposedly rational “scientific racism” influenced the work of vindicationist anthropologist St. Clair Drake (1911–1990): While completing his doctorate Drake in 1946 joined the faculty of Roosevelt University, an experimental institution . . . in opposition to anti-Semitism and white supremacy in education and explicitly dedicated to an active fight against racial discrimination and segregation. Post-World War II optimism about changing the attitudes and behavior of Americans found its way into the curriculum. . . . With confidence, Drake [fought a] battle against Arthur de Gobineau, Neville Chamberlain, Lothrop Stoddard, and cliques of reactionary biologists. (204)

The perspectives of and criticisms by African American anthropologists such as Willis and Drake point out that anthropology must scrutinize racist ideologies, colonial domination, and gender oppressions—and that this scrutiny includes becoming vigilant about its own contribution to these practices. Though their work complicates and enriches the discipline, Black anthropologists have made their greatest impact outside of academic anthropology. The work of Allison Davis (1902–1983), for example, was used in arguments to desegregate public education, and the activism of Arthur Huff Fauset (1899–1983) influenced the civil rights movement. Zora Neale Hurston is more often recognized for her literary and feminist contributions than she is for her anthropology. Though Hurston innovated experimental and literary ethnography, anthropologist Clifford Geertz never mentions her in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author; nor is she mentioned in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, edited by George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer. Other forms of amnesia are illustrated by the omission of African American anthropologists from Afro-American Anthropology (1970). Although editors Norman E. Whitten and John F. Swed briefly mention Zora Neale Hurston, and list Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars as a reference, Melville Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits are offered as the progenitors of the study of African America. Despite being an innovator in the study of urban anthropology and the African Diaspora, St. Clair Drake is mentioned only as a sociologist rather than as an anthropologist. However, it is true that many of anthropology’s progenitors were sociologists and historians, including W. E. B. DuBois, whose ground-breaking urban study The Philadelphia Negro (1899) influenced the anthropology of Boas, Irene Diggs, and St. Clair Drake. Yet Du Bois is also omitted from

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Afro-American Anthropology. Only one African American, Betty Lou Valentine, is included. Her article, “Making the scene, digging the action, and telling it like it is: anthropologists at work in a dark ghetto,” written with her husband Charles Valentine, expresses ambivalence about the positioning of a racially mixed team doing fieldwork in the “dark ghetto” of African America. At the time a junior scholar, Betty Lou Valentine became an anthropologist a generation after the anthropologists in Pioneers. The absence of the earliest African American anthropologists from AfroAmerican Anthropology, and Valentine’s appearance at the very end of the volume, suggest the marginalization of the racialized and gendered perspective in academia. In a vindicationist and Foucauldian mode, the editors of these intellectual biographies comment that the inclusion of pioneering African American and other scholars of color in the canons of the social sciences would solve many disciplinary contradictions: Anthropology, like all other disciplines . . . appropriates, disguises, and buries certain knowledges within the body of systematizing theory. It also disqualifies and relegates other knowledges to marginal ranks. . . . For anthropology to be successfully reinvented, recaptured, and decolonized, [anthropology’s practitioners] must come to terms with its hierarchy-producing discourses and practices and emancipate its subjugated knowledges. (4)

African American Pioneers in Anthropology will introduce some readers to, and enhance other readers’ awareness of, anthropology, Black intellectual biography, twentieth century African Americana, and vindicationism. For this reason the volume would benefit from an index. The introduction and endnotes are detailed, however, and invite the reader, whether scholar or layperson, to pursue the histories and literatures of African Americans in anthropology. The editors of Pioneers have presented the initial phase of the vindicationist history of the discipline, and have also succeeded in making less abstract the experience of African Americans facing institutional racism and sexism in the United States in the first part of this century. These biographies also point to how dishonest anthropology is when the discipline fails to acknowledge its past, and when it ignores, in the words of anthropologists Johnnetta B. Cole and Sheila S. Walker, its own “intimate associations with colonialism, imperialism, and racism.” Anthropology must also come to acknowledge that some of its former subjects of study have studied, innovated, and made incisive critiques of the discipline. The biographers in Pioneers illustrate this by showing that native anthropology, vindicationist practice, and antiracist social activism provide some of the

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remedies to anthropology’s contradictory past. At the same time, these theoretical innovations strengthen anthropology’s future. B. C. Harrison NOTES

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Though we share a common surname, and are African American anthropologists, the two editors and the reviewer are not related to one another. 1. Pioneers does not include the West African-born Blooah because the volume focuses on African-descended anthropologists from the United States; Louis Eugene King and Elliot Skinner are present because they immigrated to the U.S. from Barbados and Trinidad, respectively, when they were young. WORKS CITED

Aschenbrenner, Joyce. “Katherine Dunham: Anthropologist, Artist, Humanist.” Harrison and Harrison. 137–53. Baber, Willie L. “St. Clair Drake: Scholar and Activist.” Harrison and Harrison. 191–212. Cole, Johnnetta B., and Sheila Walker, ser. eds. “Black Anthropology.” Parts 1 and 2. The Black Scholar 11, nos. 7–8 (1980): 1. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro. 1899. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1973. Dunham, Katherine. Dances of Haiti. 1947. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, 1983. _____. Island Possessed. 1959. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. _____. Journey to Accompong. 1946. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1971. _____. A Touch of Innocence. 1959. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994. Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Hymes, Dell. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Random House, 1974. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Meyers. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Mullings, Leith. On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of African American Women. New York: Routledge, 1997. Rankin-Hill, Lesley M., and Michael L. Blakey. “W. Montague Cobb: Physical Anthropologist, Anatomist, and Activist.” Harrison and Harrison. 101–36. Stanfield, John H. Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American Social Science. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985. Whitten, Norman E., Jr., and John F. Swed. Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: The Free Press, 1970.