Don D. Fowler

Diggers and Doggers: Parallel Failures in Economic Acculturation

The histories of economic acculturation of the Western Desert Aborigines of Australia and the Numic-speaking Indians of the Great Basin of North America are compared in a manner similar to that utilized by Murphy and Steward (1955) in their study of Northeastern Algonkians and the Mundurucú of South America. Numerous and specific parallels in economic and social change are noted, leading to the conclusion that both of these desert hunting-and-gathering societies have followed a pattern of economic acculturation characterized by increased dependence on European food and goods rather than by the establishment of a viable relationship to the world economy.

Preserving the Anthropological Record: A Decade of CoPAR Initiatives

Ruth Bunzel threw out all her fieldnotes from Zuni Pueblo after she had published her books, thinking that they no longer had any use. The Zuni could have used these fieldnotes, if they had been available, in a water claims case in the 1970s. James Mooney kept all his fieldnotes, and they have been saved in the National Anthropological Archives, where Kiowa scholars have used them to help reconstruct their history. The archives of the Wenner-Gren Foundation contain audiotapes of its supper conferences and international symposia that provide the opportunity to listen to hundreds of anthropologists developing their theoretical ideas. Unpublished anthropological records like these contain a vast array of information about historical and contemporary human diversity and about the history of anthropology. Both professional anthropologists and little-known but exceptional amateurs have produced these records. Their fieldnotes and other papers document how they engaged in their work and how knowledge is constructed in our discipline. The records cover virtually every culture in the world, past as well as present societies, and nonhuman primate as well as human populations, and they contain evidence of evolutionary processes, biobehavioral variation within our species, and cultural continuity and change. These data are invaluable because they form the basis for longitudinal and comparative studies. They can be used to solve new scientific problems through reanalyses of extant data, and they can be referred to repeatedly as research questions change. The anthropological record is vast, complex, and scattered in repositories, museums, government agencies, universities, and private homes around the world. It is also in danger. Many irreplaceable records have been lost

Nomenclature Wars: Ethnologists and Anthropologists Seeking to Be Scientists, 1840–1910

Scholarly disciplines are ever-changing and continuously debated constellations of intellectual heritage and contemporary issues. This article discusses debates over anthropological nomenclature, anthropometric indices, and museum exhibit design in the development of European and American anthropology from its ethnological beginnings in the 1840s through nineteenth-century evolutionism to the establishment of the Boasian historical particularist approach after 1904. It also outlines the impacts of those debates and disagreements on the subsequent development of the “four-field approach” in American-university-based anthropology programs. The transitions from ethnology to evolutionism to particularism can be followed through arguments over nomenclature, anthropometrics, and the content and design of museum exhibits, as nascent anthropologists defined and redefined their subfield(s) of study and attempted to become part of the burgeoning Science Establishment of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and North America. The arguments and their (sometimes) resolutions laid the foundations for twentieth-century university-based anthropology programs and ethnographic and archaeological exhibits in anthropology and natural history museums. The article is, thus, a contribution to the developmental history of anthropology in Europe and North America.