When Steward began organizing the HSAI , he initiated a systematic correspondence with Lowie, recognizing his contributions to the analytical study of South American Indians.
The two researchers also discussed an intellectual division of labor over which Steward intended to preside for compiling the Handbook, submitting to the elder anthropologist the idea of a hierarchy of 'contributors' and 'sub-contributors,' dividing tasks between "key authors" responsible for the introductory and focal papers and "local collaborators" responsible for the detailed descriptions of particular indigenous peoples.
The separation of the lowland cultures into two volumes was not part of the original plan. The distinction between "Tropical Forest" and "Circum-Caribbean" was made for theoretical and strategic reasons: The evolutionary distinction between ideal types such as "the simplest Amazon cultures" and "more complex societies as the chiefdoms" had already been criticized.
In his preface to the volume, Steward at one point explains his main concerns about the arbitrariness of dividing the region into cultural areas and the difficulties inherent in any such division, as exemplified by comparing Map 1, showing the five parts covered by the volume, with Map 8, showing the cultural areas themselves. He believed that acculturation as a practical problem in areas where indigenous cultures were "still a matter of some national concern" Steward He did not go so far as to recognize, however, that indigenous cultures were also a matter of national concern in Brazil, as shown by the nation's indigenous policies at federal level.
At the same time, though, he was aware that contributors to the volume were dealing directly with Brazilian indigenous policy makers, meaning that their anthropological studies of cultural change, administration, community and regional studies were backed by public funding in modern nation states and undertaken more from political than cultural motives: He then summarizes the general ethnographical contained in the book, following the scheme designed by Steward for the HSAI: Significantly, he combines social and political organization his main earlier interest with other general ethnographic data on warfare, life cycles, esthetic and recreational activities, religion, shamanism and traditional medicine, mythology and literature, lore and learning, as well as on etiquette.
The introduction, however, lacks the theoretical explorations that characterize Lowie's work elsewhere, such as his comparison of the social and political organization of North and South American indigenous groups Lowie The volume offers first-hand information on how the Indians lived at the time the book was compiled: Other merits of the volume are its consideration of different countries within a pan-Amazonian view of the indigenous peoples of the tropical forest, exploring the differences between Bolivian, Peruvian and Ecuadorian 'tribes' Radin This international view may basically be attributed to the inspiration of the ethnogeographic and pan-American thinking of the Second World War, as well as the aftermath of isolationism, economic breakdown and the resettlement of intellectuals throughout the western world.
However, the HSAI failed to update the cartographic information concerning the peoples described, referring to their social situations and national locations as found in the s, when the data was gathered. The editor, the ethnographer and the local contributors. Although Social Anthropology was not the main focus of the Rockefeller Foundation RF , this institution had supported anthropological research since the s, dedicating small sums to projects at Yale and Columbia. The Institution had no extra funds to pay for fieldwork activities. Financial aid therefore had to be drawn from the limited sphere of the Bureau of American Anthropology's budget, which was subject to specific bureaucratic rules and regulations.
Though the editor considered the 'volunteer' ethnographers working outside US institutions to be important sources of information, he did not recognize them as equals comparable to professional scholars academically trained as anthropologists. The Rockefeller Board decided to send money through a Brazilian institution.
The National Museum and the Goeldi Museum competed to be the chosen intermediary. The CIAA eventually produced, that same year, a map identifying indigenous groups that could be used as labor forces for rubber collection. Previously, Steward had invited a select group of people from these centers to contribute to the HSAI albeit as minor collaborators , stipulating the number of words he expected each author to submit. The main purpose of my trip is to contact people we are inviting to contribute to the HSAI.
The idea is to ask for short articles, which, for the most part, may have to be reworked into broader regional articles.
I have made the following requests from Brazilians: Maria Julia Pourchet, 2, words on morphological types of present-day mixed blood populations of Brazil. Roquette-Pinto, demography of present types in Brazil, 2, words. Anibal Matos, 2, words on Lagoa Santa culture. Bastos de Avila, 3, words on anthropometry of Brazil. Eventually Steward heard about the tardy founding of universities in Brazil, eventually created the country's elite in an effort to promote the national intelligentsia.
Its creator Anisio Teixeira, who had studied at Columbia New York University in the late s, attempted to invest public funds in a University based on autonomous research Favero Under the authoritarian government, the academic staff were incorporated into the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia FNFi at the Universidade do Brasil , created in and subject to the control of Catholic Church.
Andean peoples
The trajectories of Brazilian intellectuals might have seemed odd to a US scholar. One example of the kind of ambivalence found among Brazilian intellectuals was Arthur Ramos, an internationally renowned social anthropologist who corresponded with S. Another controversial author was Gilberto Freyre, who studied with F.
Boas at Columbia before heading back to Brazil, There he wrote and publicly launched the Regionalist Manifesto in the Northeastern city of Recife in , advocating the study of regional and racial singularities as a way of promoting nation building.
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Asking Brazilian scholars to write short articles that would inevitably be reworked led to outright refusals, as Lowie had warned would happen. The absence of any solid relationship between Brazilian and US anthropologists contributed to the misunderstanding, especially since Steward evidently did not see them as members of his own intellectual lineage. Even though US sociological research had planted deep roots in Brazil by this time, the anthropological research conducted lacked a background spirit of cooperation between the US and Brazilian anthropologists.
This was despite previous academic exchanges between researchers from the University of Columbia and the National Museum, which was Brazil's foremost academy for field research, since the incipient Brazilian Universities were basically no more than "vocational centers" until the s. The encyclopedic worldviews of Brazilian anthropologists under European influence may well have been considered unscientific by Steward.
Moreover, most Brazilian intellectuals and writers working under the Vargas dictatorship were involved in state-building practices. Roquette Pinto's ethnography mixed physical and social anthropology, while examining indigenous cultures in the light of nationalist indigenous policy making. In a letter to Lowie, Steward suggested that Radcliffe-Brown was a representative of colonial Anthropology, whose practices typically involved daily contact with colonial administrative powers. At the same time, Steward did not visit other regional centers such as Manaus or the smaller Amazonian urban centers.
Years later, Brazilian anthropological criticism would characterize the asymmetrical relations between Brazilian regions as "internal colonialism" Oliveira This Brazilian power structure clearly affected Amazonian fieldwork too. During his trip, Steward also made contacts with the aim of establishing a Brazilian office of the Smithsonian Institute for Social Research. Wagley advised him that it would be preferable to work with the National Museum in Rio, explaining its advantages as a center of excellence in research and teaching, as well as its director Heloisa Alberto Torres's academic talents and capacities.
Heloisa Alberto Torres proved reluctant to sign a contract that would diminish her professionally, since she would only be able to submit a total of 3, words. He also sent her a letter suggesting the creation of the "collaborative institute," proposing, if funds were available, to send a group of American researchers to the National Museum, basically a cultural anthropologist, "assisted by a linguist, a human geographer, or even a physical anthropologist, according to the needs of the specific research to be undertaken Steward argued that a contract had already been signed and that copyright legislation prohibited the publication of the volume's contents before it was published.
Heloisa Torres was the daughter of Alberto Torres, one of the founding fathers of Brazilian social thought. When she entered the National Museum she was 23 years old and became its director in There is evidence that she found Steward's proposal to be asymmetrical, implying an unequal power relationship between Brazilian and US scholars, and thus depreciating both the museum and her own capacities, especially since she already suffered the disadvantages of being one of the few female scholars at the time.
Her role in directing the National Museum and standing up to the Americans was remembered long after the episode was over. His arguments reveal his belief that the rules of institutional production should not override the scientific quality expected of anthropological research. By classifying and organizing this material he was able to generate institutional support for founding the Ethnological and Archeological Collections of the Goeldi Museum.
His work was considered to be a model of the scientific method, carried out in a dynamic dialogue with his predecessors in the field of ethnography. Harboring a pessimistic view of interethnic contact as an inexorable process of assimilation and ethnic homogenization, he overlooked the possibility of ethnic groups developing strategies to contest domination.
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These changes have demanded a historical turn in anthropological analysis, inspiring several initiatives to update the Handbook, initiatives that all still underway. The touchstone of this latter definition is the researcher's interference in the definition of the area's limits while elaborating his or her object. Anthropology on the cultural frontline.
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The HSAI is an "area studies" artifact, one of anthropology's responses to wartime necessities. As such, even though field research in the tropical areas of Amazonia was not subject to direct military intervention, it represented a sort of "cultural frontline" affected by the war issue since the Amazon was seen as a strategic location, "the last frontier," the melting pot where nature and culture interacted.
It was also a region laden with symbolism for Pan-American encounters. Mexican ideologies were too revolutionary for these pre-cold war times. Seeing Brazilian indigenous groups as a docile mass malleable for political development was a reversal of the previous image of these peoples held by foreign Americanists as "authentically living in the state of nature. The 'Americanization' of 'Americanist anthropology,' which incorporated European-born anthropologists who had moved to North and South America, led to the delimitation of specific national and regional units of study, conducted by professionals considered to be specialists and who undertook long periods of "front line" fieldwork in specific countries.
The Tropical Forest areas, as important suppliers of natural rubber, were located far into the Western Hemisphere and as yet unexplored by the human sciences, thus making them a ideal site for the convergence of anthropological and logistical interests. Pursuing sociological approaches developed during the war, Steward worked as a Social Anthropologist even though - having never done fieldwork in the Amazon himself - he saw Amazonian ethnography as a marginal area of study better suited to an applied science.
Even so, he reshaped previous hierarchies between armchair anthropologists and those who went out into the field, whose testimonies direct from the early twentieth century Amazon about the transformations taking place there significantly countered the previous tendency to view 'primitive' peoples as timeless and unchanging. Today, the concept of "cultural areas" has come under criticism. A historical analysis of the transformations of "cultural zones" viewed intersubjectively implies a critique of the essentialism embedded in a static concept of culture, subjecting it to a new analysis of social change.
This approach focuses on deeper aspects of knowledge among specific indigenous groups. These forest peoples have been considered the touchstone of the historical and conceptual turn in recent ethnological monographs.
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Fieldwork carried out by anthropologists in this region, introduced into scientific debate in different national contexts, as well as the recognition of cultural translation as a vital element of fieldwork as a domain of theoretical research , have all played a significant role in this historical turn. History has thus heuristically influenced the ways in which anthropologists and natives interact in the construction of anthropological texts.
The possession or absence of a scientific degree is a constant feature in the relationships focused on in this paper, a hierarchy embedded in paternalism, and which underlies the production of knowledge, implying that ethnographers who lived in the Amazon in the first half of twentieth century would be ranked - despite all being European - as 'local scholars' and 'minor' contributors in comparison to the renowned academics who directed research and training in US institutions. However, at the same time, these ethnographers also adopted hierarchical attitudes when dealing with native groups whose lives and culture they studied.
Moreover, the hierarchical relationships present in the social production of knowledge remain a problem for the heuristic understanding of the construction of anthropological knowledge, concerning which the production of the HSAI is a significant example due to its formative role in bringing about a contemporary way of understanding anthropology. Reflexive social thinking about this kind of production may hopefully lead to a more active pursuit of scientific quality instead of just working to meet high-productivity deadlines, and thus help breakdown the differentiation between theoretical production and field centers.
The documents used to elaborate this paper were obtained during my stay in US with a CNPq postdoctoral fellowship, researching in the following archives: James Clifford and George Marcus eds. The poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press. Credit and intellectual property in science. New York and London: Handbook of American Indian Languages. The rich neighbor policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil.
New Haven and London: A study in environmental history. Cambridge and New York: The evolution of Latin Americanist scholarship in the United States, The University of Alabama Press.
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Dordrecht, Boston and London: A Universidade no Brasil: Hopper editor and translator , Indians of Brazil in the twentieth century. Institute for Cross Cultural Research. Scenes from the high desert. University of Illinois Press. Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. Le savant e le politique. Lowie's selected papers in anthropology Ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: A batalha da borracha na Segunda Guerra Mundial. Consulted on 26 th February , pp Intelectuais e classes dirigentes no Brasil The Tropical Forest Tribes.
Daniel Myeres, Mary Elizabeth Rudden eds. University of Utah Press. Conflict in modern culture and other essays. America Indigena , 1 1: Handbook of South American Indians ed. Theory of culture change. Volumes may be purchased individually. Paul Radin reviewed the first four volumes, generally giving a favorable evaluation, but noting that the volumes are a "compromise between a handbook and a textbook.
He highly praises the inclusion of the cultures of the indigenous in the Southern Cone, which is new in the anthropological literature. He also esteems the article on Andean civilizations, while deeming the volume on the circum-Caribbean groups the weakest. Steward , General Editor. Steward, ed, Julian H From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from " https: Monographic series Encyclopedias of culture and ethnicity Smithsonian Institution publications Non-fiction books about indigenous peoples of the Americas History of indigenous peoples of South America.
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