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To Read Sydel Silverman's 949 Council’s committee on Latin America, and they worked to- The First 50 Years gether on a comprehensive state-of-the-art conference on Middle American ethnology in 1949. Tax edited the confer- ence volume as well as three volumes of the concurrent In- A Social Experiment ternational Congress of Americanists. At this time of postwar expansion of anthropology, Fejos was envisioning a more am- Sol Tax, Paul Fejos, and the Origins of bitious role for the WGF, beginning with a massive inter- Current Anthropology national symposium in 1952 that he thought of as “a concrete Sydel Silverman basis on which to erect its future policies” (Fejos 1953, v). Under the presidency of A. L. Kroeber, and with a planning (E-mail: [email protected]) 1 IX 09 group that brought in eight other major figures, its goal was Current Anthropology was born out of a meeting of minds of to inventory the totality of what was known to anthropology two remarkable individuals. Sol Tax and Paul Fejos were very at the time. Fifty papers presented at the symposium were different personalities, almost polar opposites in their biog- published as Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory raphies and temperaments, yet they had in common unusual (Kroeber and International Symposium on Anthropology daring, an expansiveness of vision that acknowledged few lim- 1953). After the symposium Tax was brought in to oversee its, and a belief in anthropology that went beyond its scholarly the task of condensing and editing the voluminous transcrip- value. tions of the discussions (Tax [and others] 1953). During the Paul Fejos, born in Hungary to once-landed gentry, was 1950s Tax was also developing an “action anthropology” pro- cosmopolitan, multilingual, multitalented. During World gram, serving (with vigor and innovation) a term as editor War I he rode with the hussars and flew as a pilot with the of the American Anthropologist (1952–1955), and organizing air cavalry. He completed medical school, then became a the- an elaborate celebration of the Darwinian centennial (which atrical and film director, first in Europe and later, to consid- included a musical reenactment of Darwin’s life) as well as erable acclaim, in Hollywood (a review of his first movie was an equally ambitious event that brought together diverse headlined “Introducing You to Mr. Paul Fejos, Genius”). He North American tribes and factions in the American Indian came to anthropology by chance, through ventures as an ex- Conference in Chicago in 1961. plorer, ethnographic filmmaker, and self-taught archaeologist But it was with the project that became Current Anthro- and ethnologist. After saving the life of Axel Wenner-Gren pology (CA) that Tax moved firmly into the role of master on a tiger hunt, Fejos persuaded him to establish the Viking impresario of world anthropology. His contemporary Mar- Fund in 1941, which 10 years later was renamed for its ben- garet Mead was better known to the public for her advocacy efactor. Fejos was a charismatic figure, master of the extrav- of anthropology on a world stage, but she did so mainly as agant gesture, five-times married, whose influence on an- an individual enterprise. Tax, in contrast, was an institution thropology through the Wenner-Gren Foundation (WGF) was builder, and his efforts were directed primarily at the an- guided as much by his own instinct as by the advice of the thropologists themselves. CA became his vehicle of choice. professionals who counseled him. He did not, however, set aside other activities, and toward Sol Tax was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Russian the end of his editorship, he also took on the task of hosting Jewish immigrants, secular despite their descent from rabbis, the 1973 International Congress of Anthropological and Eth- socialist in their political leanings. Tax was small and shy but nological Sciences (ICAES) in Chicago. True to form, for him also entrepreneurial as a boy (Stocking 2000, 173).1 He dis- this was not merely a matter of coordinating some meetings; covered anthropology through Ralph Linton at the University he planned for the Congress to yield some 300 volumes (of of Wisconsin, then completed graduate studies at the Uni- which 92 were actually published), and he may be the only versity of Chicago, later his long-time academic home. He conference organizer in the history of anthropology to stage did extensive fieldwork in Middle America, but his forte was a full-scale opera in honor of the event, commissioning no more organizational than theoretical. Tax was earnest, hard- less a figure than Gian Carlo Menotti for the assignment working, personally unprepossessing, a family man. His ap- (Stocking 2000, 211). proach to the world, as summarized by Stocking (2000, 172), was “a mix of liberal democratic enthusiasm, relativist hu- 1. In addition to the publications cited, sources for this article were the mility, and universalist hubris.” files on CA and Tax in the Wenner-Gren archives and in-house Fejos and Tax met up as members of the National Research publications such as annual reports of the WGF. The most valuable source on Paul Fejos was Dodds (1973), itself based largely on Fejos’s own account in the Columbia University Oral History Archives of his life. ᭧ 2009 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Many of the events and anecdotes recounted there stretch credibility, but All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2009/5006-0015$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/ when I once asked Lita Osmundsen which were true and which were 648315 exaggerations, she said that the more unbelievable ones are true. 950 Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 6, December 2009 What Fejos and Tax shared was a vision of a world of to “Anthropology Today” (1956, edited by William L. Thomas, seamless intercultural understanding to which anthropology Jr., who was on the WGF staff). However, Fejos felt it was would lead the way. Fejos, in fact, had persuaded Axel impractical for the Foundation to produce further editions Wenner-Gren to devote his Fund to anthropology by ap- in-house, and he was disappointed that some of the authors pealing to his ambition to be a mediator of international did not actually write inventories. Moreover, he thought that relations (which had impelled an uninvited visit to Hermann what was needed was a more rapid and more flexible means Goering to try to persuade him of the folly of the Nazi military of communication. Fejos asked Tax to develop a plan that buildup). For both Fejos and Tax, anthropology embodied would more effectively meet these goals, and in April 1957 the most comprehensive knowledge of humankind, and it Tax agreed to take on the project, seeing in it an opportunity was a connected enterprise of scholars worldwide. They be- “to develop new patterns of worldwide intercommunication lieved that that connectedness was also a means of addressing in the profession” (Stocking 2000, 204). the large problems of the day. (In Wenner-Gren’s words, writ- Tax submitted an initial plan that envisioned a series of ten for him by Fejos, anthropology had the potential to touch five books (to be called Current Anthropology) to be pub- on universal issues.) Thus, the venture that became CA was lished every second year, which, along with revisions of the always more than a publishing project; it was part and parcel original Anthropology Today (AT) articles, would yield a de- of a worldview and a mission shared by the dashing Hun- finitive encyclopedia of anthropology. But before he was ready garian Renaissance man and the Jewish anthropologist from to put a plan into effect, he felt that he needed to discover Milwaukee who had always been eager to do good in the what the scholars of the world themselves thought would be world (Stocking 2000, 173). The two of them were under- most useful. With full WGF support, he then embarked on taking what they thought of as a social experiment that could a hectic round of meetings—44 of them between 1957 and change the face of international anthropology and have an 1960, covering more than 30 countries and a dozen venues impact beyond the discipline. in the United States, as well as several meetings at Burg War- The background to the origin of CA was a shift in priorities tenstein and in New York, and involving some 650 individuals. within the WGF. In the immediate postwar years it had been Tax’s journeys took him everywhere except to Australia and among the very few sources of support for research in an- the Pacific Islands. He estimated that there were about 3,000 thropology, but the creation in 1950 of the U.S. National anthropologists all over the world at the time, and he was Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, both determined to talk to as many of them as possible. with far more lavish funding, began to leave the WGF behind The idea that Tax took with him was that there should be in the competition for good projects. In response, Fejos de- a “participatory democracy of scholars in exchanging infor- cided to focus on “communication” functions. In the first mation.” True to his conviction, he was bent on soliciting a instance, that meant conferences, building on the supper con- wide range of suggestions. What he got was a dizzying array ferences that had been held at the townhouse in New York of reactions and ideas: participatory democracy meant every- since it was acquired in 1945; to these were added major one had his (sometimes her) own notions. It was Tax’s genius gatherings held at universities and other sites and, from 1958 that he was able to sort these into coherent plans while seem- on, the extremely productive summertime program of inter- ing to accommodate most opinions, even contradictory ones.
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