History of Anthropology Newsletter Volume 29 Issue 2 December 2002 Article 1 January 2002 Volume 29, Issue 2 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/han Part of the Anthropology Commons, and the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons Recommended Citation (2002) "Volume 29, Issue 2," History of Anthropology Newsletter: Vol. 29 : Iss. 2 , Article 1. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/han/vol29/iss2/1 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/han/vol29/iss2/1 For more information, please contact [email protected]. H istory of A' nthropology N ewsletter XXIX:2 2002 History of Anthropology Newsletter VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 2 DECEMBER 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS CLIO'S FANCY: DOCUMENTS TO PIQUE THE IDSTORICAL IMAGINATION British Colonialists, Ibo Traders. and Idoma Democrats: A Marxist Anthropologist Enters "The Field" in Nigeria, 1950-51 ..•.•... 3 SOURCES FOR THE IDSTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY .....•.....•..•.....12 RESEARCH IN PROGRESS ..•••.•.•..•...••.•.•...•..•....•....•..... 12 BI6LIOGRAPIDCA ARCANA L American Anthropologist Special Centennial Issue . • . 13 ll. Recent Dissertations .......................................... 13 IlL Recent Work by Subscribers .•••....•..........•..••......•.. 13 ill. Suggested by Our Readers .••..•••........••.•.• o ••••• o ••••••• 15 The Editorial Committee Robert Bieder Regna Darnell Indiana University University of Western Ontario Curtis Hinsley Dell Hymes Northern Arizona University University of Virginia George W. Stocking William Sturtevant University of Chicago Smithsonian Institution Subscription rates (Each volume contains two numbers: June and December) Individual subscribers (North America) $6.00 Student subscribers 4.00 Institutional subscribers 8.00 Subscribers outside North America 8.00 Checks for renewals, new subscriptions or back numbers should be made payable (in United States dollars only) to: History of Anthropology Newsletter (or to HAN). Direct all correspondence relating to subscriptions and editorial matters to: George W. Stocking, HAN Department of Anthropology University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, Dlinois 60637 Subscribers and contributors should understand that HAN is carried on with a small budget as a spare-time activity. We depend very much on our readers to send along bibliographic notes, research reports, and items for our other departments. It will not always be possible, however, to acknowledge contributions, or to explain the exclusion of those few items not clearly related to the history of anthropology or for other reasons inappropriate. For similar reasons, we must keep correspondence and documentation relating to institutional or subscription service billing to an absolute minimum. 2 CLIO'S FANCY: DOCUMENTS TO PIQUE THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION British Colonialists, Tho Traders, and Idoma Democrats: A Marxist Anthropologist Enters "The Field" in Nigeria, 1950-51 Having undertaken and put aside in early 1950 a wide-ranging Marxist theoretical treatise on "Society and Matter" (HAN 29 #2, June 2002:1-10), Robert Gelston Annstrong returned to work on his dissertation project after two years away from the University of Chicago, during which he taught at Atlanta University (1947-48) and at the University of Puerto Rico (1948-49). As originally proposed in 1946, Armstrong's thesis was a comparative historical study of cultural elements in sub-Saharan Africa, in order to determine the relation of the gendered division of labot to matrilineal and patrilineal descent. In contrast, the dissertation that he completed while at Oxford during the summer and early fall of 1950 was a more focussed comparative study, based on recent monographs by British social anthropologists, of six African peoples, ranked in implicitly evolutionary order, in terms of the fonn that "exploitation" took in each of them (Annstrong 1950). In late October, with his dissertation needing only fmishing touches, Annstrong set sail for Nigeria, with support from the British Colonial Social Science Research Council, for two years of fieldwork among the Idoma, under the nominal supervision of Edward Evans-Pritchard, whom he had met when E-P taught at Chicago in the winter quarter of 1950. During the time he was in Nigeria, Annstrong sent a number of lengthy letter reports to his close friend John Murra, whom he had known at Chicago before the war, and who had been instrumental in inviting him to Puerto Rico, where Armstrong participated for a time in Julian Steward's innovative team study of "The People of Puerto Rico" (Steward et al. 1956). The letter reproduced in part below is the second in the series, and is published with the pennission of the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, where it is in Box 5 of the John Murra Papers. In its original form it is half again as long as here presented, and had to be edited in order to fit within the HAN format. In addition to deleting several extended passages relating to inquiries about mutual friends and radical student activities at the University of Chicago, I have substantially condensed on a line-by-line basis most of the Nigerian topics Annstrong treated, hopefully without sacrificing too much of the vivid "this is the way it was" (or seemed to him to be) experiential stuff of Armstrong's initiation into the colonial and ethnographic field, now more than fifty years ago. In a few cases, I have inserted in brackets clarifying comments or identifications of people who might not be known to readers of HAN. Dear John [Ibadan, Nigeria] May 6, 1951 It's really your fault, you know, that I haven't written to you for so long. You were so damned flattering about my last letter that I thought I couldn't do less in my next. But finding the time and energy to do it hasn't been so easy. I have [received] a sample copy of Monthly Review [a Marxist monthly] in the mails, though, and they say you gave them my name. Maybe this is just the sort of burr in the ass I needed .... The Department kept me on edge all winter waiting for formal word of some kind on the thesis. I was buoyed up, however, by the thought that [Robert] Redfield liked it ... and will quote the various relevant points to you: (From RR, Dec. 27th) I have read your thesis-from the beginning to the end. I liked it, and like it the more because I think it is in some respects not so easy to like as are some other theses .... You take some considerations and argue them out, publicly, which isn't done, you 3 know. But ... I recognize in this public exposure of one's efforts to find general meaning in some facts a weakness of my own, to which, when I fmd it in others, I am therefore sympathetic .... As for "exploitation," I think there are real troubles there, but not so much from the uncomfortableness which attaches to the word from its background in Marxism, as for the reason that the concept is not so clearly defined as it sounds .... When I heard nothing more for quite a time, I wrote . pointing out that I discuss the limitations of the exploitation idea in pretty explicit detail in the thesis; that although it formed the real backbone of the thesis, I felt that I had really just got started on what must be a long-term study; that this was the real reason for my five-months excursion into theoretical green pastures [the essay on "Society and Matter"]; and that I had sought to cover myself from the point of view of thesis requirements by making a couple of "contributions to knowledge" at points where they are easier to make: vanquishing the Hamitic Hypothesis and chastening the Conquest Theory [the ideas that civilizational advances were the work of invading lighter-skinned racial groups] .... [Having heard that his dissertation was formally approved, Armstrong continued:] I have been telling myself and the public at large that I feel elated etc. that it is now substantially over. Actually I feel more like a wrung-out dishrag. I think it would have been good if I could have arranged to have a rest before starting on fieldwork, but I don't know quite what to do about that now .... So much for me and mine. Now for Africa.... The Ibo are really quite a phenomenon. They include in one teeming volcano the most emphatically advanced and the most emphatically backward peoples of Nigeria ("backward" in the stereotypical sense of most naked, most atomized political organization, most surrounded by rumours of sale of human meat in the markets, etc. I suspect that the actual incidence of cannibalism in Iboland is no greater than in the U.S.A. today). I mention the stereotype because it seems to me important in the thinking ofjust such folk as a hell of a lot of the Ibo are turning themselves into-lower-middle-class, sociological Protestants. As such they have penetrated all over Nigeria as the clerks and traders and carpenters of the country. They are like the Yankee traders of the last century in America, full of the old P.[rotestant]E.[thic], shrewd business men. The Idoma regard them as city-slickers who will cheat you out of your last penny if possible .... What it boils down to is that the Ibo are much like anybody else when you meet them inside their own world. I have met quite a lot of Ibos who are a lot of fun and very sweet people. [But] the postmaster at Oturkpo is the sort of person I do not warm to so readily .... [He] refuses to serve Idoma women unless they cover their breasts-tells them that they are a bunch of primitives and should go and put some clothes on. On the other hand he was present with some other clerks at a big dance I attended.