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Family Trees and Timber Rights: Albert E. Jenks, Americanization, and the Rise of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Mark Soderstrom
Mark Soderstrom
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Hindsight allows present-day scholars to view the development of academic disciplines in a light that contemporaries would never have seen. Hence, from our perspective, Mary Furner's assertion that anthropology developed as a profession reacting against biology and the physical sciences makes sense, for we tend to celebrate the triumph of cultural anthropology as the coming of age of the discipline. However, this trajectory of professional development was not a necessary or predestined development. Rather, the eventual (if occasionally still embattled) predominance of culture over the categories of race, nation, and biology was only one of many possible outcomes. This paper investigates a different trajectory, one that most current scholars would hope has been relegated to the dustbin of history. It is still a cautionary tale, though, in that while the racial anthropology followed in this narrative did not survive World War II, its practitioners did enjoy a degree of prominence and influence that was much greater and longer than has been generally acknowledged by current accounts.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 176 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2004

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References

2 That is, unless one is currently in the sub-disciplines of forensic anthropology, physical anthropology and archeology.

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