Recent Trends I N Am Zrican Ethnology

MERICAN anthropology as an organized science is only one hundred years A old. The American Ethnological Society of New York, founded in 1842, was the first organization of its kind on the continent. I n 1851 “the first scientific account of an Indian tribe” appeared-Lewis H. Morgan’s League of the Iroquois. I n 1866 the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology was founded in Cambridge. In 1879 the Bureau of American Ethnology was organized as the first agency to be supported by a national government for the systematic study of the aboriginal groups under its jurisdiction. I n the same year the Anthropological Society of Washington was founded. The first number of the American Anthropologist appeared in 1888 and the Journal of American Folklore began the following year. These early milestones were conceived and set up by men who, for the most part, had begun in other fields such as geology (McGee), medicine (Matthews) or law (Morgan). Some, like Matthews, subsisted from their original profession and practised anthropology as an avocation. Others, like Powell and Putnam, became affiliated with the Bureau of American Ethnology or with a museum. The universities were slow in adding anthropology to their course of study. The first Ph.D. (1892) was awarded to Chamberlain by Clark University only a little over fifty years ago and exactly fifty years after the founding of the first American society for anthropology. In this first half century the foundations were laid and the pioneer work in American archeology, linguistics, physical anthropology and ethnography was done. This did not stop a t simple description. These men were interested in interpreting what they saw, although the facts they possessed were few compared with the number available today.’ The outstanding efforts in this direction were made by Morgan. I n Systems of consanguinity and afinity (1870) he attempted to classify kinship systems and relate them to each other. Ancient society (1877) is one of the most substantial attempts in Europe or America to contribute to an understanding of the evolution of our social system. In Houses and house-life of the American aborigines (1881) he tried to show the correlation between architectural forms and social organization. This is the true scientific attitude: facts are of value only for the generalizations that can be derived from them and applied to a better understanding of our own life. From 1892 to about 1925 Boas and his students dominated American anthropology. They found much to criticize in the evolutionary approach. When they tried to apply the evolutionist’s sequences of development to particular tribes or peoples they discovered that the history of few if any of them con-