"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 18: Toward the Darwin Centennial

Of the numerous major conferences organized by Sol Tax, the one most representative of the Department (in a certain phase of its history) was that held in celebration of the Centennial of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Insofar as the subdisciplines of anthropology have a more than accidental historical unity, their integration is grounded in a broadly evolutionary view of man which, despite the early twentieth-century reaction against cultural evolutionary assumption, was variously reasserted in the postwar period. From this perspective, the Darwin Centennial was the culmination of several trends: the concerns articulated in the course on “Human Origins” which Tax, Braidwood, and Krogman had designed in 1945; the neo-evolutionary civilizational interests which Redfield pursued in the early 1950s; and the intellectual dynamism of Sherwood Washburn, who came to the Department as Krogman’s successor in the fall of 1947.

Although focusing on problems of human growth, Krogman was in some respects a traditional physical anthropologist, measuring skeletal characteristics for purposes of human racial taxonomy. In contrast, Washburn had a strong background in zoology and became a leading proponent of the “new” physical anthropology which emerged around 1950 in the context of recent developments in biological theory. Sharply critical of many traditional approaches, Washburn advocated the application of experimental laboratory methods – modest support for which was quickly forthcoming as a result of his already established relations with the Viking Fund in New York. Washburn’s most important contribution to an evolutionary physical anthropology was the observation of primate behavior in natural situations, which he first undertook on a field trip to Southern Rhodesia in 1955. Among those stimulated by Washburn’s attempt to coordinate biological and social anthropological research in the study of the evolution of human cultural capacity was Irven Devore, who combined primate behavioral research with the study of contemporary hunting populations. Although Washburn left for the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958, his interests were clearly manifested in the symposia of the Centennial, to which he and his student Clark Howell contributed a paper on human biological and cultural evolution in the Pleistocene period- an area which was to be the focus of Howell’s subsequent research.

What Howell later came to call “paleoanthropology” was bounded at the end of the Pleistocene by the interests of Robert Braidwood, whose research focused on the establishment of an effectively produced agricultural food supply as the “germplasm of the Western European cultural tradition.” From 1947 on, Braidwood carried on field work at Jarmo and other sites on “the hilly flanks of the fertile crescent” in order to fill in the blank period in the “gap chart” he had prepared for the “Human Origins” course in 1945. Although the gap chart was drawn up just prior to Willard Libby’s development of Carbon14 dating, the subsequent application of nuclear techniques suggests the broadening natural scientific context in which archaeology was to be increasingly embedded. Requiring the participation of geologist, zoologists, and botanists, Braidwood’s research was one of the very first anthropological projects to be funded by the National Science Foundation which in the early 1950s was seeking politically uncontroversial ways to broaden its coverage to include what were then being called the “behavioral” (as opposed to the”social”-ist) sciences.

Among the field party during the first full season at Jarmo was Robert McCormick Adams, who went on to formulate a dissertation project comparing the emergence of civilization in the Old and New Worlds – an investigation which Redfield clearly considered relevant to his own interest in “how simple village life gave way, in several parts of the world, to theocratic states.” Adams’ later Centennial paper categorizing the attitudes of social anthropologists toward evolutionism elicited his fellow panelist A. L. Kroeber’s comment that most of them continue to think of themselves as anti-evolutionist.” Nevertheless the ecological orientation characteristic of the neo-evolutionary movement is clearly reflected in another major departmental research project organized by Norman McQuown in the highlands of southern Mexico. Although its funding was divided into components underwritten respectively by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, and the project reports tended to fall into clearly differentiable subdisciplinary modes, the “Chiapas Project” was conceived as an investigation of “man-in-Nature,” unifying “within the framework of a natural history approach the contributions of all the anthropological sub-disciplines.”

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