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

Case 11: Getting to Know Modern Man

To the surprise of the University community, Redfield in 1934 became the third (and longest-tenured) Dean of the Social Sciences Division, which had been created by the University reorganization four years earlier. With its internal affairs under Cole's benignly paternal supervision, the young Department of Anthropology was in a good position to take advantage of such opportunities for growth as the depression years offered. When the death of Roland Dixon upset the tenuous balance between innovation and tradition in the Harvard department, Redfield moved quickly to recruit one of the most dynamic figures in midtwentieth-century American social science: William Lloyd Warner.

After a traditional Boasian training at the University of California, Warner had come under Radcliffe-Brown's influence while doing fieldwork with Australian aborigines. From the beginning, however, his ultimate goal was "to get to know modern man better," and when he took a job at Harvard after his return to the United States, he was able (by affiliation with Rockefeller-funded industrial researches at the Harvard Business School) to initiate major projects in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in Natchez, Mississippi, and (under different auspices) in western Ireland. Although Warner saw these as modern case studies for Radcliffe-Brown's "comparative sociology," they seemed to Redfield an obvious complement to his own work on communities within the orbit of modern civilization.

After speaking in the Divisional "Seminar in Race and Culture Contacts," Warner concluded that Chicago would provide a supportive milieu for his broadly ranging interests. He soon accepted a joint appointment in the Departments of Anthropology and Sociology - although the transfer of his rather heavily-staffed and technologically complex projects required further negotiation. The analysis and publication of the earlier research results by Warner and his co-workers continued at Chicago - the Newburyport study producing five volumes in the "Yankee City Series" between 1941 and 1960. Warner, however, was not a man to rest on his entrepreneurial or intellectual laurels. Having initiated the study of what he called (somewhat controversially) the "caste" system of the American South, he was instrumental in organizing work in the Latin American and Black communities of Chicago - out of which came St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton s widelyacclaimed Black Metropolis.

Warner seems to have found even a joint appointment confining to his intellectual energies. Unlike his mentor Radcliffe-Brown, who during his Chicago stay focused ever more narrowly on the analysis of social structure, Warner moved out from Durkheim via Freud to encompass a range of processual, psychological, and symbolic problems - all of them unified by his underlying interest in the way in which traditional American social institutions and cultural values functioned in modern industrial society. He alwz ys defined himself as a social anthropologist and continued to play an influential intellectual role in the Department, involving a cadre of its students in his researches for the Committee on Human Development. However, his interdisciplinary ventures did not always meet with his colleagues' whole-hearted approval. In 1947, Redfield responded to a proposal for a Committee on Human Relations with queries as to whether it would not conflict with existing departmental interests. Over time, there was a tendency for Warner's association with the Department to become diluted by his multiplex involvements, particularly when he initiated a downtown business venture in applied social science (Social Research, Inc.). Back in 1935, however, the effect of his appointment - along with that of Fred Eggan as instructor the same year was to stamp the Chicago Department as the stronghold of a "social anthropological" viewpoint.

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