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

Case 19: From the Paleolithic to Palo Alto

The belated celebration, in November, 1955, of the Twenty-Fifth anniversary of the Department, was the occasion for considerable nostalgia, as thirtyfive Ph.D.'s and former students returned for festivities which included an honorary degree for Cole. The conjunction with the anniversary of the Social Sciences Building dictated a social anthropological focus. Round tables were held on "The Comparative Approach to the Study of Culture" and "The Analysis of Social Structure.Although reactions to the discussions are unrecorded, there are evidences elsewhere of a sense of theoretical malaise in the early 19509. Half a century of inquiry into "the nature of culture" had left the notion buried in a conceptual morass which took Kroeber and Kluckhohn a full volume to categorize analytically. Although Milton Singei s five "'models' for characterizing cultures as wholes" were more succinctly presented,his own evident preference for the "symbolic" left for future solution the problem of cultural comparison. Returning from the 1952 WennerGren conference assessing the state of "Anthropology Today," Washburn shared with Redfield his disappointment at the "conservatism" of their discipline, and the lack of any "systematic body of theory." In this context, some of the rising generation of anthropologists, seeking perhaps a middle way between neo-evolutionary scientism and a humanistic study of world view, began to turn to sociology and more sociological orientations within anthropology. At the reunion symposia these were symbolized respectively by the presence of Talcott Parsons of the Harvard Department of Social Relations and by the invitation, forestalled by his death, to Radcliffe-Brown to address the session on social structure.

Despite incipient schismatic tendencies and despite its focus on "social structure" rather than "culture," the British social anthropological tradition offered a methodologically selfconfident and theoretically coherent approach to synchronic holistic analysis which seemed very attractive to many young anthropologists in the 19509. Given the prior link represented by Radcliffe-Brown, it was natural for Chicago students to join the transatlantic movement opened up by Fulbright Fellowships and by the establishment of new research positions in the British colonies. Most prominent among them was perhaps Lloyd ("Tom') Fallers, whose work at the East African Institute of Social Research so favorably impressed Audrey Richards that he was subsequently invited back to succeed her as director.

Returning to the United States in 1957, Fallers joined two students of Parsons and Kluckhohn, Clifford Geertz and David M. Schneider, at the University of California, Berkeleyacross the Bay from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, the Ford Foundation - funded social science Shangri-la to which the Chicago anthropologists resorted sequentially in the later 19509. Aside from such manifest functions as clarifying conceptual distinctions and sharpening "cutting edges," a year at the Center often facilitated institutional mobility among the rising social scientific elite. From the point of view of the Chicago Department, 1958-59 was a vintage Center year, as Eggan and several other Chicago social scientists joined a group of anthropologists which included not only Fallers and Geertz, but also the British social anthropologists Raymond Firth and Meyer Fortes. At the end of the year, the ten Center anthropologists drafted a proposal for an Anglo-American Journal of Social Anthropology which in Fallers words would serve as the organ for "that part of anthropology which is part of modern social science." Although the Journal did not get off the ground, the Center year was fruitful in other ways. With Washburns departure, Redfield's death, and the news that Warner, too, was leaving, the Department faced a personnel crisis as serious as Sapii s departure for Yale. The eventual decision, through Eggan s intermediary, of Schneider, Geertz, and Fallers to come to Chicago was to have an impact on the Department quite as strong as that of RadcliffeBrown.

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