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

Case 15: A Program for Postwar Anthropology

Despite the anxious shadows cast by an "exploding technology," the professional prospects of the Department seemed very hopeful at the end of World War II. Universities all over the country were reevaluating and expanding programs in anticipation of a wave of returning GIs. Employment opportunities in anthropology had never been so bright - though Cole found it difficult to place Jewish students in some of the midwestern American schools which formed the basis of the Chicago network. At Chicago, too, there were changes in personnel and program.

After Hoijer took a permanent position at U.C.L.A. in 1940, Cole was able to establish regular instruction in Old World archaeology by bringing in Robert Braidwood of the Oriental Institute. Although the appointment of Kenneth Orr as Cole's successor in American archaeology in 1946 proved to be short-lived, some of the archaeological slack was taken up by Chicagotrained personnel at the Field Museum, with which Cole established a formal cooperative arrangement in 1945. Andrade's death in 1940 and the reorientation of his successor's interests toward the Far East left the status of linguistics in doubt. After some discussion the future of linguistic anthropology in the Department was assured by the appointment of Norman McQuown in the waning months of the Carnegie Mayan project. In contrast, several initiatives of a more social anthropological character fell through. Claude Levi-Strauss returned to France after his wartime stay in New York City. Clyde Kluckhohn felt obligated to remain at Harvard to represent anthropology in the Department of Social Relations which he, Talcott Parsons, and several Harvard psychologists had just established. Thus when Cole reported to Ralph Tyler in December, 1946, on the dissertations supervised in the Department, social anthropology was strikingly underrepresented in what had been considered its American stronghold.

Several of those whom Cole classed as "ethnologists" had of course felt the influence of Radcliffe-Brown. However, when Sol Tax was brought in full-time from the Carnegie project in 1944 to organize a postwar program in anthropology, social anthropology was incorporated into a framework in which human diversification and the evolution of culture had priority of place. In consultation with specialists both inside and outside the University (including the British prehistorian V. Gordon Childe), Tax, Krogman, and Braidwood played the major role in defining the course in "Human Origins" which introduced the new program in 1945. Equipped with bound syllabi and volumes of selected readings, students were treated to a varied sequence of special lectures, round tables, laboratories, field trips, and discussions - with numerous written assignments and examinations. Although the second course in the series, Eggari s encyclopaedic review of world ethnology, was much more an individual tour de force, the course in social anthropology introduced in 1947 was again a teamtaught venture. For more than a decade, the 220-230-240 sequence provided the comprehensive training in "general anthropology" which was a hallmark of Chicago students in this period. It also provided part of the context in which certain issues of a broadly evolutionary character became the foci of major research projects - a development marked by the participation of Redfield and Braidwood in a 1947 Oriental Institute symposium on "The Birth of Civilization."

The end of that year saw the retirement of Cole after more than two decades as organizer of Chicago anthropology, an event which was celebrated with a dinner, at which the mock-up of a forthcoming archaeological Festschrift was presented by James Griffin. The Department's more dominant intellectual figures in these early decades had not always been sympathetic to investigations of what Redfield had once referred to as "stones and bones." Nevertheless, Cole had succeeded in giving the Chicago Department an unusually strong sense of primary-group solidarity, and stamped it with a traditionally embracive "sacred-bundle" conception of the discipline - both of which were to endure for some time after his departure.

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