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

Case 5: The Self-Made Anthropologist

Before anthropology was a recognized academic discipline, the route to a professorship was necessarily circuitous. Frederick Starr's career took him from Pennsylvania through Illinois to Iowa, where he taught biology at Coe College and did research on thunderstorms for the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences - a regional organization whose ambitions for national status were tarnished by disputes over the authenticity of moundbuilder artifacts later proven to be forgeries. After becoming interested in the Iowa Indians, Starr began including lectures in Indian costume among his repertoire as a public lecturer to Iowa farmfolk; he also introduced the first course in anthropology in the state. In 1888 he returned East to qualify for a more serious pursuit of his scientific interests, studying with William Graham Sumner and James Dwight Dana at Yale and travelling under the latter's sponsorship to other natural history institutions. After helping to prepare anthropological collections at the American Museum of Natural History, he eventually took a professorship of geology at Pomona College in California.

Following Harper's invitation to Chicago, Stan further prepared himself by conducting surveys of the major anthropological institutions of the eastern seaboard and Western Europe; he also did physical anthropological work among the Cherokee as part of the investigations Boas organized for the Columbian Exposition. Coming upon anthropology just before its intellectual transformation, Starr's efforts at self-professionalization had the effect of rooting him permanently in late nineteenth-century evolutionism. His first major anthropological work - a publication of his summer lectures by the Chautauqua Press - was little more than a reworking of Tylor's Anthropology, which Starr continued to use as a textbook until the end of his career.

Starr, however, was not the stereotypic "armchair" evolutionist. At a time when American anthropologists rarely worked outside the United States, he made two trips to Africa, a half dozen to the Far East, and fifteen to southern Mexico. However, his Congo field notes suggest that the data he collected were rather superficial: characteristically, he "measured, vocabularied and photographed." Primarily interested in physical anthropology, he was preoccupied with exotica such as albinism and polydactylism. His proudest anthropological production was an extended series of plaster busts, collected by means which, according to one account, required Starr to establish himself almost as village dictator, threatening reluctant subjects with jail if they did not submit to the arduous and anxious procedure. His most representative publications were travel accounts and photographic albums, and he seems to have had little awareness of the linguistic and textual approaches which Boas was using to move anthropology from the museum to the academy.

To a great extent Stan's anthropology was oriented outward from the University, from which he was gone much of the time. His personal eccentricities and his interest in anthropological oddities made him a frequent figure in the public press. Even his serious political concerns had a paradoxical character. Although he was an active Anti-Imperialist, he defended Belgian rule in the Congo against reformist criticism - for which the Belgians awarded him one of the various citations and medals which he had accumulated by the end of his career.

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