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

Case 7: Separating from Sociology

Foreseeing the eventual realization of an independent department, Small recommended that Starr's place be filled by the part-time appointment of Fay-Cooper Cole, who had been employed at the Field Museum since his graduation from Northwestern University. Accompanied by his wife, Cole had done extended fieldwork in the Philippines in 1906, from which he later produced a thoroughly Boasian dissertation for his Ph.D. at Columbia. A genial, self-effacing man of no great intellectual pretensions, Cole was an able lecturer and a remarkably effective organizer and administrator. He quickly took advantage of the resources available to the social sciences at Chicago to consolidate his own position and that of his discipline. When his prompt success as a teacher suggested the need for additional personnel, Cole, with the aid of money from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, brought to Chicago the brilliant linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir, whom he had known as "the shark of the lot" in Boas' seminar.

Although Sapir's appointment placed Chicago anthropology firmly in the Boasian tradition, it also reflected a change in American anthropology from a museum-oriented discipline to one that would contribute to knowledge of "the essential patterns and mechanisms of social behavior." Sapir continued to study the historical relationships of contemporary Indian language groups, but he was also concerned with the psychological problems of the way in which different languages created "distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." His ultimate goal, he suggested at one point, was a "social psychology of the symbol." The fact that Chicago anthropology was tied to a sociology department with a strong interest in the cultural assimilation of immigrant groups in contemporary America clearly contributed to this reorientation. Cole had early introduced a course on "Our Alien Peoples," and several of his research proposals reflected a concern with contemporary social issues.

In many respects, however, anthropology at Chicago remained quite traditional, and when Cole and Sapir applied to the Spelman Memorial for money to support field research as an essential component of graduate training, they criticized museum anthropology on the grounds that traditionally important anthropological activities were suffering from the unevenness of museum interest. Once Sapir's presence freed Cole from certain teaching burdens, he reactivated a long dormant interest in archaeology, which he saw as a means to mobilize support for an easily accessible and inexpensive form of field research. From 1926, under the auspices of the National Research Council Committee on State Archaeological Surveys, a reconstructed Reo "camper" travelled to sites all over Illinois, and the summer dig in an Indian mound became a regular feature of the Chicago anthropology student's career.

As Robert Redfield's graduate program suggests, the rapidly growing number of students who specialized in anthropology had little time for sociological training, and when Leslie White took his Ph.D. orals in 1927, one of the sociologists seems to have given him a rather bad time. By then, Redfield's addition to a staff of eight converted a pair of anthropologists into a distinct faculty grouping - housed together in the physiology building some distance from the sociologists. When it seemed that funding and job opportunities would sustain their independence, Cole proposed a separation on the grounds that anthropology's ties to sociology were no closer than those to a number of other social and natural scientific disciplines.

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