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

Case 21: Untying the Sacred Bundle

The tradition of "general anthropology" was still quite strong at Chicago in 1960. Although the exigencies of staffing had begun by the mid-1950s to loosen the structure of the old 220-230-240 sequence, the number of required core courses was raised from nine to fifteen during McQuown s chairmanship. At the end of their second year, students continued to be subjected to a grueling two-day written examination covering all the five subdisciplines. Nevertheless, the centrifugal forces of intellectual specialization had for some time been unravelling the bindings of the traditional "sacred bundle" of general anthropology. In 1954, Washburn was already complaining that inadequately trained social anthropologists were accepting positions in which they were asked to teach "modern physical anthropology." With the arrival of the new group of social anthropologists in 1960, the problem of what constituted appropriate training for a Chicago Ph.D. became the subject of a prolonged reevaluation.

An attempt to reduce the five subfields to four by the creation of a new category "socio-cultural anthropology" was unsuccessful. However, the eventual disappearance (in 1971) of "ethnology" was foreshadowed in May, 1961, when the core was reduced to nine courses largely by eliminating the requirements in "areal ethnology." Over the next year, Fallers was responsible for coordinating the design of a new core program, which was built around two three-quarter sequences, "one organized 'historically', the other'scientifically."' Since "all the aspects of man" were "understandable partly in terms of systematic analysis and partly in terms of historical analysis," each course would crosscut the various fields of anthropology. "The Human Career" was a revised version of the old 220, with Howell's Braidwood's and Adams' interests each represented in one quarter. In contrast, "Systematic Analysis in Anthropology" (or "Systems") was a Parsonian revision of the old 240, with quarters devoted respectively to the "social system," the "cultural system," and "personality systems." Although the revised core recognized the methodological legitimacy of historical ethnology by including a course in the "interpretation of evidence in the more historically oriented aspects of anthropology," it was taught only once.

In retrospect, Fallers' attempt to map the cognitive territory of the Department in terms of an opposition between history and science, with "pleistocene-ecology" on one side and "behavioral science" on the other, does not adequately represent the changing intellectual orientations of its subdisciplines. These were the years when Lewis Binford was advocating the "application of laboratory methods . . . to the solution of archaeological problems." Although he did not win tenure at Chicago, Binford and his students made the Department for a time the center of a self-consciously scientific "new" archaeology. Indeed, the general trend in both archaeology and physical anthropology was to look to the natural sciences for methodological models and sources of specific expertise. In 1962, both Howell and Braidwood complained about their inadequate relations with the natural science departments of the University. And while the reorientation of "archaeo-biology" also involved a stronger interest in the "behavioral sciences" side of Fallers' grid, the other wing of the Chicago Department was developing along quite different lines, which heightened rather than reduced the sense of methodological and substantive opposition.

Hints of this development are evident in comments Schneider offered in 1964 on Parsons' paper "Clyde Kluckhohn and the Integration of the Social Sciences." Discussing Kluckhohn's alleged antipathy to certain British social anthropologists and his distaste for sociology in general, Schneider emphasized his feeling that linguistics was the "constant source of theoretical innovation in . . . Anthropology's fundamental intellectual task, the study of culture." Increasingly, "systematic analysis' at Chicago did focus on the concept "culture" rather than on those of "society" or "personality," and on symbolic structures rather than on patterns of behavior. The comparative macrosociological orientation represented in the New Nations Committee did not disappear entirely, and there was a continuing interest among some faculty in processual or historical problems. But the increasingly dominant interest, although synchronic, was relativistically humanistic rather than "scientific" in outlook. It was oriented less to the behavioral or social sciences, than to linguistics, philosophy, and certain currents within sociocultural anthropology itself - notably French structuralism and the American Boasian tradition.

In this context, there seemed no reason why aspiring sociocultural anthropologists should carry a burden of "stones and bones." By 1968 they were able largely to avoid it, although archaeobiologists were still required to take "Systems." By 1971, however, the only trace of a graduate requirement in "general anthropology" was a phrase "encouraging" students to take courses "in all the fields of anthropology."

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