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

Case 17: The Dilemmas of Utilitarian Anthropology

Although Redfield argued that his "Program in Intercultural Studies" might help in the establishment of a peaceful world community, its practical value, like that of humane scholarship or liberal education, inhered not in the determination or implementation of specific policy but in its effect on the attitudes of men. At various times in the history of discipline, anthropologists and others have entertained the hope that it might offer more directly utilitarian benefits to society. Cole, who had first-hand experience with the Dutch colonial administration in Malaysia, was quick to respond to the reorientation of United States Indian policy following the appointment of John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. He and RadcliffeBrown met with Collier in the spring of 1934 and in June sent a memo suggesting ways in which "the Indian Bureau might make use of Anthropology." Subsequently, Chicago-trained anthropologists played a prominent role in various experiments in "applied anthropology" during the New Deal and wartime years.

The attempt to create a more utilitarian anthropology has been plagued from the beginning with serious problems, some of which are hinted at in a letter from John Provinse to Redfield in 1937. Government personnel were often doubtful of the practical value of the research proposed by academicians, who in turn were subject to the temptations of the greater security and freedom in a university positionthough Provinse himself chose to spend much of his career in government service. In the case of the large-scale research project on "Personality Development in Six Indian Tribes," which Lloyd Warner organized for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the early 1940s, clashes between academic and Bureau personnel and disagreements over the control of research data led to the termination of the cooperative arrangement under which the project was conducted.

After the war, Warner's applied interests shifted from government back toward the business community, and the rest of the Chicago faculty returned to more traditionally academic pursuits. Although Redfield went to Texas in 1947 to testify in one of the major cases challenging the legality of educational segregation, such service as an expert witness was quite consistent with an essentially academic conception of the anthropologist's role. It was simply a matter of disseminating a basic postulate of modern anthropology: the equal potentiality of all human groups as participants in modern civilization.

Ethical and methodological issues of a less traditional sort were raised when the Department set up a field school in Tama, Iowa, to study the acculturation of the Fox Indians, among whom Sol Tax had worked in the early 1930s. Prodded by a group of students uncomfortable with a posture of non-commitment on issues affecting the future welfare of the Fox, Tax concluded that the traditional anthropological role of "participant observer" should better be thought of as "interferer observer." Reversing his earlier position on the necessary separation of pure scientific research and the solution of practical problems, he became the proponent of what he called "action anthropology." During the early 1950s a number of Chicago students spent their summers working with the "Fox Project." Although his daughter Lisa Peattie played a leading role, Redfield seems to have had his doubts about "action anthropology." In general, the academic and political atmosphere of the 1950s was not a supportive one. U.S. Indian policy had moved toward "termination" of the special relations of Indians to the federal government, which was more interested in applied anthropology that sustained American interests overseas.

By the end of the decade, when its major activities were an Indian handicraft cooperative and a day school, the Fox project had ended. But Tax played a major role in 1961 in organizing a meeting in Chicago of representatives from ninety tribes, whose "Declaration of Indian Purpose" marked an important stage in the emergence of a pantribal Native American consciousness. By that time, however, Tax's own entrepreneurial energies were heavily involved in the establishment of Current Anthropology as a medium of communication for anthropologists all over the world. When the Vietnam War raised the methodological and ethical issues of utilitarian anthropology in a new and agonistic form, the response of the Chicago Department was to insist once more on "the need to maintain a separation between academic research in the social sciences and mission-oriented activity under government control" - a position it has maintained to the present day.

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