Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886-1965

Cultural anthropology in the United States from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries reflects a broad cross section of thought and experience—much broader, certainly, than can be properly historicized if one solely takes an internalist perspective on the methodological and conceptual developments that gave it such cultural currency in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. As crucially important as those disciplinary innovations are in the history of anthropology, they intersect with external considerations that place them within larger frames of reference and meaning. The influence of American cultural nationalism is the external factor that receives the most thorough examination in John S. Gilkeson's Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America. It is “the peculiar fit between American anthropology and American cultural nationalism” that most intrigues him, or the need to be released from a nagging sense of cultural inferiority vis-à-vis Europe (p. 2). Although the epistemology of anthropology, like that of the sciences in general, often embraces positivist values, the empiricism of the scientific method has never inoculated the discipline against the social and political milieu in which anthropologists work. Historically speaking, what has been considered science has been something of a sliding scale. Gilkeson's book is a forceful reminder of just how that process worked among American anthropologists during the interwar period of 1919 to 1941

Discipline · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Positivism · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Law · Philosophy

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