![]() He also served on a committee to reorganize the American Anthropological Association and played a role in the creation of the National Science Foundation. He also took a position at the Smithsonian Institution, where he founded the Institute for Social Anthropology in 1943. Among them: Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938), which “fully explicated” the paradigm of cultural ecology, and marked a shift away from the diffusionist orientation of American anthropology.įor eleven years Steward became an administrator of considerable clout, editing the Handbook of South American Indians. (EthnoAdmin 2003) In 1931, Steward, pressed for money, began fieldwork on the Great Basin Shoshone under the auspices of Kroeber’s Culture Element Distribution (CED) survey in 1935 he received an appointment to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), which published some of his most influential works. Steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” - the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work - an approach Kroeber regarded as “eccentric,” original, and innovative. In 1930 Steward moved to the University of Utah, which appealed to him for its proximity to the Sierra Nevada, and nearby archaeological fieldwork opportunities in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon. Steward went on to establish an anthropology department at the University of Michigan, where he taught until 1930, when he was replaced by Leslie White, with whose model of "universal" cultural evolution he disagreed, although it went on to become popular and gained the department fame/notoriety. Steward studied under Kroeber and Lowie-and was taught by Oskar Schmieder in regional geography-at Berkeley, where his dissertation The Ceremonial Buffoon of the American Indian, a Study of Ritualized Clowning and Role Reversals was accepted in 1929. Farrand advised Steward to continue pursuing his interest (or, in Steward's words, his already chosen "life work") in anthropology at Berkeley (Kerns 2003:71-72). ![]() Although Cornell, like most universities at the time, had no anthropology department, its president, Livingston Farrand, had previously held appointment as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. (Kerns 1999 Murphy 1977)Īs an undergraduate, Steward studied for a year at Berkeley under Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, after which he transferred to Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1925 with a B.Sc. ![]() Steward’s “direct engagement” with the land (specifically, subsistence through irrigation and ranching) and the Northern Paiute that lived there became a “catalyst” for his theory and method of cultural ecology. ![]() Steward's experience at the newly established Deep Springs Preparatory School (which later became Deep Springs College), high in the White Mountains had a significant influence on his academic and career interests. ![]() to attend boarding school in Deep Springs Valley, California, in the Great Basin. Steward was born in Washington, D.C., where he lived on Monroe Street, NW, and later, Macomb Street in Cleveland Park.Īt age 16, Steward left an unhappy childhood in Washington, D.C. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |