Significant Others

Interpersonal and Professional Commitments in Anthropology

Richard Handler

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780299194703
• eBook ISBN: 9780299194734
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthropology is by definition about "others," but in this volume the phrase refers not to members of observed cultures, but to "significant others"—spouses, lovers, and others with whom anthropologists have deep relationships that are both personal and professional. The essays in this volume look at the roles of these spouses and partners of anthropologists over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially their work as they accompanied the anthropologists in the field. Other relationships discussed include those between anthropologists and informants, mentors and students, cohorts and partners, and parents and children. The book closes with a look at gender roles in the field, demonstrated by the "marriage" in the late nineteenth century of the male Anthropological Society of Washington to the Women's Anthropological Society of America. Revealing relationships that were simultaneously deeply personal and professionally important, these essays bring a new depth of insight to the history of anthropology as a social science and human endeavor.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Anthropology’s Other Others
• “The Endless Conversation”: Fieldwork, Writing, and the Marriage of Victor and Edith Turner / Matthew Engelke
• Inverting the Camel’s Hump: Jorge Dias, His Wife, Their Interpreter, and I / Harry G. West
• The Director as Significant Other: Max Gluckman and Team Fieldwork at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute / Lyn Schumaker
• Boasian Cosmographic Anthropology and the Sociocentric Component of Mind / Michael Silverstein
• Jaime de Angulo and Alfred Kroeber: Bohemians and Bourgeois in Berkeley Anthropology / Robert Brightman
• A. I. Hallowell’s Boasian Evolutionism: Human Ir/rationality in Cross-Cultural, Evolutionary, and Personal Context / George W. Stocking, Jr.
• It Was No “Pink Tea”: Gender and American Anthropology, 1885–1903 / Joy Elizabeth Rohde
• Index