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Theories from the High Desert

Julian Steward is attracting renewed attention from historians of anthropology and among fans and opponents alike. Virginia Kerns’s book offers an insightful reanalysis of Steward’s anthropology by emphasizing what might be termed the social histories of his ideas. Neither proor anti-Steward in any essentialist way, Kerns’s treatment traces the origins of his ideas in detail and often, more interestingly, with well-argued speculative analysis which relates Steward’s upbringing and his wellknown prejudices to his anthropological theory. Steward was born in Washington, D.C., in 1902 and died in Urbana, Illinois, in 1972. In later life he rarely mentioned his youth in Washington. His parents split up when he was 16, and he was sent west to live with like-minded boys on a ranch in California and attend a school that they built there. It is this desert influence that Kerns especially emphasizes in the subsequent development of Steward’s anthropological ideas on ecology, technology, and ethnography. Steward studied zoology and geology at Cornell and earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at Berkeley in 1929. He held various teaching positions, most notably at Columbia and at Illinois, and he worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology and edited its six-volume Handbook of South American Indians, which was published between 1946 and 1950. His most important fieldwork was with the Shoshone of California, and here Kerns stresses the impact of his early contact with former foragers near the ranch where he spent his youth. Among the controversies he was involved in, Steward famously changed sides from supporting Native American land rights to supporting the U.S. government in Indian Claims Commission law cases. His reasoning was that reservation life amounted to ghettoization and would disadvantage Native Americans in the future. Among Steward’s prejudices seems to have been a strong feeling that male dominance was part of human nature. This was reflected personally in his discouragement of female students. It is that Steward was out of