Anthropology News • April 2010 • Volume 51 • Issue 4
Paul L Doughty, Contributing Editor

Anthropologists Crash the Headlines

It is always interesting to find that an anthropological colleague has gained fame by becoming a headliner in the public media. In that domain, the late Margaret Mead had no contemporary peers and she has become an icon outside the discipline as well as in it. I could first identify with this “close to fame” phenomenon in the mid-1950s when as a graduate student I watched my University of Pennsylvania professors Carleton Coon, Alfred Kidder and others match wits on the CBS program “What in the World,” identifying unusual artifacts from the Penn Museum.

The esoteric in anthropology has long fascinated the public and attracted media attention. Thus, through Internet communiqués from our fearless ASA leader, Tony Paredes, this headline from the New York Times (October 22, 1902) was called to my attention: “ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN DISPUTE: Lively Controversy Over Coining the Word ‘Amerind’: The discussion evoked such terms as “hybrid” “mongrel” and “monster”—Toscanelli Letters declared to be forgeries.”

Participants at the International Congress of Amercanists heard the word from JD McGuire, and at once, Franz Boas, Frederick Starr and others opposed its use. The word “Amerind” was introduced by Major John Wesley Powell, founder of the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), and according to WJ McGee of the BAE, the term was being used by “one half of ethnology students.” Discussion then wandered to Columbus, and a European participant was quoted by the Times as saying “Columbus, ze bold seaman, he simply say, ‘I show you ze shortest way to India where grow ze spice…” All the news that’s fit to print, ad captandum vulgus, so to speak.

Even as we fast forward to our “era” of high speed communications and Google I wonder if we can ever escape “the exotic” image of anthropology, concerned only with strange “others” or explaining what some take to be “obvious.” Thus, Nancy Banks-Smith, writing in The Guardian (July 21, 1988) noted: “Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over—except when they are different.” Well sort of, I guess. Back when I was teaching Cultural Anthropology 101, I refused to use textbooks with exotic cover photographs of the “other” with filed teeth or a bone through the nose. I wanted facilitate the students’ being able to apply what I was saying to themselves and not just to illustrate strangeness. All that of course is now moot, what with tattoos and tongue, belly button and genital “jewelry,” as many of our kids may have become “the other!” Oc