Fifty Years in Anthropology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 11: 1-24 (Volume publication date October 1982)
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.11.100182.000245
Ralph L. Beals, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90024
Read the abstract here.
Letters to My Tutor…
My dearest lady,
I decided to read one of the Overviews from the Annual Review of Anthropology this week. When I read that Ralph Beals entered university thinking that he would be a fiction writer and leaned toward majoring in philosophy, I thought, “This is I.” From the first that I learned to read, I loved to read, and I’ve felt at home with writers. I had an early attraction to philosophy and I was indeed a philosophy major for a while. I felt many such instances of “sameness” while reading “Fifty Years in Anthropology,” and I believe that I’ve added to my understanding of what draws me to anthropology. In my recent pondering as to what it means to think like an anthropologist or lawyer or what have you, I’ve come to a clearer realization that I think like a writer, a writer who sees the world in much the same way an anthropologist would, the way an ethnologist would. As a young girl I romanticized this picture of myself as the wallflower on the sidelines observing situations that would provide the roux of later writing.
I like that Beals didn’t seem to have hang-ups regarding the descriptive-vs-theoretical issues prevalent in the field. I like that he pondered whether much of applied anthropology involved manipulating people and whether the motivation for that manipulation had more to do with a desire to help the subjects or a desire to do what was best for whichever administering agency (I’m reminded of recent discussions of Margaret Mead as a war horse). I liked what Beals had to say regarding anthropology and science:
My friend and ex-fellow student, Cora Du Bois, suggested in Volume 9 that our future lies in what she calls philosophical humanism, rather than futile pursuit of the goals of science. I approve thoroughly of what she says about the humanistic goals of anthropology, and I hope it may always retain its humanistic character. But I do not believe that combining humanism with science is an impossible goal, provided we properly understand the modern trends of science.
More and more I’ve been thinking that I should talk to more anthropologists and anthropology students. Maybe reading more of the Overviews and noting how anthropologists talk about anthropology and what brought them to anthropology will help me in formulating questions and in developing a sense of what it is I would like to gather from an interview, at least in part. It would be nice to get at something more than just asking people about their work or research interests, although I like the idea of that, too.
I’ve yet to decide on the next five articles to read. I’m working more and reading more books and doing more community service. I’m a little lost. Still, I’ll try to be a better student this week.
Yours truly, deeply
