Anthropology: Its Achievements and Future

AMONG MY MANY CHERISHED recollections of the years I spent in the United States, 1 remains outstanding because it is associated with what, due to my inexperience, appeared to me as something of a discovery. This apparent discovery took place quite casually one day, when I stumbled upon a bookstore which specialized in secondhand government publications and where could be bought, for $2 or $3 apiece, most of the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology. I can hardly describe my emotion at this find. That these sacrosanct volumes, representing most of what will remain known about the American Indian, could actually be bought and privately owned was something I had never dreamed of. To my mind, they belonged rather to the same irredeemable past as the beliefs and customs of which they spoke. It was as though the civilization of the American Indian had suddenly come alive through the physical contact that these contemporary books established between me and their time. Although my financial resources were scant and $3 represented all I had to spend on food for the same number of days, this sum seemed negligible when it could pay for 1 of these marvelous publications: Mallery's Pictographs, Matthews' Mountain Chant, Fewkes's Hopi Katcinas, or such treasure troves of knowledge as Stevenson's Zuni Indians, Boas' Tsimshian Mythology, Roth's Guiana Indians, and Curtin and Hewitt's Seneca Legends. Thus it happened that, volume after volume, at the cost of some privations, I built up an almost complete set (there is still 1 volume missing) of Annual Reports 1-48, which belong to the "great period" of the Bureau of American Ethnology. At that time, I was far from imagining that a few months later I would be invited by the Bureau to become a contributor to 1 of its major undertakings: the 7-volume Handbook of South American Indians. Notwithstanding this close association and the years that have since elapsed, the work of the Bureau of American Ethnology has lost for me none of its glamour, and I still feel toward it an admiration and respect which are shared by innumerable scholars the world over. Since it so happens that in the same year that marks the 200th Anniversary of James Smithson, the life of the Bureau has come to an end (though its activities are carried on under a new guise), the time may be fitting to pay tribute both to the memory of the founder of the Smithsonian Institution and to the Bureau which has been one of its greatest achievements. Ever since it was founded in 1879 (emancipating ethnology from geography and geology, with which it had until then been merged), not only did the Bureau avail itself fully of the amazing opportunity provided by the presence of scores of native tribes at a few hours' or days' travel from the great cities, but also "the accounts of custom and culture published by the Bureau compare in thoroughness and quality of reporting with modern ethnographic studies" (Lienhardt 1964:24). We are indebted to the Bureau for instituting standards of scholarship that still guide us, even though we but rarely succeed in attaining them. Above all, the collection of native texts and factual observations contained in the 48 major Reports and certain of the subsequent ones, in the 200 or so Bulletins, and in the Miscellaneous Publications is so impressive that after nearly a century of use only the surface of it has been scratched. This being the case, one can only wonder at the neglect in to which this invaluable material has temporarily fallen. The day will come when the last primitive culture will have disappeared from the earth, compelling us to realize only too late that the fundamentals of mankind are irretrievably lost. Then, and for centuries to come, as happened in the case of our own ancestral civilizations, hosts of scholars will devote themselves to reading, analyzing, and commenting upon the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which preserve so much more than has been preserved of other bygone cultures (not to mention the unpublished manuscripts placed in the Bureau's custody). And, if ever we succeed in enlarging our narrow-minded humanism to include each and every expression of human nature, thereby perhaps ensuring to mankind a more harmonious future, it is to undertakings such as those of the Bureau of American Ethnology that we shall owe it. However, nothing could be farther from my mind than the notion that the work of the Bureau belongs to the past; I believe, on the contrary, that all of us, together with its legal successor, the Office of Anthropology, should seek in these achievements a living inspiration for the scientific task ahead of us. It has become the fashion in certain circles to speak of anthropology as a science on the wane, on account of the rapid disappearance of its traditional subject matter: the so-called primitives. Or else it is claimed that in order to survive, anthropology should abandon