Book Reviews - Methods and Principles

Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie. Emile Durkheim. Felix Alcan, Paris, 1912. 647 pp. and tribal map of Australia. A contribution by Emile Durkheim always commands attention. His Les règles de la méthode sociologique, De la division du travail social, and Le Suicide have exercised an appreciable influence on sociological theory and are still remembered and read. As editor of L’Année sociologique, Durkheim deserves credit for a methodical and extens..

Early Civilization: An Introduction to Anthropology

Non-referee

History, psychology, and culture

xi, 475 p.; 23 cm

Responses to "The Superorganic:" Texts by Alexander Goldenweiser and Edward Sapir, Edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

Alfred Kroeber’s “The Superorganic” is a classic of anthropological theory. Originally published in 1917 in American Anthropologist, the article drew important responses from Edward Sapir and Alexander Goldenweiser. SMOP #1 includes Kroeber’s article. This occasional paper includes Sapir and Goldenweiser’s responses. The responses have been edited for brevity, concision, and clarity. In a few cases I have altered verbs and nouns for agreement when editing the text caused them to disagree. These are indicated with brackets. The goal has been to respect the author’s stylistic choices while presenting a slimmed-down version which can be taught in a single session in an undergraduate or graduate theory course

Culture, the diffusion controversy,

Mode of access: Internet.

Boasian Critiques of Race in The Nation, by Franz Boas, et al., edited by Alex Golub and Angela Chen, with an introduction by Richard Handler

This series of 7 essays by Franz Boas, his students and those in his circle of liberal New York City intellectuals, appeared in The Nation in 1925. Boas had for years been fighting against the rising tide of scientific racism that triumphed with the passage of the Johnson Immigration Bill in April 1924, the second such bill in three years to restrict entrance to the U.S. on the basis of race. But Boas continued his work as a public intellectual, critiquing the “myth” behind the bill and mobilizing his colleagues to do the same. In these essays, Boas and his students—Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits and Alexander Goldenweiser—rehearsed the main tenets of the Boasian consensus: that race “antagonism” is not instinctive; that American racial categories could not be correlated with fixed biological facts; that “civilization” included “contributions” from all peoples (not just the “Nordics”); that there was no relationship between a people’s cultural achievements and the biology of the group; and that such sciences as eugenics were little more than rationalizations of commonsense prejudices (as Sapir put it, the “heated desire” of racists “subdued to the becoming coolness of a technical vocabulary”). The series is rounded out by the inclusion of essays by the Columbia-trained historian Harry Elmer Barnes (who published several standard textbooks on American and Western civilization), the popular historian Hendrik Willem van Loon (whose children’s book, The Story of Mankind, won the first Newberry Medal in 1922), and the journalist and travel writer Konrad Bercovici, whose romantic appreciation of peoples scorned by proponents of the Nordic myth is evident in his contribution

Anthropology in North America /

Includes bibliographical references."The papers were prepared for presentation by the American anthropological association and the American folk-lore society to the Nineteenth International congress of Americanists, which was to have been held in Washington in October, 1914...The contributions have been reprinted from the American anthropologist and the Journal of American folk-lore."Primitive American history / John R. Swanton and Roland B. Dixon -- Areas of American culture characterization tentatively outlined as an aid in the study of the antiquities / W.H. Holmes -- Material cultures of the North American Indians / Clark Wissler -- Physical anthropology in America / Aleš Hrdlička -- The present condition of our knowledge of the North American languages / Pliny Earle Goddard -- Ceremonialism in North America / Robert H. Lowie -- Religion of the North American Indians / Paul Radin -- Mythology and folk-tales of the North American Indians / Franz Boas -- Social organization of the North American Indians / A.A. Goldenweiser.Mode of access: Internet