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In the annals of the history of anthropology, Alexander Goldenweiser is ordinarily identified equally the writer of a seminal work on totemism, which offered a thorough criticism of this concept equally adult by tardily nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropologists and argued that totemism as a universal cultural phenomenon did not exist. While this work had indeed been his major contribution to anthropology, Goldenweiser besides introduced such important notions as "the express possibility in the development of culture" and "cultural involution." Moreover, along with Edward Sapir and Paul Radin, he insisted on the primal role of the individual in culture and promoted a rapprochement between anthropology and psychology. Finally, he was as well a strong advocate of an interdisciplinary approach to the social sciences, i. e., combining anthropological with historical and sociological interpretations of civilization history.

A Life in Two Cultures

Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was born in Kiev (Ukraine, Russian Empire) in 1880 in an educated eye-course family of assimilated Russian Jews where European high culture was profoundly valued. [i] He attended a well-known Pecherskaia gymnasium (high school) and spent one twelvemonth studying at Kiev'due south St. Vladimir University.

His father, Alexander Solomonovich Goldenweiser (1855-1915), a prominent liberal lawyer, had a major influence on him. Alexander Solomonovich devoted much of his practise to helping the poor and the underprivileged, including the Jews victimized by the tsarist authorities, A follower of Tolstoy's philosophy, he was a dedicated defender of the rights of every criminal and an opponent of the death penalty (А. S. Goldenweiser 1904; 1908). He was also a follower of Herbert Spencer; in fact, his colleagues described him as a lawyer-social scientist. This combination of an involvement in the social sciences and a passion for social justice was passed on to each of his three sons—Alexander (1880-1940), Emmanuel (1883-1953), a prominent economist and one of the creators of the Federal Reserve, and Alexei (1890-1979), a lawyer and a legal scholar who worked on behalf of stateless refugees (Budnitskii 2020).

Eager to protect his older sons from anti-Semitic discrimination and give them an opportunity to live in a democratic country, Goldenweiser Sr. brought Alexander to the U.s.a. in 1900 and Emmanuel a couple of years later. [2] Alexander enrolled in Harvard equally a special student, majoring in philosophy, but afterward 1 year he transferred to Columbia where his bookish interests shifted to religion and later on anthropology.

Fig. 1

Alexander Solomonovich Goldenweser, Alexander Goldenweiser's father.

Courtesy of Leslie English language

Fig. 2

Alexander Goldenweiser equally a Kiev Academy student, 1900.

City Annal of Kiev, Ukraine

Having obtained his Yard.A. in 1904, [3] he entered a Ph.D. programme in anthropology with the minors in psychology and sociology. There he studied under Franz Boas, earning his avant-garde degree in 1910. While pursuing his Ph.D., Goldenweiser spent 1905-1906 in Berlin pursuing anthropological work at the Ethnological Museum. He also spent a year dorsum in Kiev (1906-1907) to acquit out his military machine duties. [4] In 1906 Alexander married Anna Hallow (ca. 1878-1952), a Jewish immigrant from Russia. They had one child, Alice Rosalind, born in 1914. The couple divorced in 1927.

While in New York, Goldenweiser was the centre of a small simply lively group of young intellectuals, most of them anthropologists or anthropology graduate students similar himself (due east.g., Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Elsie Clews Parsons) who gathered frequently to discuss their discipline besides as broader issues such as the philosophy of the social sciences, psychology, politics, and literature (Kan 2015). He was the organizer and the heart and soul of several study "circles" and intellectual groups. Best known among them were "The Pearson Circle" and "The Unicorns" (Deacon: 1997: 449). At that time, Goldenweiser was seen by many equally Boas' favorite and near promising student. Non surprisingly his mentor offered him a lecturer position in his own section at Columbia. For virtually a decade, Goldenweiser taught many of the core undergraduate anthropology courses and was widely admired every bit an constructive and charismatic instructor.

Fig. 3

Alexander Goldenweiser and his wife Anna Hallow, 1909.

Courtesy of Leslie English language.

Goldenweiser'southward only ethnographic field research involved several trips to the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario in 1911-1913, where he worked with Iroquois consultants, having been recruited past Edward Sapir, the chief ethnologist of the Division of Anthropology of the Geological Survey of Canada. He published several brusk articles based on that research, merely the full reports on this work were never published because of the division'south falling out with the Regime (Goldenweiser 1922a). Cheers to Margaret Mead, an erroneous notion that Goldie disliked fieldwork became firmly entrenched among American anthropologists (Kan 2013a). He actually appears to have enjoyed information technology and managed to collect a adept deal of data on social organization, religion and mythology and several other topics. Shoora developed a particularly close human relationship with John A. Gibson, the head chief of the Seneca Tribe of the Thou River reserve in Ontario, and his family. [5] A prominent leader of the Longhouse faith of the prophet Handsome Lake, Gibson shared his deep knowledge with the young ethnographer. When the primary died in 1912, Goldenweiser published a warm obituary of this extraordinary man (Goldenweiser 1912a). According to William Fenton, to whom Goldenweiser turned his fieldnotes over in the 1930s and who later worked with some of the same consultants, his data were first-rate. [6]

Fig. four

Franz Boas with his students. Goldenweiser is seated next to Boas. Standing showtime from left is Fay-Cooper Cole. Third from left is Robert Lowie.

American Philosophical Society. Franz Boas Papers.

In addition to pedagogy undergraduate courses at Columbia, Goldenweiser also taught anthropology at the Rand Schoolhouse, affiliated with the Socialist Party betwixt 1915 and 1929, and gave numerous public lectures to earn badly needed coin but also spread Boasian ideas on race, immigration, sexual practice and marriage, and cultural relativism. For the same reasons he published numerous articles and volume reviews in such liberal and left-leaning magazines as The Nation, The New Commonwealth, The Modern Quarterly, etc. In some of his publications he used such anthropological concepts every bit, for example, magic and mana to make sense of contemporary social issues. [7] Every bit far as Goldenweiser's politics were concerned, he was a leftist but with a strong anarchist bend. He rejected Marxist theory as economic determinism and distrusted American Communists because of their authoritarianism and pro-Stalinist position (Goldenweiser 1935). With his Russian background, he understood the totalitarian nature of the Soviet political system and was never seduced by information technology the mode many left-leaning American intellectuals were. [8] With his anarchist individualism, he was non only a strong critic of fascism simply also condemned what he perceived every bit President Roosevelt'south encroachment on the rights of the individual. In his words, "An as significant case of grouping control is presented in the United States in which a semi-dictatorial executive branch is assuming unprecedented functions of transformation and control checked but by surviving fragments of democratic ideology and the speedily fading ghost of what was once the economic doctrine of laissez faire." [ix]

Boas' efforts to obtain a permanent position for his protégé failed and in 1919 Columbia let him go. While many of his contemporaries as well equally subsequent commentators believed that his Jewishness and his own as well as Boas' leftist politics were the reasons for this, Goldenweiser's "irregular" behavior, including his failure to return academy library books and pay personal debts played a major role in his dismissal. Luckily 1919 was also the yr when a group of distinguished progressive social scientists, with Goldenweiser among them, established The New School for Social Inquiry. Here his courses were pitched at a higher level and he had a lot more than freedom to choose their subject matter. In add-on to lecture courses in the social sciences he taught seminars in which students had to undertake their ain field research. For case, in 1924-1925 he offered a seminar entitled 'Racial Groups in Greater New York'. Among Goldenweiser'south anthropology students at the New School were such prominent future scholars as Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovitz, and Leslie White. He had a detail influence on Benedict whom he persuaded to enroll in Columbia's graduate anthropology program (Benedict 1940). Goldenweiser's concept of Gestalt, adult in the late 1920s, influenced Benedict's ain thinking as articulated in her Patterns of Civilization. After the New School decided not to offering him a full-fourth dimension appointment, Goldenweiser became a member of the editorial board of as well as a correspondent to the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, a major multi-volume reference piece of work. In fact, the unabridged encyclopedia project had been his ain idea, fifty-fifty though a different chief editor was chosen for it.

Unable to observe whatsoever education position on the East Coast, Shoora (as he was known to his friends and family members) moved to Portland in 1930, where he taught anthropology, sociology and fifty-fifty European history at the Academy of Oregon'southward Extension between 1930 and 1938; simultaneously he taught anthropology, folklore and even social psychology at Reed College equally a Visiting Professor in the department of history and the social sciences between 1933 and 1939. He was popular with Reed students, a number of whom shared their leftist political views with him. While he continued to relish a reputation as a slap-up teacher, Goldie (some other nickname used past his American colleagues and friends) viewed Portland as a provincial backwater and fabricated several attempts to obtain a position in larger West Declension cities such as Seattle and San Francisco. Still, except for a ane-year visiting appointment at the Academy of Wisconsin, Madison plus occasional summer teaching at SUNY Buffalo, Stanford and the Academy of Washington, none of his efforts came to fruition. Eventually Goldenweiser's reputation every bit an iconoclast and a leftist, who was also known for not attending kinesthesia meetings and not turning his grades on fourth dimension, led to some serious conflicts between him and Reed'southward administration, and so that in 1939 the latter decided not to renew his contract. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, in the 1930s he finally constitute personal happiness when in 1933 he married a younger woman by the name of Ethel Cantor. Goldenweiser died suddenly of a heart attack on July half-dozen, 1940. [10]

Fig. five

Alexander Goldenweiser at SUNY Buffalo, mid-1930s.

Courtesy of Leslie English.

Despite having spent two thirds of his life in the U.s.a., Shoora never felt entirely at domicile in the New World or in the twentieth century (e.grand., he never learned to bulldoze). Instead he was a cosmopolitan European intellectual with a strong identification with nineteenth-century Russian civilisation. Equally far as his Jewish identity was concerned, he was a typical assimilated Russian Jew who believed that by assimilating American Jews would help bring an end to anti-Semitism. At the aforementioned time, he thought that thanks to their worldly cosmopolitanism the Jews were the best advocates of internationalism and opponents of nationalism and racial and indigenous prejudice (Kan 2009).

Critical Contributions to Anthropology

In his Ph.D. dissertation, published in 1910 as Totemism: An Analytical Study, and a serial of subsequent articles, Goldenweiser demonstrated that the presumed unity of totemic phenomena was a scholarly invention. In fact, he argued, that totemism was a coating term for a wide variety of practices. He also suggested that it was based on symbolic or mystical relationships, with every social club having its ain totemic practices. Goldenweiser's work prompted a lively debate amid anthropologists and provided one of the theoretical bases for Lévi-Strauss's 1962 Le totémisme aujourd'hui (translated in 1963 past Rodney Needham as Totemism). [11]

His other important contribution to anthropological theory in general and the study of cultural dynamics in particular was a 1913 commodity 'The Principle of Limited Possibilities in the Development of Culture," in which he argued that institutions and objects with a limited number of forms were about certainly contrived independently by cultures located at a cracking distance from each other. This idea helps explain those cases in which convergence provides a much ameliorate solution than improvidence. [12]

Goldenweiser likewise developed an important concept of "involution," which he articulated in a brief 1936 essay "Loose Ends of Theory on the Individual, Pattern, and Involution in Primitive Society." According to him, involution described civilization patterns that in reaching a definitive form stopped evolving into new patterns but continued developing simply in the direction of internal complexities, leading to 'progressive complexity, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity inside monotony.' Thirty years subsequently Clifford Geertz (1969) used this concept to study Indonesian agronomics.

In several of his publications, Goldenweiser also argued that when cultures come into contact, there is no automatic absorption of ideas and practices from one to another, just whether or not any new items will be accepted depends on the receptivity of the civilization, which in plow depends on various social and psychological factors. Many areas of the social sciences have institute this idea useful.

More often than not speaking, Goldenweiser was much more interested in broad theoretical questions than many of his swain Boasians, specially such "strict" ones as, for example, Lowie (Kan 2015). From this perspective, Goldenweiser was much closer to Radin and Sapir whose work he admired greatly. In fact, he considered Sapir to be the most brilliant anthropologist of his time (Goldenweiser 1941). He also shared Sapir'south and Radin's interest in the role of the individual in "primitive" society and the use of autobiography in anthropological research. Goldenweiser was besides one of the starting time Boasians to pay serious attention to psychology, including psychoanalysis, and his works frequently brand references to the key role of psychological motivations in social life and cultural production. Thus, i of his early articles contains an interesting argument about the importance of religious "thrill" in religious experience (Goldenweiser 1915b). [13]

What also distinguished Goldenweiser from many of the other leading figures in American anthropology of the pre-World State of war II years was his interest in crossing interdisciplinary boundaries and engaging in a dialogue with sociologists, psychologists, historians and other social scientists. This breadth of his scholarly interests is best illustrated by a collection of essays he co-edited with William F. Ogburn, a prominent American sociologist. Entitled The Social Sciences and Their Interrelations (1927), it contains thirty-four chapters, each of them devoted to the interrelation between two specific social sciences and written by a leading scholar of the twenty-four hour period. A commitment to this dialogue (combined with a perennial search for honoraria) explains Goldenweiser'south frequent contribution to various edited volumes dealing with such hot contemporary bug as sex, wedlock, and others. While Lowie dismissed Goldenweiser'south interdisciplinary activities by calling him the number ane amid "the liaison officers of the social sciences," they gained him recognition and respect among many leading figures in the social sciences (see Kan 2015). [14]

Goldenweiser was also the offset educatee of Boas to publish a comprehensive textbook in anthropology. Entitled Early Civilization: An Introduction to Anthropology (1922b), it was based on his lectures at the New School. Fifteen years later he published another textbook, Anthropology: An Introduction to Primitive Culture (1937). In addition, he produced a pop book called Robots and Gods: An Essay on Arts and crafts and Mind (1931) equally well as a collection of essays, History, Psychology and Culture (1933).

As far as his academic career was concerned, Goldenweiser did non accomplish as much as his young man-Boasians, but most of the blame for this must rest with his own difficult personality and erratic behavior. For this reason, plus the fact that quite a few of his articles appeared in non-anthropological journals, he receives little attention in many of the histories of anthropology. However, a careful reading of the unabridged corpus of his work reveals a brilliant mind of a highly erudite scholar.

References

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