a conversation with irving goldman

American Anthropological Association and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Ethnologist.

http://www.jstor.org

A Conversation with Irving Goldman Author(s): Enid Schildkrout and Irving Goldman Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 551-563Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645274Accessed: 24-02-2016 22:35 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 216.73.244.41 on Wed, 24 Feb 2016 22:35:06 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/publisher/black

http://www.jstor.org/publisher/anthro

http://www.jstor.org/stable/645274

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



comments and reflections

a conversation with Irving Goldman

ENID SCHILDKROUT-American Museum of Natural History

As one of Franz Boas' last graduate students at Columbia University, Irving Goldman has

staunchly carried on the ethnographic tradition in his research, writing, and teaching. In the 1930s he did fieldwork among the Alkatcho Carrier of British Columbia, and then went to South America where in 1939 he began working with the Cubeo of the Vaupes of Colombia, returning in the late 1960s and 1970s. His intellectual preoccupation has been with systems of thought, including religion and status systems. This focus has been evident in his work on the Cubeo (The Cubeo, Indians of the Northwest Amazon, University of Illinois Press, 1963), his reinter-

pretation of the Kwakiutl potlatch (The Mouth of Heaven, John Wiley and Sons, 1975), and in his monumental analysis of Polynesian status systems (Ancient Polynesian Society, University of Chicago Press, 1970). His new book, Hehenewa of the Cuduiari: An Introduction to Cubean Religious Thought is being prepared for publication. He taught at Sarah Lawrence from 1947 until 1980 and at the New School for Social Research from 1980.

Enid Schildkrout:' You were one of Boas' last students, and it would be very interesting to hear how, in hindsight, you evaluate his legacy in anthropology, as well as how you perceive the Boasian influence on your own work and on your teaching at Sarah Lawrence.

Irving Goldman: That is a question that can launch a book-a lengthy article, at least. I will adhere, however, to Boasian brevity in offering an answer to it. "Legacy" strikes me at once as a most appropriate term because it has a generative significance referring, as it does, in the historical sense to the basic traditions, principles, and values that a founding ancestor transmits to his descendants. Only founders of a tradition such as the tradition of anthropology transmit a legacy. Others pass on doctrines and ideologies. What has been transmitted in the Boas legacy is still a mystery for many anthropologists even though it is still at the heart of the subject, but deeply embedded and therefore not readily recognized. It animates the work of many who do not think of themselves as Boasians. And if the essentials of this legacy were to lapse, anthropology would be diminished.

ES: In other words, it's a set of assumptions, an approach.

IG: Yes, partly. I am being somewhat elusive in my answer, but for an appropriate reason. For example, I arrived at Columbia in the 1930s as an eager but utterly unoriented student. The only book on the subject I had then read was Robert Lowie's Are We Civilized? Even so, I barely knew what anthropology was and least of all did I know what "Boasian" anthropology meant. I eventually learned the more elementary forms of anthropological thinking. But as for "What is a Boasian?" I had to be comforted with knowing that no one else in the department seemed to know. But, and this is very interesting, all were asking the question and debating the answers. There was little point in asking "Papa Franz" because he did not answer such questions. There

comments and reflections 551



was little more point to asking Ruth Benedict, the mother figure of the department. She would answer with a beautiful and enigmatic Mona-Lisa-like smile that suggested oceanic meanings but no answers.

ES: One might conclude from these discussions that "Boasian" was simply the local term for

anthropology itself, which in those days was the study of "primitive peoples."

IC: On the other hand, it did not take long to learn who were Kroeberites, Stewardites, or Whiteans. Easier still to identify Durkheimeans, Malinowskians, and Radcliffe-Brownians. For

some, the labels were stark and simple: "real Marxists" and the others. We concluded sagely that we had to discover what a Boasian was, not from any of his declarations, which were rare, but from what he expected of us in the classroom and from succinct passages in his ethno-

graphic treatises. If I am remembering correctly from 50 years ago or more, this is how the legacy was trans-

mitted in the classroom. First, minimum theory, then hardly anything on methodology, and just about no global statements on any subjects but race and culture. Elsewhere, the departmental mentors had discovered "engines of history," "central dynamics" of cultures, and "laws of

society." They had mastered "social relations of production," the "ecological determinants," "technological determinants," "energy systems," and even protein balances without which societies could not grow. They had determined all cultural functions as well as the masterly arrangements of "equilibrium systems." To no one's particular astonishment, they had discovered that even though preliterate societies upheld a moral superiority, they were ruled by the same laws of rationality that governed the Western world. Boas himself drew upon such an-

thropology-made-easy to explain the potlatch as the "interest-bearing investment of property." Anthropology seemed to be arguing that the native peoples were not different from ourselves.

ES: ... which may seem obvious now, but in historical perspective was actually quite a radical

idea, given the racist and evolutionary assumptions of the time when Boas was at the Museum

[American Museum of Natural History from 1895 to 1903]. Just before he went to Columbia, there were still many assumptions about the progress of civilizations and the relative status of "races." This pervaded the exhibition halls until the 1930s. Boas' move to Columbia was really a major loss to the Museum.

IG: Yes. Elsewhere the departments of anthropology were like advanced civilizations that had reached high roads of general theory. Their high perspectives raised them above the petty de- tails in the lore of magic, ritual, religion, and myths. In the Boasian classrooms, I had the impres- sion that at Columbia we were at the subsistence levels of hunters and gatherers. The others had already built up surpluses. We, however, lived on small findings.

Students returning from the "field" were drafted into ongoing seminars where they did what

they could to intimidate us with their intimate knowledge of a newly studied particular culture. I remember Jules Henry slapping down one imprudent generalization after another with the dry remark, "but that is not how it is among the Kaingang." It was best to stay with the one culture

you could claim was your own from superior knowledge. We were usually a gathering of tribes each speaking from the standpoint of its particular traditions rather than a conclave of erudite

generalists. But even that confidence in superior knowledge of a single cultural tradition was undermined by Edward Sapir who came down from Yale and in one brilliant lecture demol- ished the idea of a coherent culture. Boas never neglected to remind us of intracultural varia-

bility. Sapir took us to the end of that road. One tenet of the Boasian anthropology was skep- ticism or, at least, what students thought of as inordinate restraints. I was appointed Depart- mental Assistant and was given research assignments by Boas. I realized that he threw out all

my most brilliant general conclusions. The Boasian teaching of linguistics is a good example of the subsistence mode of learning,

that is, learning by the tiresome method of gathering small provender. Boas did not altogether

552 american ethnologist



neglect our education in the general structure of languages, but relied in the main on the field method of teaching a particular language from a native informant. Ella Deloria taught a class in Siouan Dakota, her own language. She dictated texts and we searched for the linguistic rules

by closer examination of these and other texts. There were general courses, for example, in History of Anthropology, Social Organization,

Economics, Religions. Each course, however, turned toward focusing attention on the ethno-

graphic entity. Seminar papers and the discussions that followed from them were on ethno-

graphic specifics.

ES: You are really describing a method of learning to use evidence and data. This is very much the method that was used to teach social anthropology in Britain-despite the fact that what

people sometimes distill from social anthropology is only the skeleton of structural function- alism, which is not at all what that education was really about. Like Boas, the social anthro-

pologists really did focus on ethnographic detail.

IG: At Columbia, when I was there, generalists were given short shrift. No wonder our fellow

anthropologists on the outside marveled at our lameness in theoretical exposition. I suppose I should say something about how we felt about the tension between the ethnographic discipline we submitted to and our interest in arguing the "big issues." As in any department, much of what we learned took place in the corridors and in local "greasy spoons." There we became

self-taught generalists and theoretical tyros. Even so, what I still recall most vividly are the area seminars. I devoted much time to the Northwest Coast. There were also incredibly thorough courses on Plains cultures and on the Southwest. Franz Olbrechts was invited and gave an

encyclopedic course on Africa. Somewhat later, Linton gave a majestic course on Polynesia that surely guided me in my writing of Ancient Polynesian Society.

I think I have said enough to make at least one point clear. And that is how the Boasian

legacy, the legacy of the preeminence of ethnography, affected me most directly, in my own

teaching and in my current thinking. After such an education, it became difficult for me to plan a course that did not turn to ethnographic exposition. I confess that I also thought of this pro- clivity as an intellectual weakness that I should resist so as to join the mainstream. I had been a Marxist of sorts for some portion of my academic career. That also pushed me into general directions, but with poor results.

ES: What of Boas' legacy to anthropology as a whole?

IG: There is also, as you remind me, the grand-scale Boasian Legacy, the public Boas, the Boas who helped establish almost the total subject matter of anthropology, and who launched what is to my mind without question the most ambitious program for ethnographic studies. I refer especially to the great Kwakiutl text collections carried out in collaboration with George Hunt, his principal informant, a collaboration that granted Hunt co-authorship. Such a mode of fieldwork that advances the informant to a plane of equality with the ethnographer points to a progressive anthropology in which field relationships are freed from their traditional inequalities of master and subordinate. Eventually more ethnographies will be written-or so I hope-as discourses between equals. The Western ethnographer will have to recognize that "natives" think and reason philosophically and scientifically. In any case, the anthropological interest must move in this Boasian direction. It must shift from the solipsistic fascination with one's own ratiocinations to a serious interest in what the native savants have to say. Boas did not reach with George Hunt that level of discourse. He left it as a possibility to be realized.

The more immediate importance of the Boas and Hunt collaboration is its format. It is all in the Kwakiutl text with interlineal translations by Hunt. In toto it is a close-to-complete rendition of Kwakiutl culture in an authentic form. Its value is therefore permanent. Theorists can work their heads off with it for generations to come. They can write from it whatever fancies they can concoct. The texts themselves are not falsified. Just think of how much of a falsified ethno-




graphic record we have that had been written from a glamorizing or indoctrinating point of view. Even a few false ethnographies poison the wells. Boas left an ethnographic legacy of

incorruptible purity. There is, I believe, an important place in anthropological writing for a type of description

that is free of didacticism, or of the easy textbook approach or, from the other side, of "heavy" interpretation that competes with and overshadows the observed "data" that the ethnographer has actually entered into his field notebooks. Like most earlier ethnographers, Boas was content to reveal whatever he could of the native voice. In the Kwakiutl texts he opened up the native

thought through its own semantics. What I am driving at is what an extraordinary archive of authentic ethnography we would have to work with now and in the future if all early fieldwork were reported in the Kwakiutl manner. Needless to say, Boas' students produced a substantial

body of native texts. I will conclude my remarks on the Boasian legacy with some varied observations that might

escape me if I run on too much. There is Boas who knew from the start that the challenge for a

"progressive" anthropology was to understand the mental or the inner life, or the distinctive

perspectives that come from different cultures.

ES: That also guided his attitude to museum collections, including the Northwest Coast material he collected for the museum on the Jesup expedition. Collections of material culture were made to reveal the mental processes, the ideas, of their workers. These were the only proper subject of study.

IG: Yes, he thought that fresh insights from other cultural perspectives were essential to the

process of liberation from what might be the limitations of our own intellectual and moral her-

itage. This brings me to remark on prose style, on mode of discourse. Boas admired the classic mode. In music, he loved only Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. He would not tolerate Brahms. He sought to create an anthropology of classical clarity, balance, and openness.

ES: What do you think happened to the "Columbia school" as you describe it?

IG: I must declare first my deep affection for Columbia anthropology. My days and years there were among the happiest in my life. Columbia anthropology was then not a department. It was an enlarged family. It was bound to happen that when Boas vacated his seat of power a coun- terrevolution would follow and it did. The Columbia school then turned away from ethnography. It turned didactic and at times intemperate. It joined the grand tradition of majestic theo-

rizing and wandered into Cultural Materialism.

ES: You have done major work on three such diverse areas: the Cubeo, Polynesian societies, and the Kwakiutl. I would like to talk about the conceptual thread that links them.

IG: Many threads link them. But this is not to say that I had in mind a master plan, or some

integrative scheme that would bind these three together meaningfully. I chose to work with Cubeo because I belatedly realized that what I wanted most was to get to know a tropical forest

people (see Figure 1). This opportunity came when Columbia had received major funding for field research in South America. I later chose to do a library study on Polynesia and then on Kwakiutl for very different reasons. Only after I had finished writing Mouth of Heaven (1975) and was sketching out its introduction did it occur to me that each of these three was an unusual

example of primitive aristocracy that might be studied comparatively. I have put off such a

comparison until I have finished my second volume on Cubeo, on religious thought. I am no longer altogether certain what it was that drew me to a library study of Polynesia

when I still had so much to learn about Cubeo. In retrospect, it seems to me that I turned to

Polynesia out of a general dissatisfaction with my theoretical and general preparation as an

anthropologist. After I had returned from the Vaupes, I taught introductory courses for several

years at Brooklyn College. Then I went to Washington as an information and intelligence an-




Figure 1. Goldman in the Vaupes, 1939.

alyst on Latin America. From there, I went into the Army and was assigned to an Intelligence unit, and from there I was assigned to the OSS. And when my branch of the OSS was later

incorporated into the State Department, I went along for several years. It was not until 1947 that I returned to anthropology as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence. But even there I spent five years on a research project that had little to do with my real interests in tribal societies. The intimate

type of teaching at Sarah Lawrence, however, had the beneficial effect of exposing me, at least, to the inadequacies of my anthropological thinking.

The college then granted me a special sabbatical of one entire semester that allowed me to start on my anthropological rehabilitation. During my fallow time, I had given general thought to an area study that might shed some systematic light on processes of cultural development. I even thought that I might do a study of "evolutionary change" in Polynesia. In this semester that included, however, the summer, I began to read the bulk of the published anthropological literature on Polynesia. And so as not to miss out on some nuances of the subject, I included Micronesia and many of the Melanesian Islands as well. It was slow work and my first article did not appear in print until 1955. It was then published in the American Anthropologist in 1955 as "Status Rivalry and Cultural Evolution in Polynesia" (Vol. 57:680-697). A batch of related articles appeared more quickly thereafter. I then broke off my Polynesian studies in order to write a book on the Cubeo.

I decided to concentrate on Polynesian societies because these seemed to have the most

clearly defined configurations and were historically the most coherent, or integrated, of the Oceanic types. I began with no particular theoretical guidelines other than the Boasian intent of bringing to light major Polynesian concepts rather than imposing an external system upon the area. True, I began with an underlying argument. It was a negative one, to avoid the dead cliches of materialist and functional determinants. In retrospect, I did not succeed too well with these intentions. I was not radical enough and not sure enough of myself to make a clean break with established tenets of anthropological theorizing on social structure, in particular. Never-

theless, I carried out a systematic study of social and cultural variations for a large culture- historical area with its focus on status systems-specifically its modes of aristocracy. Also in

retrospect, I see where I might have followed through more fully on a detailed religious analysis




of the Polynesian cultures. Ancient Polynesian Society (1970) is a work of which I am still

proud. When I read in it from time to time, I am astonished that I was able to carry out so massive and concrete a work. Its errors, some due to sheer fatigue, stand out because each assertion derives from close citations of data. It contains very little theoretical fluff. It is, I think, a reputable Boasian product, although Boas would have probably been put off by its evolu-

tionary direction. In fact, I was as intimidated by the taboo of evolutionism as were most well-

brought-up anthropologists of my age. But the evolutionism is there or it appeared to be there then to my eyes, and it would have been cowardly if not unscientific to have ignored the evidence of my senses. The common run of anthropologists was put off by other matters. Margaret Mead, who was one of the readers of the manuscript for the Chicago University Press, later said to me, "This is a very gutsy book for an anthropologist to have written. But given your creden-

tials,-this was an allusion to my appearance before the Jenner Committee-you may possibly get away with it."2

ES: But, after this monumental work of synthesis you didn't turn to further comparative and

generalizing work, but back to deciphering culture on a smaller scale-or at least a more intimate scale.

IG: If nothing else, I learned my anthropology lessons from Polynesia and I came out with an

appreciation of the integrating role of religious concepts upon culture as a whole. Religion is not a separate branch of culture, distinct from social organization, economy and government. It is commonly the rationale, the metaphysics, and the science, the organized knowledge of

primitive societies.

ES: If we start from religion as the primary force that helps you explain social institutions, how can an anthropologist work in a nonprimitive society? And what happens to that approach in a secular society? In northern Nigeria where I did fieldwork, for example, Islam is so powerful that it can explain a great deal. On the other hand, Islam itself cannot explain the variations in local Islamic societies. What happens when you get into a more fragmented and more secular

society than, say, the Cubeo or the Kwakiutl?

IG: Well, fine, you are reminding me, as a Boasian would, not to universalize subject matter that is bound within its own historical framework. But there are known to us many societies where religion does have this integrative capacity. The anthropological concern then is to ex-

plore fully this quality of the religion. The payoff in theory might be interesting because it would reorient perspectives on culture. By the same token, acculturation studies of societies that had been primitive, traditional, and tribal might also yield a useful payoff if they dealt with the

consequences of loss of religious orientation. As anthropology is presently orientated the cat-

egories that classify by function or by structure belong to a Western tradition of rational organization and, in the light of a concept of "science of society" are presumed to have the features of constancy of the physical sciences. This presumption is manifestly false and serves only to construct a certain kind of false system that sounds right because it is our own. Besides, this kind of anthropology is easy to teach, to talk and write about. Religion, on the other hand,

providing it is not manipulated by also being chopped up into categories that we have arbi-

trarily devised, has its inherent unity, its internal logic, its private language of signs and symbols that belongs to a particular tradition and that conforms to the rules of that tradition more or less in the way that scientific or philosophical precepts do. It should not be necessary for anthro-

pologists ever to explain that religion is not trumped up, that it is not "the opium of the people," that it is not the irrational product of the unconscious, that it is not an invented doctrine devised to entrap or exploit the masses on behalf of chiefs and priests. Nor are religions allegories. They draw upon close observations of natural structures and natural processes and in this respect are not allegories about nature. Religions have their professional modes of reasoning and of defin-

ing, as do our sciences. As Levi-Strauss had so brilliantly observed, they confound us by trying




to go too far. They try to link up more than we dare to in a single system. I will not condescend to praise what they do, especially if I do not really understand it. I am saying only that we should take native religious thought as seriously as we take varieties of philosophical thought in our own tradition. As anthropologists we have no business indulging in racist or ethnic assumptions about the inferiority of primitive religious thought. I am reminded now of the complaint of a Pueblo Indian savant to an American academic philosopher, who had engaged him in a serious discussion of philosophical issues, that no anthropologist had ever talked about such matters with him before. What goes on here? Since when are natives dummies entitled to our compas- sion but not to our respectful attention as thinkers?

ES: In the Kwakiutl book you say that with respect to the Kwakiutl, culture is equivalent to

religion, and that religion is based on perceptions of nature. This raises the perhaps circular

question of what determines perceptions of nature. How is perception shaped if not by culture?

IG: Well, I do not think that we advance our anthropological understanding if we insist upon going back to hypothetical beginnings-when, let us say, the material conditions first determined the social and the intellectual traditions. That, I assume, is a question of metaphysics. Within our own scientific tradition we grant a subject matter its own province. We are inter- ested in whether a botanist is doing his job right, and no botanist who takes his profession seriously spends his time in writing treatises on the cultural factors that enter into a colleague's presentation of a new species of plant.

ES: But perhaps he should be aware of them.

IG: If I recall his work correctly, Professor Brent Berlin has found that South American Indian

plant taxonomies are quite similar to our own.

ES: But that is only one instance. They need not be, and often aren't.

IG: I am saying that anthropologists belittle their own subject matter and the human beings who have produced it by arguing eternally like Durkheimeans that natural taxa derive from social categories. The savage is smitten with himself-an original narcissist-and sees only himself in nature. We will not have a grown-up anthropology until we grant to the "noble

savage" parallel powers of reasoning, and qualities of curiosity and of close observation. I say that we should leave the fascinating questions of chickens and their eggs to coffee-klatsch meta-

physicians! As anthropologists our starting reference point does not begin with Creation. In writing about

Kwakiutl, I start with them or with cultures of the North Pacific Coast. I wish to understand what they think about death, cycles of existence, and other natural processes.

ES: But is it not difficult, especially in a work which deals with cultural evolution, to ignore the question of beginnings, to seek to explain the forces or rules of change?

IG: Some people have complained about Ancient Polynesian Society saying, "you make an issue of status rivalry, but you do not explain where status rivalry comes from." If I thought I could explain that I would have trumpeted the news about it. Even so, I do not neglect the question because I do develop an analysis of what I think a "status system" is in a Polynesian context and in that I indicate the relations between status rivalry and a nexus of social, religious, psychological, and other cultural factors. Nevertheless, I present status rivalry only in its Poly- nesian setting and not as a "prime mover" or as an "engine of history." I make that very clear. If, however, I had been willing to write that "status rivalry" arises from the redistribution of material production, I would have declared my allegiance to the gospel and the explanation would be granted credibility. I believe that the arguments about beginnings have no scientific merit. In our rhetorical ghetto the statement of origins is taken only as an oath of allegiance. A strange attitude for a scientist.




ES: But then in the article you did on altruism what you come down to as being at the basis of altruism is incest-so that basically comes down to biology, even if in a very complex way.

IG: Well, it is you who see that I resort to a biological argument. In my commentary on Pro- fessor D. T. Campbell's remarks on altruism, in his presidential address to the American Psy- chological Association (1975), [I believe that I was] speaking only of native perceptions about

biological processes. It is that that might affect the stability of genealogical or genetic lines. But, I will agree with the hidden premise you point to, namely, that such perceptions, insofar as they are embedded in the incest taboo, are, in fact, part of the biology of reproduction and are, furthermore, part of the social-biological process that regulates the formation of kin groups through which all elementary adaptive behavior is mediated. Yes, incest regulation in that sense is part of biology and in that sense the organization of relations around it is also part of a

sociobiology. What I find extremely interesting is that the native mythologies that deal with

incest, especially those from lowland South America, those for example, collected in Levi- Strauss' great work, The Raw and the Cooked, commonly present the violation of the "taboo" as a natural obsession that brings about the death of one or both of the participants or else, or as well, some remarkable transformation that changes the natural order of social development. Myths presumably call attention to native reasoning about incest, whereas our theories-such as providing for the exchange of sisters-appeal to our own sense of rationality.

The incest themes in the South American myths I have referred to do arrive at a systematic formulation-a theory, if you will-that unifies themes that are already related, such as incest,

marriage, relations between parents and children, between siblings, between grandparents and

grandchildren, between human beings and the forces of death and decay in the natural world, between the morality of obedience to rules and the inevitable violation of the rules and thus, in the end, between the forces that enhance life and the inevitability of disorder and death. Levi-Strauss has already had much to say on this subject. But in the background of his reasoning is the rigor of French rationality that displaces the awareness the native has of the absolute

interdependence of the social and biological meanings of exchange as a human social interest and of exchange as a biological process revealed in all of nature. The native perception verges on the biological.

ES: In order to understand this, then, we have to abandon our distinction between culture and

biology or at least to recognize that this separation is, at best, theoretical. This is difficult for

many cultural anthropologists to do. We are not talking about a simple biological determinism, but rather about a very complex integration between these realms of experience or behavior. The term "instinct" is inadequate, but we have no other.

IG: Yes, I do not like to use the term "instinctual" either to talk about so complex a behavioral issue as incest.

ES: Of course not, but again our fear of certain terms may prevent us from looking at some

aspects of reality.

IG: There are surely certain instincts we need not be afraid to speak of-the fear of death and

danger.

ES: And incest?

IG: Exactly. To return to the example of the South American myths in The Raw and the Cooked: they do refer to the subject matter of instincts, to deep fears of death and astonishing material disruptions. The myths seem to deal with these fears by elevating them to the level of

cosmological events. Incest is thus depersonalized by being dealt with philosophically as an

ontological metaphysics. I return to the idea that the myths draw us into the thickets of native

reasoning where we can make no easy discoveries. Our own rationality is crystalline. It cuts




off the search for understanding before it has even begun. I sometimes think that anthropolo-

gists, who are often in the vanguard of advanced thinking, are the least adept at following the

labyrinthine channels of alien thought because they have been educated to be exemplary models of their own academic environments.

ES: On first glance, your work in ethnography and your wish to let the data reinforce its own

conclusions, allowing us to get inside the minds of another people, would seem to be a far pole from the more comparative part of your work, such as the Polynesian work, which draws material from a large number of different societies. Are these phases of your career or is there a

deeper unity in it?

IG: If this is not evident to you from your reading of Ancient Polynesian Society, then I did not

accomplish what I had set out to do: that is, to present an interior view of this civilization. Even

though I explicitly explain that the central themes, status, honor, power are religious in nature and are associated with mana, and even though I make an equally explicit statement about the combined religious and social character of kinship, genealogy, social structure, the book still reads as though it were in the anthropological mainstream. It uses familiar terminology, worst of all the British notions of segmentation, which I thought, however, suited an agrarian civilization with its images of modes of subdivision.

Let me now answer your question directly. The book is not a far pole from what I have been

saying about cultures. Hence, it does integrate for me. On the other hand, having been written, it became a new phase in my anthropological development. Compared with The Mouth of Heaven it might be referred to as "Goldman's Middle Period." But compared to the new book I am writing on Cubeo, The Mouth of Heaven, which annoyed one very highly esteemed re- viewer to distraction because of its preoccupation with religion, will also recede as a kind of formative period. The Polynesia book was but a step in the direction I am following.

ES: What would have happened if you'd done fieldwork in Polynesia?

IG: I cannot say. I would have been working with heavily transformed societies, missionized, Christianized, commercialized, secularized, and in many other ways modernized.

ES: Can you relate the cultural evolutionary schema to real historical cultural evolution in particular islands?

IG: I believe that I did this with reasonable success by matching historical, documentary records from the early periods of discovery, archaeological and genealogical records with "systems analysis." What had appealed to me about Polynesia from the start was the presence of extensive genealogical records that had been compiled by native genealogical specialists. Some of the more advanced archaeological studies from Easter Island, New Zealand, Tonga, Society Islands also showed interesting correspondence with "system" and with genealogical traditions.

ES: Is the new Cubeo book to be a conceptual link between the Polynesian study and the Kwakiutl book?

IG: I think it is. There is a difference between the way one approaches one's own fieldwork and the way in which one uses, interpretively, the fieldwork of others. The development of

anthropology depends upon the interplay between field and armchair. Fieldwork demands a special exercise of responsibility. The field report, the ethnographic study is a primary resource. If it is falsified inadvertently, it permanently distorts the recorded data, giving an unfortunate twist to theoretical understanding. On the other hand, using the variety of studies and having the freedom for conjecture and interpretation of the published ethnographies is part of the play of the anthropological imagination and is necessary for the formulation of fresh hypotheses. I do not wish to overstate the distinction between the relative subjectivities and objectivities of




fieldwork and library research. Still, contemporary field writing has become much more in-

terpretive than it was in earlier generations. In many respects it is the opposite of the Boas-Hunt texts. Sooner or later a correction will be needed to restore the distinctions between the obli-

gations of original fieldwork and the conjectural freedoms in interpreting the works of others. I guess that I have deliberately used Ancient Polynesian Society and The Mouth of Heaven

in a dialectical counterplay with my thinking about the new book I am writing about Cubeo.

Going back to an earlier question of yours, how the three works might arrive at some conceptual unity. That is the answer.

ES: But religion has become the moving force in your thinking?

IG: Well, yes. Apart from what I have already said, namely, that native religious thought, if it is seriously studied, draws us into the heart of the subject matter of cultural anthropology and offers prospects for a high theoretical yield on the nature of culture and questions that stem from that. There is also the matter of taking a stand, of choosing a direction for one's work. I do not actually feel that I need argue that the study of religion is important or more important than

any other aspect of human activity. I simply wish to make my contribution in that field. As it

happens, I find religion an interesting area of study that is also closest to the Boasian direction. Boas himself, of course, had no passionate interest in religion as a subject of study. He would

just as soon have followed the human mind through the study of semantics. Still he wrote more on Kwakiutl religion than on any other single aspect of their culture.

But to return to the matter of taking a stand. There is my belief that anthropology is not a

science, although it can be and often is a highly disciplined branch of knowledge. When I speak of science I do not wish to get caught up in the ambiguous question of what exactly is a science. I am responding rather to the directions anthropology is taking. One direction is to win favor with the National Science Foundation which offers higher grants and higher prestige, but at an intellectual cost. That cost is to construe anthropological data as though they had the constancy of data from physical or statistical branches of study. At the very least, that assumption is pre- sumptuous. Boas, who was trained in the natural sciences, hoped to rid anthropological think-

ing of nonsense, but did not claim that it might discover laws that were other than self-evident. But then Boas was a classicist who did not overplay his hand. History and the humanities, including the study of myth and religion, are not branches of study that need an apology. As for the Boasian position, Boas hoped that a knowledge of how the members of different cultures

perceived themselves and their immediate and imagined surroundings would have a liberating effect upon our civilization. Boas, of course, was not a value-free scholar. He hoped anthro-

pology would widen the scope of human freedom. Systems, the science of society, can serve well the rationality of totalitarians, but not the aims of freedom and democracy. That is what I think Boas had in mind about a liberating cultural anthropology.

ES: Do you think anthropology will keep going?

IG: I hope so. Well, no! I am sure it will. There is something direct and straightforward about the older ethnographies that appeals to me. But anthropological writing has always been a mixed bag, as it is today. At the core of modern anthropology there is still sound ethnography and even more an intense curiosity about the inner nature of culture. The contemporary ten- dentious schools will be succeeded by a new contentiousness that will temporarily command the field. The solid stuff, nevertheless, continues to accumulate. Moreover, more of the older

ethnographies, many of them descriptive masterpieces, will be restudied and mined for new

insights. To be sure, structuralism in the hands of lesser talents can be annoying. Yet structuralism has given our subject an inspirational shaking by offering to us relationships of meaning we might otherwise never have thought of.

What disturbs me most about present tendencies is what almost everyone I talk to assures me is, in fact, the case-namely, that the teaching of ethnography, by which I mean whole




cultures as a structural entity, is being abandoned entirely or is seriously neglected in many otherwise distinguished departments of anthropology. Nothing can be more certain. If this ten-

dency does in fact exist, so that the teaching of ethnography becomes inconsequential, then that teaching will have become a branch of sociology or of higher shamanism. But we will still not have the real shamans or a real shamanistic tradition to give substance to such teaching. However, I do not really believe in apocalypses.

ES: Whatever made you become an anthropologist in the first place?

IG: In truth, I do not really know. I have said many things about it to students who have asked me this before. My answer now is that I do not know unless I was spooked into it by an ado- lescent dream of adventure-trudging across Andean wastelands, riding horses with western Indians, canoeing along Amazon streams and the like. Strangely enough, I came to do these

things and at the same time I also became a real anthropologist. I suspect I could figure it out, but why should I?

ES: How did you get to South America? Did that have anything to do with Boas?

IG: Yes. Boas had received for the department [at Columbia] a substantial grant from the Social Science Research Council for acculturation studies. I can recall offhand the names of at least eight of us who were financed by it. Buell Quain, for example, went to central Brazil where he died under circumstances that I no longer recall clearly. It was rumored at the time that he discovered he had contracted leprosy from earlier fieldwork in Fiji and committed suicide. Jules Henry managed two field trips, one among Kaingang and another among Pilaga. Bill Lipkind went among the Caraij. Bernard Mishkin went among Quechuan speakers in the Peruvian Highlands. Ruth Landes went to study African cults in the Bahia area of Brazil. Morris Siegal, I believe, also part of this grand party, went to Guatemala. Charles Wagley's fieldwork among Tapirape may have come from a later grant, but was still part of this great plan to open up what was then a terra incognita for anthropology. And last, I was sent to the Central Andes of Col- ombia to work with Chibchan-descended Paez. It was not the kind of field study I wanted to do. So I broke discipline. I thought then that was the ethnographer's prerogative-to make bold decisions in the field for himself. I wrote to the Department that I was going to the Vaupes and so I did. That little corner of the northwest Amazon was where I really wanted to be. For better or for worse, I went in cold and began from ground zero without a single preconception. As a result, I did what a well-informed field worker might not have chosen to do, namely to start his life in the field among the lowest-ranking sib of a low-ranking tribe in the Vaupes. Luckily, I was able to redeem a decent sense of structure with later work among higher-ranking groups. In the end, it worked out well, because the low-ranking community was also, it turned out to be, an adjunct group from what Tukanoans regarded as "servant tribes."

ES: When you went back did you go back to the low-ranking group also?

IG: I had every intention of doing so. But the demands of this later stage, roughly 1968-70 (see Figure 2) with a short follow-up during the summer of 1979 for tidying-up, plus some personal problems, made that impossible. By then, the main body of Cubeo were going through an interesting cultural revival, which I had to witness. In an earlier tightening up of rules of social structure they had encouraged my low rankers to return to their proper place upstream. Along this section of Vaupes, I should explain, communities are hypothetically arranged along a traditional river system in order of their rank, that is, emergence order with highest ranks downstream and the lowest ranks upstream.

ES: I want to come back to your last book on the Kwakiutl, The Mouth of Heaven. Do you think that the potlatch material is what has bothered people the most of anything that you've done-is it the most provocative?




Figure 2. Goldman among the Cubeo, 1970.

IG: The potlatch for sure, because everyone who has ever written a textbook or has published on exchange-with, of course the notable exceptions of Mauss and Levi-Strauss, both of whom understood that "exchange" in primitive societies is not mercantile but moral-was bound to be upset by the heavy religious weighting I gave to the so-called potlatch. One unhappy re- viewer complained that my overemphasis upon religion among Kwakiutl made him gag or retch. Actually the days of Kwakiutl Indians as miserable exemplars of mercenary motives run riot among "noble savages," no less, are about over. Anthropologists will need to find better

examples, preferably closer to home.

ES: This brings me to my final question. If Boas were alive today, how do you think he would look upon current work in anthropology?

IG: That is an intriguing and also a fair question. And while, of course, one cannot pretend to know how an actual Franz Boas would react either as one who had simply lived on and con- tinued to grow up with anthropology after 1942, the year of his death, or a Rip Van Winkle who suddenly reappears and is startled by what he sees, one can speak from some knowledge of the Boasian intellectual temperament. That temperament, as I have already suggested, is classicist. In any case, the first personal judgment that I made of Boas came from what people were saying about his love of the classical tradition in music. If I may indulge myself here in a non-Boasian overstating manner, I will say that the Beethoven piano sonatas that he loved most of all were a hidden accompaniment to his anthropological thinking: order and restraint that contained flashes of mysterious and passionate phrases so that the effect is all human and re-

ligious, but never mechanical.

Perhaps the general tenor of present-day anthropology is not in this mode and Boas would be troubled. Still, he would find a substantial body of work that is rich in ethnographic detail and concerned with the search for inner meanings and native concepts that are derived from close semantic analysis. He would surely be pleased by the varied nature of anthropological interests. But he would probably be put off by the symbolists and the structuralists.

I am not saying that I myself see really fundamental disagreements between what Levi-Strauss has done and what Boas had in mind for anthropology. On the contrary, Levi-Strauss, who can




see beneath surface appearances better than most, acknowledges his kinship with the ethno-

graphic tradition of Boas. If a judicious list were to be compiled of distinguished Boasians the name of Levi-Strauss would have to be at the top or close to it. They may seem to be at odds, but actually they each typify complementary scholarly temperaments and analytic styles of the same school. They are, to borrow from structuralist categories, respectively the "cool" and "warm" types. Ignore the matter of intellectual temperatures and you recognize in both a common fascination with the same cultural phenomena. There is a common interest in the mind as revealed through myth, magic, religion, art, artifacts, language, and the rules of kinship. There is the common sensitivity to ethnographic detail and an appreciation of the concreteness of native thought. And then, on a broader scale, each has a magisterial vision of ethnography as a discipline that opens the mind to new perceptions and to new realities.

As a contemporary Boasian, I too could argue with Levi-Strauss on specific issues, on the incest taboo, for example. But that is really beside the point. The point is that structuralism is a

remarkably inventive and probing development within the ethnographic tradition. It follows

upon Boas' prophetic expectation that the anthropological frontier is in the study of the human mind. I saw the innovative results of the structuralist approaches after I had returned to the

Vaupes in 1968. A new anthropological generation had arrived at the same time to do fieldwork in the spirit more or less of Levi-Strauss' latest writings. Among these were Christine and Ste-

phen Hugh-Jones of Cambridge, Patrice Bidou of the College de France, Pierre-Yves Jacopin of Neuchatel, Kaj Arhem of Uppsala and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff of the University of the An- des. As we say in Brooklyn, "they stood the Vaupes (and vicinity) on its ear."

As Alexander Lesser never tired of reminding me, Boas was combative. He fought against racism, intolerance, and anti-democratic tendencies. He gave a great deal of precious time and

energy to help refugees from Hitler. He wrote to the high authorities on behalf of "native"

rights. He was a defender of the civilized order. In comparable fashion he launched himself

against unsound reasoning in anthropology. The answer is that Boas thought of himself as one of the creators of anthropology, for which he felt responsible. He would fight with everyone on one issue or another and no one who knew him could ever imagine that he would ever let go. He would be fighting now for good politics and good ethnography. His quarrels with symbolists and structuralists would be classic intellectual encounters.

notes

'Enid Schildkrout was a student of Irving Goldman as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence in the early 1960s. It was with his encouragement that she went on to study social anthropology at Cambridge Uni- versity. She recalls that Goldman felt that at that time graduate training in Great Britain was much more solidly grounded in ethnography than it was in the United States.

2Senator William Jenner (R.) was chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that in 1953 questioned Irving Goldman about membership in the Communist Party and his associates in it. He an- swered all questions about himself, but despite warnings that he was subject to citation for contempt, Gold- man would not name his associates. The committee, however, chose not to press contempt charges.

submitted 15 October 1987 accepted 30 November 1987




a conversation with irving goldman

Documents