I’m happy to announce that I have a new interview out at the New Books Network! This one is with Jack Glazier on his new book Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of...
I’m happy to announce that I have a new interview out at the New Books Network! This one is with Jack Glazier on his new book Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race. You can listen to it here or over there. There is also a page with a complete list of all my NBN interviews available if you’d like to see some of my other work. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview. Enjoy!
Alex Golub: Hello everybody and welcome back to the new books in anthropology podcast, which is a channel of the new books network. I’m Alex Golub, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at M?noa and I’m the host of the channel today. I’m excited today to be talking to Jack Glazier, who’s a professor emeritus at Oberlin College, and who’s the author of Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race. I’m interested in this book because it’s one of the first books that’s been written on Paul Radin. At the same time, this is not your first book, you’ve been writing and researching for quite a while. So can you tell me how it is that you came to write this book?
Jack Glazier: Certainly, Alex, and thank you for inviting me. This book’s roots go back to about 2001-2002. At that point, I was beginning to conduct research in the black segment of a community in Western Kentucky. It was kind of an ethnohistory. I was interested in contemporary life among African Americans, but my view has always been that any question in anthropology about culture and the contemporary world has to have a historical perspective. So in connection with that research, which focused on the bifurcation of white and black memory, I got very deeply involved in African American history, the history of Western Kentucky, and I came upon the WPA slave narratives.
These were commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. They occurred with a variety of interviewers, I think, in 17 states. Thousands of interviews, very mixed [in quality], on the experience of people who had lived through slavery and had survived into the 1930s. And in looking into those narratives I became aware of Paul Radin, who had spent some time at Fisk University and was little written about. A few sources have noted him as well as his research assistant — I would call him a collaborator — Andrew Polk Watson. This then led me to interviews that they did between 1927 and 1930. They were published by Fisk University in 1945 without authorship. Radin’s name and Watson’s name do not appear as authors. So it took some years between the collection of those narratives and their publication by Fisk University. And then I think they were very submerged. Then in 1968 they were republished by a Christian publisher, and I certainly became aware of that publication. And then as I looked more into Radin’s work, I happened upon an unpublished manuscript on his Fisk research that lay in the Marquette University Archives. And so in getting a copy of that unpublished manuscript, I decided I would try to get it published.
I knew it was an uphill struggle, because many of the narratives had previously been published by Fisk. In addition, there were three chapters missing. So I tried to interest a few publishers in it, and without surprise they said no, they didn’t want to take advantage of my willingness to get that particular unpublished book published. And it was a mess. It required a tremendous amount of editing. I did write a very lengthy introduction to what I thought might be the publication of that volume. But as I said, it didn’t work. S that introduction really became the core of the book that you have before you. I thought it was certainly worth looking at and also going to Fisk University to see what might be available regarding Radin. He was a person who didn’t leave very distinct footprints about his past and there were a few things there that were very useful that had not been published. So that’s essentially the origin of the book and the extension of my interest in an African American community in Western Kentucky, which was endlessly fascinating.
Paul Radin, via his AA obit
Alex Golub: I imagine that a lot of people will know of Fisk which is famous as a historically black university, and we should definitely talk about that. I love the fact that in addition to Andrew Polk Watson, there was another researcher there whose name was Ophelia Settle Egypt, which is just a wonderful name. Amazing.
Jack Glazier: Easy to remember. Yeah.
Alex Golub: But Radin on the other hand, I think people will not have heard of him. People might just know him as one of the first students of Franz Boas, as you say he left few footprints. Can you tell us just a little bit more about his biography and who he was and how he got to Fisk,
Jack Glazier: Certainly, Radin was a problematic figure in the Boasian pantheon. He was part of that first generation: Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, Radin. He was a difficult person. His relationship with other Boasians and Boas in particular was very, very fraught. Radin had a succession of academic appointments, at least seven of them over the course of his life, never having gotten tenure in any of them until finally he got an appointment to the the chairmanship of the anthropology department at Brandeis where, of course, he and Stanley Diamond became very, very well acquainted.
Radin had almost nothing but contempt for academic administration. He thought people in the academic world had very narrow minds, and cultivated a kind of professional and personal alienation. And so he had problems meeting his obligations, even classes he would frequently miss. Even at Berkeley in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there were a few people still talking about Radin not meeting his classes. So I think part of the problem with his reputation is moving around as he did, he was very peripatetic. He taught at Berkeley off and on, he was at Kenyon, at Black Mountain, at Michigan, at Chicago briefly. With that kind of a professional history he didn’t develop a coterie of devoted students. Now, he had devoted students here and there, but not a real self-conscious, solidary group of people who were carrying Radin’s torch. I think that’s one of the reasons that we know so little about him.
It’s also the case that he was pretty lackadaisical about depositing his professional papers, and as you’ve read early in the book much of what I use, and indeed that unpublished manuscript I mentioned, came into the archives of Marquette purely by good fortune. I can say a bit more about how that happened if you’d like. But it was quite a miracle that a lot of these papers actually did survive.
Alex Golub: You say that he was difficult and he was lackadaisical. I wonder if you can tell me a little bit more about his personality in particular. Did you get a sense that he was an angry person? Or was he just, you know, sort of careless? He seems like such a successful academic in terms of his ability to write and do research.What was his personality like in more detail?
Jack Glazier: From recollections of students who left some documents, as well as his cousins who he met in Paris, I take it he was a very, very charming guy, a great raconteur. He loved company, I think he liked performance. He liked to be the center stage. A cousin of his young woman in her twenties, with another cousin, came to Paris in the ’20s when Radin and Mrs. Radin, Doris Radin, were there. Radin met them at the station, delighted to see them and insisted that they stay with the Radins and not in the hotel. And of course, Radin borrowed money from them. I think his aim was to get the hotel costs given to him, rather than to the hotel, because he was often improvident. He was constantly in need of money. He was on welfare for a while in Berkeley, but this cousin’s reflections talk about how enjoyable he was. He took them to the parties on the left bank. She suspects that one of the parties, maybe Picasso or Hemingway was there. This is circa 1924, or ’25. So I called him an improvident bon vivant, constantly in need of money. Now he’s not the kind of person you’d want to loan money to, and you certainly wouldn’t want him as a houseguest.
I think part of his difficult personality was just a kind of professional alienation from the academic world, and from “civilization”, so to speak. A thinking that that would free him up from any kind of biases he might have, so that he could look with unclouded lenses at the world he wanted to examine. He might have had the notion — and this is pure speculation — that the ones who were without bias in research would have been the pure intellectuals. I think this is a an idea floated by Karl Mannheim in a book called Ideology and Utopia, which is one of the early documents of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim thought that everybody’s perspective was conditioned by their position in the social structure, but that those who might be above were the intellectuals. I think all of us know that that was a wonderful but utterly naive notion. I think Radin, though he doesn’t mention Mannheim, might very well have been thinking much the same thing.
Alex Golub: And he has this belief in his own works that the people whose stories he records are themselves intellectuals. He didn’t see intellectuals as someone who was highly literate and went to the symphony and had all the trappings of civilization. He spent his early career doing work in Native American communities, isn’t that right? And he saw the people he was interviewing as a kind of intellectual. He saw intellectuals as existing in every society.
Jack Glazier: Exactly. This is the import of one perhaps his most important books, primitive man as philosopher, which argues first of all people in every society are individuated. Unlike a lot of thought at the time, which believed that this machine called culture is basically stamping out people as almost carbon copies of each other. He absolutely opposed that. Individuation is characteristic of every society. Moreover, every society has its thinkers as opposed to men of action. They’re a minority everywhere, but they are no less important in so-called primitive society than among complex civilizational societies.
And I might say, Radin and the rest of the Boasians got in trouble, I think unnecessarily, by the persistence of the use of that term, primitive. Leslie White in some publications right after World War Two — I think in probably in the AA [American Anthropologist] and maybe in the newly-founded Southwest Journal — took the Boasians to task saying: What? You guys never really did give up on 19th century evolution. Look at the word primitive, it punctuates all of your prose in your various books and articles. I think it’s caused continuing embarrassment. But I think for Radin and the others no one is really primitive. What they are referring to is the nature of the social order, that people are primitive if they’re living in primitive societies. For Radin, it’s little differentiation, not a great deal of technological development — these are the characteristics of a primitive society, but people themselves are not primitive. It may be an unsatisfactory resolution, I wish they hadn’t used the term but there you have it, we’re stuck with it. Radin especially would have resisted the idea that certain people are primitive by by nature, by intellect, and so on. And of course, he was in great opposition to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who argued that people in so-called primitive societies think differently. So Radin had enormous respect for the people he worked with. They were in many respects his intellectual equals. They were his coevals. They were contemporaries. They weren’t people who represented an arrested stage of evolutionary development or mere survivals. Nothing of the sort, in his view.
Alex Golub: Yeah, I think that term really grates on the ear today. I think there would be many people out there who wouldn’t be convinced by that distinction of sophisticated versus unsophisticated people mentally, as opposed to complex versus undifferentiated societies. There’d be many, many people out there who would say that the fact that they use that term shows that those two distinctions cannot be as easily separated as you might think. And, obviously, the irony of writing books with names like ‘the primitive man as philosopher’, ‘the mind of primitive man’ to show that those people were not primitive… Yeah, I don’t know. It’s… I think that’s a difficult one for many people to accept.
Jack Glazier: I understand that. I think if you read Radin carefully, that is really the basis for what I am trying to trying to say here. But yours is a point well taken. It is a tough term. It’s part of the legacy of anthropology that hasn’t done us any good.
Alex Golub: I also wonder, you know, if you think about someone like Boas, who was so committed to a concept of bildung (which is a German word, which means self cultivation). I wonder whether he and many of the other anthropologists of his era wouldn’t have looked down on the expressive production of indigenous people as being uncivilized compared to you know, the glories of Mendelssohn or Brahms or something like that. One of the one of the key things that I often think about for thinkers of this period is: what is their relationship with jazz? Often, people who come from these sort of almost literati backgrounds recognize the value of jazz, look at jazz as a lively art, a sophisticated and yet popular art. Whereas you look at someone like Sapir, you know, he loved Debussy, and he didn’t love Gershwin. I wonder whether there’s a bit more distaste for, you know, so called primitive art and culture amongst some Boasians then we might be willing to admit.
Jack Glazier: Well, I think maybe the burden on people who would make that claim would be to give us chapter and verse. I’m not sure I could buy that by any means. Certainly when you look at Boas’s reception of the Neale Hurston’s work, I think he recognized the importance of what she was doing, and the full humanity of the people that she was dealing with. He was utterly supportive of everything she did with the African American communities in Florida where she was collecting her her folklore.
Alex Golub: Yeah, it’s interesting. You have a little bit in this book. As we start talking now about African American communities and start moving to Fisk you have this quote in the book, I believe, which I had never seen before from Boas, where he said that that Hurston was so artistic she had to be held down. He was so opposed to her more literary endeavors. He wanted her to produce straightforward transcriptions of folklore like what he was getting from other people. I was quite struck by that. I mean, I think many of us would feel like the best part of Hurston was precisely the version that Boas didn’t want to see.
Jack Glazier: Well, I think he would have said that about any student. I wouldn’t read anything more into it than that. I mean, it’s easy to mean to racialize a lot of the criticisms. But he was so much the scientist that he was, in effect, trying to trying to control her. But he couldn’t. But he would have said the same thing to any student who was venturing away from his rather strict notion of what constituted fieldwork. But he couldn’t hold her down. But what’s most important is he supported her in extremely generous ways. Not uncritically, but he definitely supported her work. And Hurston’s biographer Heminway says Boas recognized her genius immediately. And I think between the two there was a good deal of respect and affection.
Alex Golub: Yeah, I think that point about Boas’s very circumscribed sense of what counted as anthropology is a good one. It’s something that not only Hurston struggled against, but in the correspondence of Sapir and Kroeber, and Lowie, many other people, they often feel like they would like to wander a bit from the very narrow strictures that Boas placed on them. So I don’t think it was just his female students or just his students of color who felt that constrained by some of that.
Jack Glazier: Well, certainly. I guess on their own time, Benedict was writing poetry before she became an anthropologist, I believe, and Sapir as well. So there’s just so far dramatic control can be exercised. But I think Boas was very much equal opportunity in the demands that he made on all of his students.
Alex Golub: Yes. And as an anthropologist, I’m very familiar with him as a successful academic entrepreneur. But as someone who’s less familiar with the history of Fisk and African American Studies, I was really interested to read about Charles Johnson, who was the academic entrepreneur who was behind bringing Radin to Fisk. He sounds like an amazing person. Could you tell us a little bit about him?
Jack Glazier: Yes, certainly. There is at least one biography of Charles Johnson. Interesting background. He was Southern by birth, from Virginia, educated in the south, very much an African American of the time, an intellectual who had his finger on the political and social pulse of the American South. He is in some articles contrasted with Du Bois. They saw the world in very, very different ways, especially when it came to gaining support from white philanthropies. Johnson didn’t make any exceptions, he would try to get money where he could, Du Bois was much more guarded. He was worried that white philanthropies might close down on anything that smacked of radical activity among the black people that he that he funded.
Johnson was born in the early 1890s. He spent some time at the University of Chicago. He was in World War One, came back, got a position with the Urban League in Chicago. And in all of this Robert Park, the sociologist, is an extremely important figure in the intellectual history of the social sciences in being a patron of numbers of gifted black would-be sociologists from Johnson to St. Clair Drake, who even became an anthropologist. Park was extremely helpful, as well as Johnson, and the position with the Urban League was gotten partly through Park’s influence. And in the dreadful riots of 1919 with, you know, many black soldiers coming back saying ‘now it’s going to be different. We were really willing to give our lives for our country’ but it wasn’t different and riots broke out across this country. And one of the worst was in Chicago. Johnson wrote an enormous compendium, a book on the the riots and the state of black Chicago. It wasn’t [sole-]authored, there were a few people adding their two cents, so to speak, to the text. And there are certain things that Johnson could not have written, like the responsibility of black people to not be invalid, to work hard, and all of this sort of racist, racist stuff. But on the whole, in measured language, he identified the basic problems in that Chicago riot. And it wasn’t the negro problem, it was the white problem. He didn’t term it that but he was very clear: from discrimination and housing, [to] labor unions, the impossibility of getting good jobs, and so forth.
At any rate, from Chicago and the Urban League, he went to New York and got a position as editor of Opportunity, which is a wonderful, wonderful journal, in which he promoted black writing. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes both agreed that Charles Johnson was probably the father of the Harlem Renaissance, sponsoring writing contests. And he had a good deal to say in Opportunity about so-called efforts to prove the inferiority of black people and how this was occurring at Harvard and at Princeton and some of our most notable institutions, so it’s quite forthright in arguing for black equality. Johnson then goes to Fisk University in, I believe, 1928 and builds up the social science program. Eventually, he became the first black president of Fisk in the late 40s, a position he held until his death, I believe, in 1956. But when he was there, actually Radin got to Fisk before Johnson. Radin was there in 1927, hired or paid for by Laura Spelman Rockefeller memorial for at least three years. And then Johnson arrived and started building up the social science program with a very interesting multiracial group of scholars. Ruth Landes and, you know, many others. Hortense Powdermaker was there for a while. I can’t think of the the other name, it slipped off my mind. But it was a very dynamic group. And Charles Johnson himself was an active sociologists and wrote a very, very important book called Shadow of the Plantation about the legacy of sharecropping and black exploitation in the rural areas after slavery.
Alex Golub: You know, I think many people might not be familiar with Ruth Landes. And to the extent they’re familiar with Hortense Powdermaker, I think it’s because she’s another person with an incredible name. But Landes was another Boasian. And, like, Radin, she originally started doing work in North America, and I believe Powedrmaker was an American who ended up going abroad to England before returning back, I believe, she was at Yale at some point associated with Sapir when he was there, so there was a fair interaction at Fisk then, between anthropologists and and Charles Johnson and Ophelia Settle Egypt, Andrew Polk Watson and these other people.
Jack Glazier: Certainly true. And of course, in those years, the place that was most notable for the study of race relations was the University of Chicago. And Fisk unfortunately is overshadowed and it shouldn’t be. That was one of the great places for studying race relations.
Alex Golub: And I will just to add some more genealogy there. You know, Park. His, I believe, his grandson was Robert Redfield, who helped support people like Katherine Dunham and and Allison Davis when they were at the University of Chicago. So it seems like there’s a lot of interactions there. And some of those stories may be less familiar to some people.
Jack Glazier: I think I might be wrong. We will have to check this off air but I think Redfield was a close closer. The Next generation, rather than my grandchild. I think actually, he might have been Park’s son in law.
Alex Golub: Yeah, I think that’s right. He married Park’s daughter.
Jack Glazier: That’s right. And there are some other interesting connections. I think that Oscar Lewis might have married the daughter of Robert Redfield. But maybe I have that wrong, or there’s some kind of kinship connection, I believe, between Redfield and Lewis.
Alex Golub: Well, you know, Radcliffe-Brown spent some time at Chicago and one of his great students was W. Lloyd Warner, who was very supportive of many of these scholars, including Allison Davis, Sinclair Drake, some of these other people that you’ve mentioned. St. Clair, I should say, Excuse me. Yeah.
Jack Glazier: And of course Allison Davis, like Hortense Powdermaker [were] anthropologists of the time but not directly Boasians. I believe that the Powdermaker got her degree at the London School of Economics. She had studied, actually with Malinowski. And I guess Allison Davis, probably as well. So they were kind of social anthropologists, more than kind of the American cultural variety.
Alex Golub: Yeah, I think you know, you mentioned Johnson’s work as a sociologist, I suppose, in some sense, for many of these people, the similarity between anthropology and sociology, that social anthropological vision must have had good fit. Although at the same time, you know, Radin’s focus on collecting oral history definitely worked well with the project at Fisk.
Jack Glazier: Unquestionably that was the case. I think what Radin was engaged in at Fisk was essentially providing documents that humanized African Americans in a world in which they were seen as something very different. You know, in the middle 1930s W.E.B. Dubois wrote Black Reconstruction. And in the preface to that book, he talks about the possible audiences for the book. And he said, one part of the audience will be those who essentially come at this with an open mind, will look at my arguments, adduce the evidence that I bring to bear, and make their own conclusions. The other segments — and I don’t know if he gives percentages, but from what we know it was a very high [percentage] of people approximately 75 years after the Civil War who questioned emancipation, who still saw black people in natural terms as a kind of savage remnant of Africa — and he said, no amount of argumentation on my part is going to change their mind at all. And that book is really part, I think, of a whole movement from Carter Woodson forward to rewrite black history.
As I said, Woodson and his colleagues were really declaring a kind of independence from the American history profession. The dominant figures of the time in history, U.B. Phillips and William Dunning and the whole Dunning school which comes out of Columbia. Dunning was a southerner, descended of slaveholders. A terrible racist and he became the definitive figure in the interpretation of the civil war and reconstruction and the post reconstruction era, and he influenced historians across the country. It’s very appalling, even someone like Henry Steele Comager, a northern historian, buys into the Dunning view of what reconstruction was like in South Carolina, down to the need for white people to reemerge to save the state from the savagery of these men who are lusting after white women. It’s quite extraordinary. And that’s that’s a northern historian.
Alex Golub: So the oral history project that Radin and Watson worked on, that was a very different project. Can you tell me a little bit about their fieldwork and what their relationship… I guess Egypt was working slightly before them? What concretely happened in that research project?
Jack Glazier: Yes. Well, I would say that when Radin arrived, the Ophelia Settle Egypt project was underway with Fisk students and herself interviewing people who had lived through slavery. The work of Watson and Radin began with his coming to Fisk in 1927, and it consisted of the collection of life histories. They collected eight of them. Radin did two of them. Watson did six of them, and in Radin’s discussion of those life histories, we got a glimpse of him that has carried forward: somewhat uncharacteristic, very generous, very modest about his own work. And this is a man who was not much given to modesty. But of the eight life histories, the two that Radin collected are the most detailed, and the most really fully developed. The ones that Watson did, six of them, two of them remain unpublished, were much shorter and the informants were not nearly as fluent as Radin’s informants. And at first blush you would think okay, here’s Radin, years before with his vast experience among the Winnebago, he published Crashing Thunder a landmark in anthropology stimulating others to do life history work. So you would chalk it up to Radin’s experience and Watson’s relative inexperience. Radin generously said: I happened to be fortunate in collecting from these two gentlemen and if Watson had those men as his informants, his life history materials would be as extensive as my own. And likewise, had I interviewed those who Watson interviewed, I probably would have come up with equally thin texts. So it’s really it’s really quite generous.
The conversion narratives were another matter. Watson collected all of those. Radin accompanied him on some of the interviews, on others Watson did it by himself. And it’s very clear Radin could not have done this work without Watson or an equally gifted student students at Fisk. Watson is so much the collaborator of this project. And Watson was from Middle Tennessee from Franklin, not too far south of Nashville. Rather different upbringing, more middle class than a lot of his informants who were part of what he would later call the primitive baptist church, with a lot of shouting and emotional display and so forth. That wasn’t Watson’s background. But as a well-trained and sensitive anthropologist, he was determined to try to understand people’s experiences that were nothis own. And so the conversion narratives are exclusively a product of Watson’s very sustained work. They are published, and they’re remarkable documents, moving documents, of people who with little resources created for themselves a kind of stability in their lives, something they could hang on to, when everything about their lives had been diminished and denigrated. It was really a kind of construction of a sense of self from the materials available. And those materials were largely the product of white Baptists and white Methodists who originally started preaching among black people, encouraged by slave owners, hoping for compliance rather than resistance. They always had ready access to violence to suppress slaves. But if they could convince people of the righteousness of their own servitude, they would have a much easier time running their plantations.
What what these slave owners and other whites didn’t reckon on is simply the humanity, what I call the human creative imagination, that what slaves heard was easily transformed with new meanings that suited their own situation. There was no way they were going to accept white preaching about the righteousness of their own servitude. They would not accept a god complicit in their own subjugation. And so these narratives are eloquent testimony to human creativity and to the very humanity that had been for so long denied slaves and people after slavery. You know, segregated, apartheid Nashville in 1930 was not a very comfortable place.
Alex Golub: And if people do get a chance to read your book, they’ll see that you’ve reproduced many long passages of these narratives. And they are remarkable. It’s not surprising that slavery was a terrible experience. But I think that reading words directly from people’s mouths, describing their experience rather than watching recreations on television or something like this is a very, very powerful experience, as is the the narratives that you present of people’s ecstatic visions of the Divine, and their spiritual journeys. There they are, as Radin would say, they’re their works of art,
Jack Glazier: Unquestionably a distinctive kind of American literature. And he had absolutely no problem talking about people who could not read or write being ‘authors’ and producing a ‘literature’. And of course, Boas has also talked about stylistic aspects of American Indian literature, as did Radin. So I think there is an enormous respect that Radin is showing for the people with whom he dealt. He needed Watson, absolutely. Radin had no experience in the South. He was an immigrant, although he came as a young child, but very, very European. You can imagine him in 1928, 1930, Nashville, no experience in the South, going about with his customary uniform of a three piece suit, maybe a beret, and an odd metropolitan manner. How do you create solidarity with people who are so accustomed to white people taking advantage, or accustomed to telling white people what they think white people want to hear? Watson is integral to this. This research couldn’t have happened without him.
Alex Golub: You know, you’ve mentioned Radin, and Boas’s view on Native American literature. And we do have a chapter on that in the book as well that I don’t want to gloss over. You compare the texts that he gathered at Fisk with his earlier fieldwork, or later fieldwork… I’m sorry, I work in Papua New Guinea, so I have to admit I’m not really an expert on North America… Hochunk or Winnebago people?
Jack Glazier: Yes, the Hochunk. We’ll call them the Winnebago. But they’re two tribal groups. The Winnebago proper, are how some designate themselves in Nebraska and the Wisconsin segment where they all originated call themselves the Hochunk.
Alex Golub: And you also have a chapter in there about his political situation when he was gathering texts. He was able to gather texts about religious ceremonies from a dissident group who was willing to reveal the secrets of the more orthodox group as part of their struggle to innovate and introduce peyote ritualism into the area.
Jack Glazier: Let us say that ethical standards of the time were different from what they are now. I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say that… let’s put it this way: anthropologists now from time to time do things that they’d rather not talk about. But certainly there is a sense of ethical standards within the anthropological community, although anyone who violates them is pretty much free, I think, because there’s no mechanism in the AAA [American Anthropological Association] for adjudicating these claims. But a Radin certainly played on factionalism within the community. He was very much interested in salvage ethnography of reconstructing Winnebago society and he was interested especially in its most sacred ritual, the medicine dance. And no one who was an adept of the medicine dance would would talk to him, would disclose secrets on pain of death of someone nearby. But the dissidents, the people who had adopted peyote had condemned much of tradition, were ready informants disclosing all sorts of secrets. And it’s not to say that Radin created factionalism. I don’t think so. But he’s certainly exploited it. There’s no question about that.
Alex Golub: I guess on the one hand, much of your book is dedicated to demonstrating the anti-racist credentials of Boasian anthropology and, Radin in particular, and pointing out the fundamentally ethical behavior of Boasian anthropologists at a time when there’s been some criticisms of them. At the same time, this chapter on his political situation with these groups does not necessarily, I guess, bolster your case.
Jack Glazier: Well, I think I’d like you to rephrase that question. You know, there’s the Boasians versus versus Radin. He did play on factionalism, certainly. But at the same time, one can say that the peyotists took advantage of Radin. They were trying to create a new kind of society, something where numinous symbols and feelings would depart from the traditional world. So in that respect, that’s distinctly modern. In a way you might say they use each other in some respects. But on the whole, I mean, if you’re asking me where there are ethical breaches of Paul Radin, was guilty? I might say, yeah, sure. There were, there were. But I think at the same time, we need to take a very holistic perspective on Radin and the Boasians. He paid dearly for his politics, and for his support of black labor, of speaking for black civil rights, you could get another entry in your FBI file in San Francisco in the 1930s speaking up for the Spanish Republicans, the Spanish in the Spanish Civil War, another entry for the FBI to taint you. And there was there was a great deal of courage there. You might say it too for Boas. I mean, people will have to explain this: The Scottsboro Boys. Boas was willing to sign on to declare these people political prisoners in 1933. And there were people like Howard Odum, the sociologist at North Carolina, who pleaded with him not to do that. Odum and other white liberals would go only only so far. And I don’t think I don’t think Boas was, very restrained in that respect.
Alex Golub: And for listeners who haven’t had a chance to read the book, your mention of the FBI files was not at all metaphorical. Radin was hounded by the FBI and spent many years out of the country. I get the feeling that he was basically chased out for his politics and for his anthropology.
Jack Glazier: TThere were probably push and pull factors. I mean, there was one letter that turned up were Radin in a particularly fearful mode, asks an ethnomusicologist whose parents have a ranch near Fresno, if he went out there if they would hide him if the FBI came looking for him. So that was a particularly low point. So there were undoubtedly push factors. But pull factors were — he had a pretty good deal going. I mean, would you move to Lugano, if you had a chance to get support from the Bollingen Institute? I think he did. And he was safe there. And he had freedomto write and to lecture. One wishes as a historian of anthropology that he was more careful with his records because there are whole parts of his story that are just blank, and one of the most intriguing for me is that he spent time at Cambridge and actually dedicated Crashing Thunder to W.H.R. Rivers. I think: What could their relationship have been? Now, Radin was deeply interested in psychology. Even though he was associated with Jung, he didn’t have any sympathy for what Jung was doing. But Rivers was one of the founders of social anthropology and hardly a stranger to psychology. He was a practicing psychiatrist. One could read the wonderful book, Regeneration about River’s work with the shattered psyches of British soldiers in in World War One. I’m trying to think of the author now… Pat…
Alex Golub: Pat Barker. It’s part of a trilogy, and some of it is set in Melanesia. So I do know that part, yeah.
Jack Glazier: Very good. It’s a fine book. At any rate one wonders what went on there. And we just don’t know.
Alex Golub: You mentioned that Radin was persecuted by the FBI. And he was not the only one. David Price has written on this extensively. And you also talked about how he was not able to fit in institutionally. I wonder whether there was a version of anthropology that was born in the 1920s, in the 1930s, when anthropology that got started in the United States in it’s modern version, which could have flourished and would have been looked upon very kindly by contemporary people who are interested in combining activism with anthropology. But because it was impossible in the 1930s, it just never happened.
Jack Glazier: Yeah, well, I guess one could ask the question of what exactly is activism? I mean, couldn’t one consider the work of Boas and Radin and others, at really great personal risk in talking about the fallacy of racial determinism? I mean, that is certainly a kind of activism and Radin paid for it. But I think there’s a lot of criticism of what Boas was doing, and this focus on biological race, a great deal of criticism focusing on it. And to my way of thinking some of that criticism is very governed by a kind of presentism. And I think what is needed is a recognition of the situation that Boas faced of the nature of racial sentiment in this country in the 1930s, that race was destiny to so many people. To unravel that, to unpack it, to explode it, was understandably a lifelong effort.
Alex Golub: Yeah, well, I think if people are interested in learning more about this, your work is an excellent place to begin. You have not just an account of Radin and Watson and Fisk, but a much more general overview of what was happening in this period and how they tie into it. So the book is scoped a little bit more broadly than just a narrow focus on one or two scholars. I think that’s one of the strengths of it.
Jack Glazier: Thank you. And one of my naysayers was critical of not having the name Paul Radin in the title. And I thought long and hard about that. And I put myself in the shoes of someone going into a book store or let’s say, going to Amazon, and seeing a book in anthropology with Paul Radin in the title, and easily going beyond that. In other words, I thought that would diminish interest. And so I kept him out of the title, even though the book is substantially about him, although I wouldn’t call it a biography. You know, it’s biographical.
Alex Golub: I should say, I think I’ve been remiss as an interviewer. That’s such an interesting point that you’ve intentionally chosen to remove his name from the title. I think you’re right, that does really shape the decision about what the audience and what the subject of the book is. And of course, the title is ‘anthropology and radical humanism’. And I feel bad. My first question should have been: what is radical humanism? That’s the key word that’s in there instead of Paul Radin. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Or perhaps we’ve already discussed it.
Jack Glazier: No we haven’t, but I’m glad you asked. Radical humanism for Paul Radin was the notion that the human document is crucial that he did not want to abstract from the testimony of various people to create a model, let’s say, of culture. And his perspective is made very clear in a 1933 book called Method and Theory in Ethnology in which he — you know, it’s amazing these people could still remain friendly — in which he takes to task Sapir and Kroeber and others. Kroeber and Radin had a fraught relationship, Sapir and Radin were very good friends. But basically Radin was very much opposed to the Boasians who were trying to teach true cultural data as if it were similar to natural science data of abstracting little bits and pieces in the interests of recreating some kind of historical picture of the of the plains, of trait distributions, age area hypotheses and so forth. He said you can’t do that. It’s turning people into marionettes. And instead, a humanistic anthropology cannot abstract from the testimony of particular individuals.
It’s much more aligned with with literature and with history that it is with natural science. So he is certainly of the radical humanists. He doesn’t build models, he doesn’t create generalizations. In many respects, he’s a documentarian making explicit the actual words of people telling their own stories, not editing out. This is it, this is who they are. This is what what I am referring to as radical humanism. He did that among the Winnebago with life histories and certainly in Nashville he found it so important he actually said, ‘the words of these people are more important than my own’. And that’s a very unusual statement for a man like Radin.
Alex Golub: I think it’s I think it’s an unusual statement for anyone to be able to get out of the way of the people whose stories you’re trying to tell and let them let them tell it themselves. That’s that’s quite something.
Jack Glazier: Yep. Absolutely true.
Alex Golub: Well, I’ve taken up a lot of your time. And thank you very much for this interview, so I’m going to let you go. But before we do that, can you tell me what you’re working on now? Is there going to be more research on this topic?
Jack Glazier: Well, I have another manuscript of Paul Radin’s with that problematic title ‘the nature of primitive religion’, never published. And he was working on it, I think, most recently in 1939. It’s published about two years after his other well known book, Primitive Religion. And he doesn’t give the reader much of a hint. He said: anything that is in this book that isn’t in Primitive Religion? Well, this is my final word, and this is the one you should believe. So I’m looking at that to see if there’s anything worth publishing, about the change from one book to to the other.
But in the bigger scheme of things, you’re right about the first thing you said: a lot of people you talk to, they publish a book, and they’re not real sure of what’s next. I can certainly understand that because you’re sort of in the afterglow of your publication that you don’t want to think about much else. But I have been thinking about it because my timing was exquisite. This book came out when the Coronavirus came out. And it distracted a lot of people. But I am thinking of a kind of retrospective view of my three major research field experiences. First in East Africa. Secondly in the Midwest among particularly American Jewish immigrants, and then thirdly, among African Americans in Western Kentucky. A kind of retrospective on the value of ethnography. You know, there was a time when in anthropology when ethnographer was much more esteemed than the theorist. It’s just the opposite in sociology and various anthropologists have said — like Robert Murphy whom I admire greatly — the theory comes and goes but the ethnography is always there. And this is what we should be valuing. So this is what I’m thinking about that would be my paean to the value of ethnography of ethnography. And that’s from someone who for many years taught cultural theory. But I think ethnography is the ultimately the end all and be all of anthropology.
Alex Golub: Well, I think that’s a very Radinesque sentiment. I look forward to to seeing that that project come to fruition. Jack, thanks again for being on the show. I really enjoyed talking to you.
Jack Glazier: Well Alex, thank you for the good and the tough questions. A couple of them. It’s been nice to be with you.
