| dc.description.abstract | In the midcentury United States, the study of culture was a peculiar vocation. It employed anthropologists at once to explain food consumption habits of native people in the Southwestern borderlands, national values and character, fine arts patronized by the new National Endowment for the Humanities, and folk customs of many groups whose historical trades, crafts, and music were deemed important to a pluralistic nation. This dissertation interweaves the histories of the anthropologists housed within the many sites that rendered culture variously valuable from the 1930s to the 1980s. Culture absorbed meaning from the discursive self-fashioning of anthropologists, from the state-building projects that occupied them during the Second World and Cold Wars, and from within the archives, libraries, and museums that contained the vast repositories of materials for anthropological research. Above all, it was the ongoing relationships with native people who had historically served as cultural anthropological research informants that imparted meaning to culture during this period. This study shows how negotiations about both scientific credibility and expertise and the ownership of cultural data and objects rendered anthropological research methods and insights increasingly obsolete, a phenomenon that was compounded by anthropology’s so-called colonial encounter during the 1960s that threw the discipline into a state of crisis. At its core, it asks why culture became such a powerful midcentury tool for some and who could wield its power in what contexts. It is a discursive, an institutional, and an intellectual history that explores the unmaking of cultural anthropology’s dominion over the ability to represent others and the epistemic tensions between past and present that arose in the process. | |
