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Walter Goldschmidt
We sadly report the passing of former AAA president Walter Goldschmidt, who died Wednesday, September 1, 2010, at the age of 97. Goldschmidt was Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCLA, and his most recent book was The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene (2005). For more on his life, please read Paul Doughty’s biography. AAA will publish a full obituary honoring Walter Goldschmidt in an upcoming issue of AN.
Readers are welcome to post links to pieces honoring him or share remembrances of him in comments.
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I spoke with Walter just a few weeks ago (and spoke to his caretaker) and it was apparent that he was in substantial decline, which is not surprising at age 97. He was a giant force in anthropology that I think goes largely unrecognized and under appreciated. His contribution to agricultural anthropology is known to most C&Aers, but his other work, including founding the journal Ethos in Psychological Anthropology, are not as well known. Paul Durrenberger, Tom Thornton, and I nominated him for the SfAA Malinowski award (which he won) and in the process of writing the nomination letter we really became aware of the full extent of his contributions (the information below is excerpted from our nomination letter). He was an important force in my life and always took time to visit, treated me as an intellectual equal (though I was and am not), was gracious to my wife and family, and was the model for what anthropology should be.
For 60 years, Professor Goldschmidt’s monumental anthropological work provided an enduring service to practical human problems and engendered an appreciation for humanitarianism. Throughout his career, Professor Goldschmidt demonstrated that rare combination of insightful theoretician, rigorous ethnographer, and humanitarian. A quarter century ago, well before applied anthropology’s current popularity, Professor Goldschmidt made clear in his American Anthropological Association Presidential nomination statement that anthropologists “need to develop a climate where anthropologists will find their way into policy-making positions and where their voices will be heard in public debate…We would be a better society if anthropological understandings were insinuated into public policy as frequently as those of such sister disciplines as economics and political science.” Professor Goldschmidt ascended to the Presidency of the AAA in 1974 because he practiced what he preaches.
Native American Land-Rights
Walter Goldschmidt’s research and public policy work on behalf of Alaska Native land and resource rights is an outstanding example of his career-long efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world through the use of social science. In 1946 Dr. Goldschmidt, then social scientist attached to the US Department of Agriculture, and attorney Theodore Haas were dispatched by the Office of Indian Affairs to Alaska to investigate the historical and contemporary land claims of Alaska Natives. They began their investigation among the Tlingit and Haida Indians of Southeast Alaska and then moved on to the Interior, where they did a survey of the Athabaskan Indians of the interior villages of Northway, Tanacross, and Tetlin. Dr. Goldschmidt authored separate reports on each investigation, which were released in late 1946 and early 1947. Although he spent only one summer in Alaska, the consequences of his work were profound and far-reaching and to this day remain relevant to land and resource management in the state.
Goldschmidt and Haas together pioneered a unique methodology, combining the best attributes of anthropological and legal traditions, designed to avoid the pitfalls that had hampered satisfactory study and resolution of Indian claims throughout history. Dr. Goldschmidt’s reports became foundational parts of Alaska Native land claims struggle. During the 1950s Dr. Goldschmidt was called upon to testify in front the Indian Claims Commission on the nature and extent of Tlingit and Haida land and resource tenure. Despite a sometimes hostile examination, Dr. Goldschmidt was able to support his conclusions that nearly all of the lands and waters of Southeast Alaska were possessed and used by Natives of Southeast Alaska. Eventually, the protracted land claims battle culminated in the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, a far-reaching piece of legislation that organized Natives into corporations and provided them with title to 44 million acres of state lands and nearly $1 billion in compensation for lands taken.
In addition to setting the gold standard for the conduct of indigenous land rights studies in Alaska and elsewhere, the report (entitled “Possessory Rights of the Natives of Southeastern Alaska”) also became an instant ethnographic classic for its scope, rich detail, and incisive analysis of Tlingit and Haida economics, land and resource tenure, and lifeways. As the distinguished ethnologist Frederica de Laguna summed it up, “This important document played a major role in the settlement of Alaskan Native land claims, and has been a source of valuable information for later ethnographers among the Tlingit.” Two key features of the Goldschmidt and Haas study were its regional scope and tight focus. In contrast to standard ethnological works of the period, which tended to be community based and encyclopedic in scope, their research was regional in its orientation and specific in its objectives. Their mission was to “determine what lands the natives of Southeastern Alaska now have in their possession in actual use and occupancy which they similarly possessed or claimed in 1884” when the Organic Act was passed guaranteeing that their possession of such lands would not be disturbed. The sharp focus of the investigation, however, did not produce narrow results. On the contrary, as is magnificently illustrated in the report, nearly every aspect of Tlingit and Haida culture is reflected through their relationships to the lands and resources of Southeast Alaska.
The investigators’ methods were equally focused and faithful to their mission. They were to interview the most knowledgeable leaders of each property owning social group (clans and house groups) concerning their group’s possessions and land use and synthesize the results into a summary narrative with maps and supporting testimony for each community. While structured key informant interviewing is a common technique employed by anthropologists, because of the nature of their investigation, Goldschmidt and Haas treated their Native experts not simply as informants but as legal witnesses. Their testimony was converted into formal “statements” which were signed by the interviewees and attested by a second witness. Processing the information this way, a bow to U.S. legal culture, was an enormously time-consuming task. The investigators not only had to gather the statements but type them up and have them affirmed, signed, and witnessed. Few ethnographers could claim such faithful attention to their informants’ words.
Likewise, in compiling the final report in the succeeding months, Goldschmidt had an enormous amount of information to pull together, including all of the 88 witness statements concerning land occupancy and use and the pertinent ethnographic and legal data from the literature. That he pulled it off so expressly and expertly is testimony not only to his diligence but also to his skills as an anthropologist and writer. The narrative is not only crisp and well-written, it is well organized, carefully supported, and even dramatic at times (unusual for a government report). In addition, his overview of Tlingit and Haida culture, written with an interest in highlighting patterns of land and resource tenure, remains one of the finest basic introductions available. All of these have served well the interests of the Tlingit and Haida, indeed all Alaskans, who desire to protect natural and cultural resources that Natives and non-Natives alike continue to rely on today.
Another precious gift of this study is the voice it gives to the elders of a bygone era. Goldschmidt lets them speak in the text, and together the statements constitute a unique body of oral literature that paints a moving portrait of the profound relationships Southeast Natives have to their landscapes and the tragic consequences they suffered in the face of white incursions. Descendants of the original witnesses still quote their words in public hearings, planning documents, and other forums.
The genius and utility of Goldschmidt’s study is best highlighted by the fact that, 50 years after its release, it was published as a book (Haa Aaní, Our Land: Tlingit and Haida Land Rights and Use, 1998, University of Washington Press and the Sealaska Heritage Foundation), which is already into its second printing. Tlingits and Haidas themselves have purchased hundreds of copies in order to read their ancestors’ statements and enjoy Goldschmidt’s marvelous integration of this testimony into a coherent narrative on the human ecology and territorial boundaries of each major village in the region. Dr. Goldschmidt enriched the publication by adding a major new reflective essay; drawing on letters he wrote home to his wife, these reminiscences offer a very personal look at the challenges of doing this work in the “last frontier” at mid-century—an exciting and beautiful but also hostile and racist milieu. Haa Aaní has not only been a popular and academic success but also continues to influence land and resource policy issues in this region and beyond, particularly those concerning subsistence uses of fish and wildlife, unresolved Native land claims, and cultural resource management.
When Dr. Goldschmidt visited Alaska in 1996 for the first time since the original study, he received an overwhelming reception and numerous citations from indigenous organizations. Perhaps 88 year old Tlingit elder Joseph Kahklen Sr., who served as translator for the 1946 study and became Walter’s very good friend, summed it up best upon their reunion in fifty years later, when he remarked to an audience of Tlingits: “[This] research was important and it was for the benefit of our people.” That statement still rings true in the new millenium, as this was social science at its best.
U.S. Agriculture
Similar to his Native American work, Dr. Goldschmidt’s ethnographic research on the industrialization of U.S. agriculture has resulted in numerous applications which continue to have profound consequences for U.S. farm policy debates and agricultural research to the present day. It was in 1940 that Dr. Goldschmidt undertook his doctoral research based on an ethnography of the town of Wasco in California’s Central Valley. Published in 1947 by Harcourt, Brace and Company under the title As You Sow, Goldschmidt’s research was the first time a cultural anthropologist assessed the social consequences of an industrial form of agriculture for rural communities in the U.S. Indeed, it was the first time an anthropologist recognized the industrialization of agriculture as a phenomenon suitable for systematic ethnographic study. His findings, that an industrial form of food production resulted in urbanized rural communities, were corroborated in a follow-up comparative study he conducted of the towns Arvin and Dinuba in the same California region. This magnificent work utilized a type of controlled comparison methodology in which two rural communities were socially and economically similar with the exception of farming being industrialized in the one and independently owned and operated by family farmers in the other. This approach (a compelling theoretical derivation of which is outlined in his 1966 book Comparative Functionalism: An Essay in Anthropological Theory, University of California Press), combined with the carefully detailed ethnography, allowed him to isolate and assess the particular consequences of an industrialized form of agriculture for the respective communities. Among his conclusions were that an industrialized form of agriculture resulted in increased socioeconomic stratification, more conflict between workers and their employers, less representative local government, and decreased participation in local civic and religious organizations in rural communities. This comparative study was later combined with his ethnography of Wasco and published by Allenheld, Osmun as the seminal book As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness.
In 1949 the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation published the “Central Valley Project Studies” based upon a report from a committee within the Bureau of Agricultural Economics at the USDA. Dr. Goldschmidt served on the committee and was a principle editor of the report. The report was an appraisal of the massive irrigation system being developed in California and its consequences for the economy and social life of California communities. Notable recommendations of this report, clearly influenced by Goldschmidt’s earlier California ethnography, were farm acreage limitations and restrictions on farmland speculation which would result in a more diffuse distribution of farmland ownership.
Except that it was conducted over 60 years ago, these examples of Dr. Goldschmidt’s work are in fact classic examples of contemporary applied anthropology in that they were sponsored by a federal agency (the USDA) in the interests of understanding a practical social problem and developing a set of policy recommendations to correct them. Indeed, the policy recommendations stemming from Goldschmidt’s comparative ethnographic work, which included changes in tax policy and treatment of labor, were such that absent the adoption of such policies he predicted the spread of an industrialized form of agriculture throughout the U.S. with comparable consequences. Fifty years later, in 1995, Dr. Goldschmidt visited the Midwest at the invitation of Professors Thu and Durrenberger. With the assistance of key farmer informants, the tour demonstrated that his predictions of a half century ago had sadly come true for Iowa, as agribusiness had indeed gobbled up farm after farm, leaving environmental, social, and economic destruction in its wake. Dr. Goldschmidt detailed his assessment of this trip and a review of the consequences of agricultural industrialization in the concluding chapter to the book Pig, Profits, and Rural Communities (State University of New York Press) that Professors Thu and Durrrenberger edited.
Dr. Goldschmidt was hardly dormant between the 1940s and the 1990s. In between his ethnographic work on Eastern African agriculture and law (which resulted in four books between 1967 and 1978 and numerous articles and book chapters), Dr. Goldschmidt testified before the U.S. Congress’ Small Business Committee on the consequences of the industrialization of U.S. agriculture. And in 1986 the U.S. Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment issued a major report entitled “Technology, Public Policy, and the Changing Structure of American Agriculture.” An entire section of this report is dedicated to assessing industrial agriculture’s “Impacts on Rural Communities” and is explicitly predicated on Goldschmidt’s California work and the subsequent generation of social science research it created referred to as the “Goldschmidt Hypothesis.”
Dr. Goldschmidt’s work on industrialized agriculture is alive and well in contemporary applied social science research and policy efforts at a variety of levels. In December of 1999, Kendall Thu visited an Iowa family farm where he participated in a meeting with two state farm leaders, one of whom nearly ousted the President of the state Farm Bureau in an unprecedented election. Farm Bureau is the country’s largest, most powerful, and most outspoken advocate of industrial agriculture. The farm leaders at this small meeting discussed unprecedented activities associated with the continuing farm crisis, including Mississippi and California State Farm Bureaus’ formal rebuke of the national Farm Bureau’s stance against proposed federal policy which would help prevent corporate agribusiness mergers. The work of Dr. Goldschmidt, his landmark research, and congressional testimony were as natural a part of this contemporary policy discussion among progressive farm leaders.
Professional Achievement and Public Interest Anthropology
Within the mainstream anthropological academy, Dr. Goldschmidt’s dedication to the practical use of anthropology is evident at a time when applied anthropology was treated as a second-class field. In 1979 he authored the American Anthropological Association publication The Uses of Anthropology. And in 1986 his dedication to applied anthropology and public policy was reaffirmed when he edited Anthropology and Public Policy: A Dialogue. His work on behalf of a public interest anthropology can be seen throughout is monumental professional service. In addition to serving as President of the American Anthropological Association (1975), Dr. Goldschmidt served as President of the American Ethnological Society (1969-70); President of the Southwest Anthropological Association (1951-52); Editor of American Anthropologist (1956-60); founder and editor of Ethos; Director, Ways of Mankind Radio Project (1951-53); Senior Scientist, National Institute for Mental Health (1970-75); and African Studies Association founding member (1956-60).