Discussion Question 1 and 2 Due May17

Community, Action, and Continuity: A Narrative Vita of Sol Tax Author(s): Sam Stanley Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 37, No. 1, Supplement: Special Issue: Anthropology in Public (Feb., 1996), pp. S131-S137 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2744238 Accessed: 17-05-2018 05:11 UTC

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Volume 37, Supplement, February I996I SI3I

Community, Action, and Continuity: A Narrative Vita of Sol Tax'

SAM STANLEY

I005i N.E. 27th, Bellevue, Wash. 98004, U.S.A. 24 IX 95

Sol Tax was born on October 30, I907, in the city of Chicago, Illinois, and passed away on January 4, I995, in the same city at the age of 87. He was the founding editor of CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY and held that office from I959 to I974. During that period, as in his whole lifetime, he accomplished many things and gave immea- surable assistance to countless friends and colleagues. For readers who know little of him I will describe some of what he did in the period in which, as George Stock- ing has said, he was "perhaps the most widely known anthropologist in the world" (I995:43). I will also chart the course of his life and try to convey some of what made him such a good and influential person.

EARLY YEARS

Tax's parents, Morris Paul Tax and Kate (Hanwit) Tax, moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he subse- quently attended elementary and high school. His edito- rial activities began here in his teens. He became editor of the Newsboys' World, which had a circulation of 5,ooo. He had joined the publishing organization News- boys' Republic at age I2, after being "ticketed" for sell- ing papers without having previously affiliated with the organization. This was his first encounter with a large organized group dedicated to improving the circum- stances of its members and others. He participated ac- tively in this group, whose structure was modeled after that of the U.S. government-with political parties, campaigns, an elected judiciary, a legislative body, and an executive arm.

In i926, Tax began his freshman year at the Univer- sity of Chicago. He later transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, because he wanted to do things, thought of political science and economics as leading to law school and perhaps a career in politics. But in the summer of i928, while supervising a Milwau- kee playground, he chanced to read Marett's Anthropol- ogy. Returning to Madison, he discovered that the uni- versity's first anthropologist, Ralph Linton, had just been hired. He took Linton's course and after several lectures decided to change his major. Linton encouraged him, telling him that anthropology was a good field and there were only about 50 anthropologists in the United States. Tax plunged into the four fields: physical anthro- pology, archeology, cultural anthropology, and linguis- tics. Courses outside the department of anthropology included geology, evolution, comparative anatomy, em- bryology, neurology, psychology, and sociology. Within the department courses were taught by Linton, just re- turned from work in Madagascar, and by Charlotte Gower, a University of Chicago Ph.D. with work on Caribbean archeology and recent fieldwork in rural Italy.

While still an undergraduate, Tax went on an archeo- logical expedition sponsored by the Logan Museum, spending the spring of I930 on a dig in Algeria. The succeeding summer and fall were spent touring prehis- toric sites in Europe. In I 93 I he graduated from the Uni- versity of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.B. degree in anthropology, and he spent the summer of that year in group fieldwork on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reser- vation in New Mexico. This was a training session in ethnography sponsored by the Southwestern Laboratory of Anthropology and directed by Ruth Benedict and Harry Hoijer (linguistics). In the fall of I93I Sol began graduate school at the University of Chicago. Coinci- dent with his matriculation was the arrival of A. R. Rad- cliffe-Brown as a member of the faculty. Even before completing Radcliffe-Brown's kinship course, Sol was asked to consider future fieldwork with the Fox (Mes- quakie) Indians near Tama, Iowa, who were notable for having an interesting variant of the Omaha type of kin- ship system. For the next three years Tax studied the history and theory of kinship systems in depth and did summer fieldwork with the Mesquakie ( T 93 and I 934)

i. ? I996 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved ooII-3204/96/37supp-0007$I.00. In preparing this vita I have consulted a number of publications deal- ing with Sol Tax's accomplishments. First, there is at the Univer- sity of Chicago's Regenstein Library in the Special Collection an archive which contains the Sol Tax Papers- I 47 linear feet of ma- terials including over 60 years of personal and professional corre- spondence, ethnographic field notes, published and unpublished articles, papers and manuscripts, lecture notes and transcripts, stu- dents' papers, audio tapes, photographs, and memorabilia. The doc- umentation begins with his youth in Milwaukee through his stu- dent years at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago, his field research and writing on Middle America and North American Indians from I932, his teaching and administra- tive roles at the University of Chicago from I 940, and a wide range of professional activities. The documents were presented to the library by Tax in I977, I979, I985, and I986. There is a splendid Guide to the Sol Tax Papers, written by Jean M. O'Brien and Rob- ert E. Moore, and I have relied heavily on it. Most of Tax's materials on the Fox project and the Fort Berthold project have been depos- ited in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. It also houses most of the materials from the i96I Chicago American Indian Conference.

From his own hand we have Tax's I988 candid discussion of his career, "Pride and Puzzlement: A Retro-introspective Record of 60 Years of Anthropology." It is a modest, straightforward account of his accomplishments and disappointments over the years-an insightful narrative of his own education as he struggled to assist his colleagues and mankind to achieve their own expectations.

Then there is the I979 publication Currents in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Sol Tax, which contains a citation from Wil- mington College, a preface by the editor, Robert Hinshaw, and 26 articles by 27 authors. The lead article is Tax's "Autobiography of Santiago Yach," and each of his daughters, Susan Tax Freeman and Marianna Tax Choldin, contributes an article. Hinshaw's preface discusses Tax's career historically and relates the articles to each other and to Tax's interests as they changed throughout his career.

Finally, I have drawn upon the short but succinct obituary writ- ten by George Stocking for the Anthropology Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association (March i995) and the pow- erful, sensitive, and impassioned obituary prepared by Joan Ablon for the Newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology (May I9951.

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SI32 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

and related tribes in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ontario (I933). The fruits of his graduate work, in addition to his Ph.D. dissertation (I935), were the subse- quent publication of "Some Problems of Social Organi-

zation" (I93 7a), "The Social Organization of the Fox In- dians" (I937b), and "From Lafitau to Radcliffe-Brown: A Short History of the Study of Social Organization" (i955). Toward the end of I934, Tax was invited to join Robert Redfield's Carnegie Institution of Washington project to do ethnography among the Indians of highland Guatemala. He accepted and together with his wife Ger- trude set off for the field as soon as his dissertation was finished, before the end of I934.

Tax worked initially in Chichicastenango, the site of a very large marketplace. When a Hollywood film started shooting there, he did a survey of northern and western Guatemala. Then he moved to Lake Atitlan, where Pa- najachel became the main site of his continuing work on worldview and economics. Redfield provided some guidance to his work, and a voluminous correspondence began which lasted for ten years, until Tax again took up permanent residence in the United States. Their dia- logue is published in R. A. Rubinstein's Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax (i99i). While in Guatemala, Sol trained Antonio Goubaud Car- rera and Juan de Dios Rosales, and they became the first native Guatemalan professional anthropologists. To- ward the end of his stay in Mesoamerica (I942-43) Tax was appointed visiting professor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City and in this capacity trained students in social anthropological field methods in Chiapas. His extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, par- ticularly on the economy and worldview, resulted in a number of important publications. The most interest- ing, perhaps, was Penny Capitalism (I953), a detailed quantitative study of economic transactions among In- dians and Ladinos.

CHICAGO TEACHING AND ACTION

In I940, while still affiliated with the Carnegie Institu- tion, Tax was appointed a research associate at the Uni- versity of Chicago. In I944 he became associate profes- sor and in I948 professor. His career as ethnologist for the Carnegie Institution had lasted from I934 to I948. During his active career at Chicago he held numerous administrative posts, including associate dean of the So- cial Sciences Division (I948-53), chairman of the Com- mittee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (i 95 2-55), chairman of the Department of An- thropology (i955-58), member and chairman of the Board of University Publications (I949-53), dean of Uni- versity Extension (i963-68), and cochairman of the Concentration in Cultural Dimensions of Social Change in the Divisional Master's Program in the Social Sci- ences (I975-79). Tax's teaching duties included anthro- pology and social science core courses, North American and Middle American Indian studies, seminars in the history of anthropology, and a very popular workshop in action anthropology. He became emeritus professor in I976.

In I 948, Tax was asked by the department to supervise six graduate students in fieldwork on the Fox Indian res- ervation at Tama, Iowa. Tax agreed, since he had many questions generated by his work there as a graduate stu- dent. Each of the students was given a specific tradi- tional anthropological problem to work on, and when they had been in the field a month, Tax visited them. In the course of a conversation he asked them, "What will be the future of the Fox?" It precipitated uneasiness in the students, because some saw assimilation as inevi- table while others thought the old ways could be pre- served. The students wanted both to help their new- found friends and to work on the anthropological problems they brought with them. Tax warned them that they would face problems of values, and they did. Upon returning to the university, they continued to dis- cuss the issues until it finally dawned on them that the question of whether to assimilate or not was not theirs to ask. It was the Indians who could legitimately decide what to do about the future; the anthropologists could only help them to see alternatives. This was the manner in which action anthropology was born. It was a recogni- tion on Tax's part that no application of science was going to work without active participation, choice, and decision making on the part of the people said to have the problem. As Tax put it (i988:8), "This was perhaps the real beginning of action anthropology; the rest has been legitimizing the relationship of the concepts be- hind the two words."

The connection worked out by Tax and his students seemed to free him to work on shorter-term projects, and he began to leave the development of pure scientific theory to others. Yet he was always careful to argue that the search for theory was as important as the action. In his words (Gearing, Netting, and Peattie i960:i68):

I am arguing for an activity that pursues [the solving of theoretical and practical problems] equally. I call it "action anthropology" and it requires that the an- thropologist move wholly into a problem situation- say an Indian tribe or community which is in trou- ble-and work independently to diagnose and to treat the difficulty in all of its aspects, and to do so as a research anthropologist.

By definition, action anthropology is an activity in which an anthropologist has two coordinate goals, to neither one of which he will delegate an inferior po- sition. He wants to help a group of people to solve a problem, and he wants to learn something in the pro- cess. He refuses ever to think or to say that the peo- ple involved are for him a means of advancing his knowledge; and he refuses to think or to say that he is simply applying science to the solution of those people's problems.

Whether action anthropology is a variety of ap- plied anthropology, or something quite different, de- pends on one's conception of applied anthropology, which is itself changing rapidly. If applied anthropol- ogy presupposes a body of scientific knowledge- compendent empirical propositions-developed by theoretical anthropologists and awaiting application

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Volume 37, Supplement, February I996 I SI33

to particular situations when we are asked to do so by management, government, administrator or orga- nization, then action anthropology is far different. For one thing, the action anthropologist can have no master; he works as a member of the academic com- munity. For another, the action anthropologist real- izes that this problem is less the application of general propositions than the development and clarification of goals and the compromising of con- flicting ends or values. In fact, the action anthropolo- gist finds that the proportion of new knowledge which must be developed in the situation is very great in comparison to old knowledge which he can apply. He is and must be a theoretical anthropolo- gist, not only in background but in practice.

In I96I Tax organized the Chicago American Indian Conference. Here again he followed the procedures de- veloped in action anthropology. The purpose of the con- ference was to draw together Indians from all over the United States to get them to discuss their continued existence and the effects on it of U.S. policy. Put more concretely, the U.S. government, through Congress, had been assuming that the Indians were disappearing and "melting willingly" into the nation. No one had really bothered to ask the Indians about this, and some tribes had actually had their treaty relationships with the gov- ernment terminated. Tax secured funding, got a com- mitment from the University of Chicago, and met with leaders of Indian organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians. He got a promise of en- dorsement from the latter as well as from the American Anthropological Association. The response was positive, and he mailed out materials, including a charter for dis- cussion, to a list of Indians and Indian organizations on December 27, I960. There were many follow-up mail- ings and meetings in at least i 2 cities in as many differ- ent states. More than 250 community, tribal, and in- tertribal meetings were held to discuss conference materials as they were received. Tax and his staff of co- ordinators made it clear from the beginning that their role was simply to coordinate the conference, and early on a steering committee of Indians emerged and then met in Chicago in February and April I96I. Besides "not running the conference," the coordinators emphasized their role as neutral scholars representing no interest group and dedicated to seeing that Indians spoke for themselves. Finally, at the conference, only Indians were allowed to speak in the sessions, although non-Indian experts could contribute if asked to do so. The confer- ence was held from June I3 through June 2o. Five hun- dred Indians attended; many were official delegates from tribes, but more than half came as independent mem- bers of go tribes from almost every state and a few Canadian bands. The conference produced a 49-page document called the Declaration of Indian Purpose. Together with appendices and other materials, it was sent to registrants at the conference and to everyone on the mailing list. In i962 it was formally presented to President John Kennedy by an Indian delegation which brought it to Washington.

The conference put a stop to the termination policy. It gave impetus to an amorphous Indian body somewhat analogous to the Associates of CURRENT ANTHROPOL- OGY. It stimulated the formation of the National Indian Youth Council, which still attracts Indian young people interested in working on Indian problems. The special news publication of the conference, Indian Voices, was for a number of years edited by Robert K. Thomas, a Cherokee student and colleague of Tax's. In her article summarizing the conference Joan Ablon (I979:446) notes:

Tax and his staff very clearly organized this meeting on the operational model of action anthropology.... The action approach is based on the premise that a group of people, if properly informed of the alterna- tives, is able to choose what is best for it more wisely than outside "expert advisors" or well- meaning planners. The action approach entails a stage-by-stage evaluation of the community's prob- lems as presented by its members and a feedback of these developing ideas to the community-client group together with a clarification of alternative paths of action among which the community could choose. Self-determination in the setting of short- term and long-term goals must be the essence of any action program. The activists stress their equal re- sponsibility to the people whom they wish to help and to the scientific community, of which they must remain members and to which they must con- tinue to contribute data. The Conference was con- ceived and carried out in terms of this approach. In retrospect it was apparent to the coordinators that the Conference could not have succeeded had it been planned or carried out in any other manner.

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

Tax's best-known international effort was the founding and editorship of CA. His greatest pride was in the cre- ation of the Associates as a worldwide community in- volved in the communication of knowledge with neither national nor academic boundaries. In the June I965 is- sue Tax writes of the Wenner-Gren Foundation's com- mitment to the human sciences as international and in- terdisciplinary and goes on to describe the I952 meeting of 50 human scientists that produced Anthropology To- day, edited by Kroeber in I953, and the meeting of 8 I scholars that produced Appraisal of Anthropology To- day, edited by Tax with L. Eisely, I. Rouse, and C. Voege- lin. Both of these works included contributions from dif- ferent countries and different sciences, and both aimed to summarize the state of knowledge in the field at that time from the broadest worldwide perspective. The Wenner-Gren Foundation then followed up in I 95 5 with a limited edition of the Yearbook of Anthropology de- signed to contain both scholarly and reference material on the worldwide progress of knowledge in all fields of anthropology. A part of the Yearbook was reprinted as CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY for wider distribution and was hailed as a worthy successor to the I 9 5 2 symposium publications. But Paul Fejos, director of research for the

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SI34 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

Foundation, felt that its staff and facilities should not be used for these purposes. As a result, he asked Tax, who had just finished a successful term as editor of the American Anthropologist and had also actively partici- pated in the i952 symposia, to develop a plan that would continually keep scholars abreast of new knowledge. In I95 7 Tax agreed to take on the task and to discover what the profession would find most useful. His original plan was to publish a series of books-an encyclopedia of anthropology-that would contain revisions of the arti- cles from the original symposia plus articles written to fill in the gaps.

After conferences in the United States, Tax traveled to Europe (July and August I958) to meet with col- leagues in England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Then in August, I4 of the scholars from the regional meetings met in Burg-Wartenstein to discuss results and develop a plan. What emerged was that CA should be published as a journal, in English, bimonthly, and addressed to a world audience of those who profes- sionally practiced the anthropological sciences. It should publish major reviews of subjects of considerable scope and also current news and reference materials. A report of the meeting would be sent to as many as 3,000 col- leagues with a card asking for cooperation and necessary information inviting them to become the first Associ- ates in CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY. Fees for Associates and others were calculated for most countries of the world.

This new plan, so different from Tax's first one, was then the subject of a new round of conferences led by Tax. At the end of December I958 he spent a month visiting Moscow, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Palo Alto (U.S.A.), with a conference at each place. In April and May I959 he held conferences in Mexico, Guatemala, Bogota', Bue- nos Aires, Sao Paulo, and Caracas. In June and July more conferences took place in Stockholm, Warsaw, Prague, Ankara, Cairo, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Ibadan, Accra, Dakar, and London. As Sol said at the end of these rounds of conferences, "CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY is a result of the suggestions and planning from all these conferences. It is the product of a unique historical de- velopment" (i965:244). He had visited some 30 locales outside of the United States, meeting with some 44 groups involving 650 persons, and listened attentively to everyone he met there. All this was done before travel by jet and while the world was torn by the cold war. Perhaps only scholars who lived in those times can fully appreciate his accomplishment! He saw CA as a "social experiment" and the Associates as the key to its suc- cess: "The first need is to recognize ourselves as a com- munity."

So CA was launched, and at the end of its first five years it was evaluated. From Tax's point of view, the intercommunicating Associates were a community who used the journal as a means to exchange knowledge criti- cally. His role was to serve the community by keeping the lines of communication as open, direct, and clear as possible. As editor he tried to let the Associates set pol- icy and guide the direction of the journal. He himself

intended to make as few decisions as possible. His mo- dus operandi was to go to the Associates for help when- ever a problem arose. Associates communicated with him through the Reply Letters that arrived in each issue. It was a creative scheme, perhaps unprecedented in the scholarly world. While it lasted, it was as democratic and egalitarian as a system could be. The traditional ed- iting system, so hierarchical in structure, had the effect of intimidating and alienating prospective contributors. Many anthropologists new to the profession suddenly felt an acceptance and a responsibility for the discipline. Secondly, those who participated in the system had the satisfaction of feeling that they belonged to a special community concerned with the science of man, and for many it opened up new opportunities to acquire knowl- edge from others, in other lands, that bore on their vital research interests. It is significant that when Tax turned over the editorship to his successor in I974 he reprinted the Letter to Associates that had been sent with June I965 issue to remind Associates that he had raised the question of succession at that time and that subse- quently they had decided how to choose a successor and his successor was chosen from among those nominated. In reprinting this particular letter, moreover, he restated the philosophy of CA and the decisions that needed to be made by whoever edited it, clearly hoping that the routines established, involving the community of Asso- ciates, would be maintained.

Tax helped organize a Viking Fund seminar on Middle American ethnology and social anthropology in I949 which drew together many Middle American specialists, and he then edited the results, which were published as Heritage of Conquest (i952). He also organized the Darwin Centennial Celebration of I959-60 and edited the results as Evolution after Darwin (i960). He served as president of the International Union of Anthropologi- cal and Ethnological Sciences from I968 to I973 and organized the meetings of its Ninth Congress in Chicago in I973, perhaps the most interesting one it ever held. The many innovations of the congress included the es- tablishment of commissions on such subjects as ethno- cide and genocide, population, urgent anthropology, and visual anthropology and the organization of precon- gress seminars in which participants could present pa- pers, critique them, and later present collective results to the congress. Tax wanted to bring as many partici- pants as possible from outside the United States. This required money, so he approached a publisher for a large advance and contracted to sell him rights to publish all of the proceedings. This money was then used to help cover expenses such as simultaneous translation into five languages for six days and to assist participants who would otherwise have been unable to bear the full cost of attending. Close to 4,ooo attended the congress, and 9I books were published in what became known as the World Anthropology Series under Tax's general edi- torship.

Tax worked closely with the Smithsonian Institution from I965 through I977. He started as special adviser to the secretary for anthropology and later was director of the newly created Center for the Study of Man. The

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Volume 37, Supplement, February I996 I SI35

Center started with a nucleus of three programs and later added an ethnic studies program and an anthropo- logical film study program. Its advisers included a num- ber of distinguished anthropologists drawn from the in- ternational community including Claude Levi-Strauss, Fredrik Barth, M. N. Srinivas, Chie Nakane, and Laila Shukry El-Hamamsy. The first of the three original proj- ects was an American Indian program, which facilitated communication between the Smithsonian and Indians throughout North America-supplying some materials for Indian programs and serving as a source of informa- tion for Indians who needed to communicate with other Indians. It secured the funding and staff and helped to recruit contributors for the Handbook of North Ameri- can Indians (first volume published I978). The second program centered on urgent anthropological research. It compiled information on research projects which needed to be done before the opportunity was lost for- ever. Small sums of money became available to finance such work, and decisions to support workers were based on recommendations of the Center advisers and the De- partment of Anthropology staff. Finally, the Center had a program dedicated to the proposition that the human sciences, particularly anthropology, had a contribution to make to the solution of modern social problems on a worldwide basis. Meetings were held in Chicago and Washington, D.C., with anthropologists and other hu- man scientists from the United States and other coun- tries to discuss the feasibility of such a program. Finally, after an international meeting in Cairo, there was gen- eral consensus on a number of problems that warranted research and evaluation. The areas singled out were (i) mis- use of Cannabis and alcohol, (2) population change, (3) education, and (4) economic development. The Cen- ter located funding sources in all of these areas and iden- tified anthropological researchers to do the work. Seven monographs were published in the World Anthropology Series and one by the Center. Space does not permit a description of every project, but a word should be said about the population project. This project recruited hu- man scientists from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malay- sia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Mexico, Venezuela, Bangla- desh, India, and Sri Lanka. They met in Bucharest a few days before the I 97 5 United Nations Conference on Pop- ulation with representatives of the Commission on An- thropology and Ethnology of the Academy of the (then) Socialist Republic of Romania and worked out a presen- tation for the population tribune of the organized non- governmental contribution to the conference. This pre- sentation benefited greatly from the participation of Sol Tax and Margaret Mead. In a short report on the rela- tionship of the seminar to the main currents of the UN Population Conference, Mead emphasized the impor- tance of "the seminar effort to highlight the significance of local, village and neighborhood groups within which people live and make decisions" (I975:4). The popula- tion program was a model of what could be accom- plished when an effort was made to involve scholars from all over the world in trying to resolve worldwide problems collectively. It provided some vindication of Tax's faith that anthropologists and other human scien-

tists could cooperate in addressing human social prob- lems and make a difference.

In addition to being president of the IUAES, Tax was president of the American Anthropological Association (i958-59) and associate editor (I948-52) and editor (I953-56) of the American Anthropologist. He was awarded the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology (i961), the Distinguished Service Award of the American An- thropological Association (I977), and the Bronislaw Ma- linowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology (I977). He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (i956), the Chilean Anthropological Society (i963), and the Czechoslovakian Society (i963). In I969-70 he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was awarded hon- orary degrees from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee (i969), the University of the Valley of Guate- mala (I974), Wilmington College (I974), and Beloit College (I 975).

COMMUNITY AND PUBLIC SERVICE

Given his experience and expertise, Tax was often asked to serve as an adviser to government agencies and insti- tutions. He was a member of the Committee on Latin American Anthropology of the National Research Coun- cil (I946-54), the Committee on International Relations in the Behavioral Sciences (i966-68), the National Insti- tutes of Mental Health Cultural Anthropology Fellow- ship Review Committee (i967-7f), and President Lyn- don B. Johnson's Special Task Force on American Indian Affairs (i965-69) and was a consultant to the U.S. Office of Education (i965-70). He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO (i959-65; executive commit- tee I963-65) and on the board of directors of the Illinois State Museum (I954-70).

In addition to this broad public service, Tax main- tained a lively interest in the community where he lived. He belonged to the Hyde Park Community Coun- cil from I946 to I954 and the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference from I950 to I984. He was also associated with the South East Chicago Commission (i952-82) and participated in the South East Chicago Historical Project (I979-82). In an article for Human Organization (Tax I959:22-27) he describes the activi- ties of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Confer- ence and the South East Chicago Commission when faced with imminent destruction of their neighborhood as ghettoization moved in from adjacent areas. The HP- KCC worked through education to gain acceptance of an integrated black and white neighborhood. The SECC, with university leadership, worked to reduce crime and enforce laws that prevented the partitioning of deterio- rating large homes into slum rentals. Eventually, at ago- nizing moral cost, the neighborhood was saved, and Tax was in the thick of it-eyes open and seeing the wrenching choices which had to be made. This was ac- tion which would not gain any kudos in the academic world, yet he did it because it was the best way to solve

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SI36 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY

a very perplexing problem. The fate of his community was as important as his career in academia.

A related activity was the Community Service Work- shop (I966-67) which produced The People vs. the Sys- tem (i968) and The Draft (i967). Both of these confer- ences examined national problems. One provided an opportunity for poor blacks to discuss their plight with experts of various sorts who manage "the system." The other concerned problems of recruiting citizens for mili- tary service. Tax organized, chaired sessions, and edited the books for publication. Subsequently, in the case of the draft, one of the alternatives discussed at the confer- ence became the "solution" to manpower recruitment.

What is characteristic about these activities is that Tax did them because he wanted to help solve or settle particular difficult problems; he had no other agenda than this.

RETIREMENT

One late night in January I979, Tax suffered a mild heart attack and was taken to the University of Chicago's Bill- ings Hospital. During his recovery he experienced a small stroke that affected his peripheral vision and left him with alexia, a condition which affects the pro- cessing of words and letters in written sentences and makes reading difficult and exhausting. He responded to this unwelcome handicap with an action approach. He proceeded to learn everything he could about the afflic- tion and in the process entered into correspondence with the leading medical authority on the subject, a doctor at an Ivy League university. In this case Tax was the party with the problem, so he kept meticulous records of his symptoms and forwarded them to the specialist on a regular basis. In return his correspondent was able to use the material as part of his scientific data and provide feedback for Tax to use in making choices. As with ev- erything, his stroke became another learning experience which he pursued with vigor. It should also be noted that he was able to remain active and productive in spite of his impaired reading ability.

He remained a stalwart supporter of the Native Amer- ican Educational Services (NAES) College, which is lo- cated in Chicago with branch campuses at Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Montana, Menominee, Wisconsin, and Twin Cities, Minnesota. He was a member of its board of trustees from I973 until I993, when he re- quested to be released from regular active participation, and occasionally lectured to students. He donated a large part of his professional library to NAES, together with a collection of papers known as the Sol Tax Studies in Comparative Tribal and Third World Development. They are complemented by the papers of his former stu- dent, Robert Rietz, who, along with Bob Thomas, was one of the most active and experienced action anthropol- ogists of all of Tax's students.

Another activity which consumed a part of his retire- ment time was the Library Anthropology Resource Group (LARG). It was formed to find ways to cope with the ever-increasing quantity of reference materials. In

I97I, Tax met with librarians and anthropologists from several universities in the Chicago area, and they de- cided to develop reference materials cooperatively. From that time on, in Tax's words, "a changing group . . . met monthly" (Tax i988:7), working "happily together without funds except as royalties now repay some out- of-pocket costs." To that date they had produced three books, and a fourth was in preparation.

Tax kept in touch with the department in his emeri- tus status. He continued to receive correspondence and responded to it. He maintained contact with some grad- uate students, and one of them, David Blanchard, work- ing under Raymond Fogelson, wrote an excellent piece entitled "Beyond Empathy: The Emergence of an Action Anthropology in the Life and Career of Sol Tax" (I979). Another, Robert Moore, assisted in setting up the ar- chive of Tax's work and then took responsibility for an exhibit at the Regenstein Library entitled "Sol Tax: The Making of an Anthropologist," on display from October 3I, I987, to January 29, I988, in the Department of Spe- cial Collections. When Tax was invited to write a paper about the University of Wisconsin-Madison Anthropol- ogy Department on the occasion of the university's cen- tennial in May I989, he produced "I928-29: The Begin- nings of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin," in which, with the help of Rob Moore, he included I3 "illustrations" from his archived materials.

Some people have youthful dreams of acquiring great wealth, some may want to be great artists, and some may want to save souls. Sol Tax's vision was to make the world a better place for humanity. He tried to judge his actions or projects in these terms. He believed that anthropology, because of its breadth, was the ideal means for developing knowledge and turning it to the betterment of mankind. The emphasis on the study of small groups and communities appealed to him because it involved face-to-face communication. As an anthro- pologist he felt two equal responsibilities: to the people he learned so much from and to those in his discipline, who were also a source of knowledge.

Attempting to explain how he had managed to do so many things, Tax cited two idiosyncratic characteris- tics: his inability to be satisfied doing only one thing at a time and "a deliberate indecisiveness that comes in part, I suppose, from my generally relativistic philoso- phy but more specifically from my immersion in action anthropology" (Tax i988:i6). Corollaries of the first characteristic were "a willingness to let things happen or grow and a hospitality to other people's ideas, desires, and needs." He also tried to improve the institutions with which he was associated. The indecisiveness which he mentions "grew out of trying to satisfy the needs and wants of persons who were not sure what they wanted; 'trial and error' takes time and patience." One influence and model for him had been the role of the American Indian peace chiefs, who are successful "only if they satisfy the perceived needs and wishes of the people they serve" (I988:I7). The trick is to operate helpfully without exercising undue personal influence. Innovative, full of ideas, action-oriented, one might imagine that Tax was radical, but this was not the case.

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Volume 37, Supplement, February I996I SI37

Actually, he always tried to work through existing insti- tutions when possible and valued continuities as much as change. He also valued ideas and had them in abun- dance. Yet though he expounded them with enthusiasm, he maintained no vested interest in his own projects and was willing to abandon them if they were rejected or superseded by better ones.

At the close of his "Pride and Puzzlement" he won- ders about the fate of his two best contributions to scien- tific theory. One, Penny Capitalism, found support from economists for its originality, but no anthropologist at- tempted to replicate it to discover the extent of its value. The other came out of his first professional work and was in the field of kinship. In working out a theory to account for the sporadic distribution of Crow and Omaha kinship systems, Tax hit upon some structural equivalences which he called "rules" and which turned out to be similar to Floyd Lounsbury's "transformational analysis" some 30 years later. Alan Coult referred to the rules in I967, and Harold Scheffler made use of them in i982, but there was little mention of the theoretical base upon which they rested. Tax learned that the "rules" still had some value when Joseph Greenberg (i980) called his I937 article "perhaps the wisest article on kinship ever written."

Tax closed his I988 article with a plan for doing some- thing to overcome the "general malaise of most of our people" (p. i9). The problem? Increasing global eco- nomic interdependence and the threat to the survival of the human species from nuclear war between nation- states. The solution? Since humans want to control their lives and destinies, why not form smaller communities where more control is possible? Something the size of the congressional districts might fill the bill. These com- munities would be bound together electronically. He concludes: "A fresh start now-with our new technolo- gies and our need for community as well as survival- might well permit an evolution fast enough to dissolve the warring nation-states before they dissolve us all"

(P. 20). Tax valued family perhaps above all. He leaves Ger-

trude, his wife and companion of more than 6o years. His two daughters, of whom he was very proud, con- tinue in the tradition of serving mankind through schol- arly work that transcends national boundaries. Susan Tax Freeman is an anthropologist who has worked ex- tensively in Spain and is a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Marianna Tax Choldin is an authority on censorship and Slavic library resources and has an endowed chair at the University of Illinois-Urbana. There are three granddaughters.

In what was probably his last appearance at a profes- sional anthropological meeting (Central States Anthro- pological Society, March i9, I993), Tax went to Beloit College to participate in a session dedicated to the mem- ory of his student Bob Thomas, who had died in I99I. In his presentation there, he referred to the I956 Map of North American Indians in 1950, to which Bob had contributed so substantially. He wondered if someone might be willing to update that document to show the changes in Indian population distribution over the sub-

sequent 43 years. He also expressed his admiration and respect for Bob's breadth and depth of knowledge. Fi- nally, he alluded to their last correspondence, in I990, when they had exchanged letters on some provocative religious questions from a Jewish and North American Indian perspective. He concluded by summing up his philosophy: "If there is something useful I can do, then I have to do it." He still had the enthusiasm, the fire, the wit, the humor, the strong moral sense, the sharp mind, and the dedication to man's betterment. He is already missed.

References Cited

AB L O N, J O AN. I 9 7 9. "The American Indian Chicago Confer- ence," in Currents in anthropology: Essays in honor of Sol Tax. Edited by Robert Hinshaw, pp. 445-5 6. The Hague: Mouton.

. I995. Obituary: Sol Tax I907-I995. Society of Applied Anthropology Newsletter 6(2):9-Io.

B LA N C HA R D, D AV I D. I 9 7 9. "Beyond empathy: The emergence of an action anthropology in the life and career of Sol Tax," in Currents in anthropology. Edited by Robert Hinshaw, pp. 4I9-43. The Hague: Mouton.

GEARING, FRED, ROBERT MCC. NETTING, AND LISA R.

PEATTIE. Editors. I960. Documentary history of the Fox proj- ect. Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Anthro- pology.

MEAD, MARGARET. I975. "The relationship of the Bucharest Seminar to the main currents at the United Nations Confer- ence on Population," in The cultural consequences of popula- tion change. Edited by Staff, Center for the Study of Man. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

O'BRIEN, JEAN M., AND ROBERT E. MOORE. I989. Guide to

the Sol Tax Papers. University of Chicago Archives, Depart- ment of Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

RUBINSTEIN, ROBERT A. I99I. Fieldwork: The correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax. Boulder: Westview Press.

STOCKING, GEORGE. I995. Death notices: Sol Tax. Anthropol- ogy Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association 36(3):43.

TAX, SOL. I937a. "Some problems of social organization," in Social anthropology of North American tribes. Edited by F. Eggan, pp. 3-35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. I937b. "The social organization of the Fox Indians," in Social anthropology of North American tribes. Edited by F. Eg- gan, pp. 243-85. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1 95 2. Heritage of conquest: The ethnography of Middle America. Glencoe: Free Press.

. I953. Penny capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian economy. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

. I955. "From Lafitau to Radcliffe-Brown: A short history of the study of social organization," in Social anthropology of North American tribes, enlarged edition. Edited by F. Eggan, pp. 445-8I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. I959. Residential integration: A Chicago case. Human Or- ganization i8:22-27.

. I960. Evolution after Darwin. 3 vols. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press.

. I965. The history and philosophy of CURRENT ANTHROPOL- OGY. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 6: 238-69.

. Editor. I967. The draft: A handbook of facts and alter- natives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. editor. I968. The people versus the system: A dialogue in urban conflict. New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for An- thropological Research.

I974. Editor's report. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY I5:365-66. I988. Pride and puzzlement: A retro-introspective record

of 6o years of anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology I7:I-2I.

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