Showing posts with label Paul Radin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Radin. Show all posts

Saturday, November 25, 2017

"Ethnologists and other experts"



Boas is known. Better known to those over fifty are his students: Margaret Mead especially, for her landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), but also Ruth Benedict, whose nicely written Patterns of Culture (1934) features a memorable chapter on the "Dionysian" Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) and the "Apollonian" Zuni.

Another student of Boas was Paul Radin, whose The Trickster (1956) was for the longest time the go-to book on that topic.

Like many scholars with "popular" impulses, Radin wrote a book for a "general" readership. The Story of the American Indian (1927) includes chapters like "The Capitalists of the North" (on the Kwakiutl) and a final chapter entitled "Can There Be an Indian Renaissance?" in which he suggests that if such a renaissance were to occur, it would require "a common homeland," and that homeland, to his mind, would be Mexico.