ALFRED IRVING HALLOWELL 1892-1974

With the death of A. Irving Hallowell, anthropology has lost one of its most dis- tinguished and influential scholars and teach- ers. Anthropology, for Hal!3well, was truly the study of man. Although much of his scholarly career was devoted to the study of the Northern Ojibwa, a people whose society, culture, and thought he recorded and analyzed with the meticulous detail of a master craftsman, in almost all of his eth- nographic accounts, he was concerned with discovering and displaying the general through the particular. This explains in part why he has had a marked influence on a large group of scholars who know or care little about the Berens River Saulteaux. When, in addition, one considers the wide array of subjects to which he made original and pioneering contr ibut ionssocial organ- ization, psychological anthropology, accul- turation, behavioral evolution, world view, cultural ecology, history of anthropology-it is all the more understandable that his influence has been felt in psychology and history, literature and sociology, psycho-

analysis and biology, as well as in anthro- pology.

As a measure of his wide influence, Hallowell received numerous honors and awards. He was, to mention only some, a Viking Fund Medalist; president of the American Anthropological Association, the American Folklore Society, and the Society for Projective Techniques; chairman of the Division of Psychology and Anthropology of the National Research Council; a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. Upon his retirement, the University of Penn- sylvania conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.

From his early background, one could hardly have predicted that Hallow ell would pursue a life of science and scholarship. Born in Philadelphia o n 28 December 1892, it was assumed by his conservative parents that he would follow a business career. Consistent with this assumption, he not only attended a manual-training high school, but upon gradu- ation he enrolled in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania. Soon, however, ideas of social reform and the social sciences, especially economics and sociology, began t o absorb his interests. Lacking the financial resources to pursue graduate studies, he became a social worker for the Family Society after his graduation in 1914, while taking soci- ology courses in his spare time.

While employed as a social worker, Hallowell took his first course in anthropol- ogy-with Frank Speck-and under the latters influence, he abandoned his sociolog- ical studies and decided to become an anthropologist. With Specks assistance, he received a graduate fellowship to study anthropology a t The University of Penn- sylvania, receiving his Ph.D. in 1924. While studying a t Pennsylvania, he also traveled to Columbia t o participate (together with Mel- ville Herskovits and Ruth Benedict) in Franz Boas weekly seminar. From Boas and Speck, alike, Hallowell acquired a view of anthropology as a holistic discipline, embracing ethnology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics, a view that was later t o be reflected in the range of his field researches and in the variegated pub- lications that resulted from them. From Speck he also acquired his abiding interest in, and indeed (as he himself said) his

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identification with American Indians. In fact, all of his fieldwork took place among American Indians: the St. Francis Abenaki of eastern Canada in the 1920s, the Northern Ojibwa of the Lake Winnipeg region over the 1930s, and the Lac du Flambeau (Wisconsin) Ojibwa in 1946. Except for a three year period at North- western University (1944-47), Hallowell taught continuously a t the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement, in 1962, a t the age of 70, Subsequently, he was a visiting professor a t the Universities of Wash- ington, Wisconsin, and Chicago, a t Temple University, and a t Chatham and Bryn Mawr Colleges.

Hallowell died o n 1 0 October 1974, in Wayne, Pennsylvania. He is survived by his widow and intellectual collaborator, Maude Frame Hallowell.

Hallowell was a rare scholar not only because he made original and enduring con- tributions to a wide array of fields, but because he continued t o pioneer in new fields long after his previous achievements had established him as a major figure. Thus, for example, it was only in his later years that his signal achievements in the history of anthropology and in behavioral evolution were accomplished. Since they appeared subsequent to the appearance of Culture and Experience (Hallowell 1955), and since, like many papers that were brought together in that volume, they are scattered across many and diverse publications, it is all the more fortunate that they are included in a forth- coming second collection of Hallowells work, Contributions to Anthropo logy , edited by Raymond Fogelson (1976). These collec- tions, together with his highly influential distributional study of bear ceremonialism (Hallowell 1926) and his definitive historical and ethnographic study of Ojibwa conjuring (Hallowell 1942), comprise his major pub- lications.

In examining these publications, it is immediately apparent that here a special mind is a t work. Although most scholars can be classified as either foxes o r hedge- hogs-the fox, according to the Greek poet, Archilochus, knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing (Berlin 1957)-Hallowell was one of the few who transcends such dichotomies. While his work deals with a great many things, i t is almost always concerned with one big thing. Hence it is that in much of his work he attempts to integrate seemingly separate domains. He builds bridges between culture and person- ality, he discovers continuities between animal and human societies, he uncovers systematic relationships between kin terms and ecology, to mention only a few. This

same combination of hedgehog and fox is reflected in his style. In one and the same paper, one discerns the erudition of the historical scholar (all those footnotes! as one student put it), as well as the subtlety and lucidity of the theorist.

To assess the importance of Hallowells work in all of the fields to which he contributed is obviously impossible in this brief review; nor is it necessary, since some of his contributions have already been evaluated by others in their introductory essays t o the papers comprising the Fogelson volume. Hence, my remarks will be confined to his contributions t o culture and person- ality, a field of perduring interest for him, and, because of space limitations, I shall concentrate o n what I believe to have been his signal achievement in this field, his delineation of the relationship between the inner world of social actors and the human social order. For what follows, the reader is referred to the relevant chapters in Hallowell (1955) and Fogelson (1976).

Although he himself was importantly influenced by stimulus-response psychology (especially by learning theory), Hallowell showed in a series of brilliant papers on the Ojibwa that action is not so much a function of the objective properties (stimuli) of the environment, whether physical or social, as of their meanings for the actor. Taking as his point of departure the gestaltists concept of the behavioral environment, Hallowell documented in rich detail that the environ- ment t o which Ojibwa actors respond is not the environment, but their environment, i.e., the environment which they perceive. Going beyond the gestaltists, however, he demon- strated in masterful fashion that (a ) Ojibwa (and therefore human) perceptions are mediated not through perceptors alone, but through cognitive orientations that organize and confer meaning on them; and (b) these latter orientations are acquired in large measure from the actors cultural symbol systems. The general conclusion is obvious. Since human cognitive orientations are derived t o a considerable extent from cul- tural symbol systems, and since perceptions are shaped by these orientations, then the human behavioral environment-the environ- ment which they perceive, and therefore the one t o which they respond-is culturally constituted. To have established the existence, and to have explicated the con- cept, of a culturally constituted behavioral environment was, in its time, a remarkable achievement, and a singular contribution t o psychology and anthropology alike. For, t o remark on its anthropological importance alone, in demonstrating how different individuals, each initially encapsulated in the

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privacy of his own inner world, neverthe- less come to share a common behavioral environment , Hallowell delineated the process by which an aggregation of private individuals becomes a group of social actors. In brief, by elaborating the notion of the culturally constituted behavioral environ- ment, Hallowell demonstrated in part how a human social order is possible.

Although the cognitive orientations, per- ceptual sets, and symbolic meanings of social actors are in large part culturally con- stituted, these (together with privately con- stituted cognitions, perceptions, and the like) comprise only one dimension of their inner world. And although this dimension makes a human social order possible, for Hallowell the social order is always prob- lematic precisely because there are dimen- sions of the inner world that are not derived from the cultural symbol systems of the outer world. The latter dimensions- impulse, affect, imagination, fantasy, and the like-comprise a set of powerful stimuli that are potentially disruptive of the social order. Even when they d o not lead to the construction of behavioral environments that differ (as they d o in mental illness) from the culturally constituted environment, they may lead to action that is inconsistent with the normative requirements of the social system. For the received anthropolog- ical wisdom of the time, this problem was scarcely recognized, let alone coped with, for by drawing rigid disciplinary boundaries, it relegated these dimensions of the inner world to psychology. Hallowell, who had a profound knowledge of psychoanalysis, not only recognized the problem, but in attempting to cope with it, he elaborated his seminal concept of the self. This was a central concept in Hallowells thought, as important as, and correlative to, the concept of the behavioral environment.

Calling once again upon his detailed knowledge of the Ojibwa, Hallowell demon- strated that the self, no less than the behavioral environment, is also culturally constituted. Acquired by means of a set of basic orientations provided by cultural symbol systems, this unique cognitive struc- ture lies a t the intersection of the inner and outer worlds and mediates between them. As mediator, the self protects the social order from the potentially disruptive dimensions of the inner world in two ways. (a) To act in accordance with the normative requirements of the social order, social actors must be able in the first instance to distinguish stimuli of the inner from those of the outer world. In an elegant psychological analysis, Hallowell demonstrated that it is through

the development of self-awareness that they are able to discern this distinction, and, having discerned it, to adapt their percep- tions t o culturally constituted cognitions, and t o monitor their behavior by reference to cultural norms. (b) But monitoring procedures appraise, they dont control behavior. Hence, when the demands of inner urges become more powerful than those of outer norms, it is the consequent threat to the actors self-conceptions that assures the persistence of norm-governed behavior.

In sum, many years before the current emic or phenomenological approaches become fashionable, Hallowell insisted that the objective constructs of culture and of personality are in themselves inadequate to explain the human social order. An adequate explanation requires, as he saw it, the notion of a phenomenologically conceived psycho- logical field consisting of culturally con- stituted selves in interaction with a cultural- ly constituted behavioral environment.

Upon Hallowells retirement, a group of former students, together with some col- leagues, presented him with a festschrift volume, Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology (Spiro 1965), and following his death, a group of younger students offered two symposia, entitled The Legacy of A. Irving Hallowell, in his memory a t the 74th Annual Meeting of the American An- thropological Association in 1975. Neither of these commemorations was an accident. Hallowell was one of those few teachers who evoked both intellectual respect and admira- tion, and personal regard and affection. Although, as a teacher, he never persuaded his students to follow his intellectual interests (as the wide range of topics covered in the festschrift and the memorial symposia testify), his vast erudition, exacting intel- lectual standards, disdain for disciplinary boundaries, and constantly searching mind served them as a model to be emulated, if not achieved. More important, in his teaching and writing, Hallowell focused his vision o n one big thing-the nature of man. Hence, although much of his teaching was concerned with the ethnography of Amer- ican Indians, his approach t o the uniquely Indian was based on and informed by a conception of the generically human; and the latter conception projected a vision of what anthropology could be, a vision that most of his students found exciting and captivating.

He will be missed.

MELFORD E. SPIRO University o f California, San Diego

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REFERENCES CITED

Berlin, I. 1957 The Hedgehog and the Fox. New

York: New University Library. Fogelson, Raymond D., ed.

1976 Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bear Ceremonialism in the North- ern Hemisphere. American Anthro- pologist 28: 1-1 75.

1 9 4 2 T h e Role of Conjuring in Saulteaux Society. Philadelphia: Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Press.

Hallowell, A. Irving 1926

1955 Culture and Experience. Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1965 Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Free Press.

Spiro, Melford E., ed.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A fairly complete bibliography of Hal- lowells writings through 1954 can be found in Hallowell (1955:430-434). It is supple- mented and brought up to date by Fogelson in Supplementary Bibliography of A. Irving Hallowell (in Fogelson 1976). A bibliog- raphy of Hallowells writings through 1964 is also provided in Spiro (1965:417-425).