Editor's Note
“Anthropologists were keeping a watchful eye on the movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.”—Danielle Stubbe
We’re proud to say that our annual meeting is a home for dynamic, emerging voices in the field. So we’re especially glad to partner with Modern Intellectual History in presenting the first annual MIH/S-USIH Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize to Danielle Stubbe, a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University, for her submission, “Patrons and Politics of the Culture Concept: Postwar Disciplinary Myth-Making in the History of Anthropology.” Let’s hear more about her scholarship.
What are you working on now?
This is my final year of dissertation work, which I’ll spend writing as a fellow at the Robert Penn
Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt. The project (tentative title: “Patterns and Patrons
of Culture: Midcentury Cultural Anthropological Subjects, Objects, and Knowledge in Motion,
1940–1980”) broadly follows how disciplinary subjects, researchers, historians, and museum and
archive officials grappled with the anthropological concepts of culture that had manifested in political
and cultural institutions in the postwar United States. It begins with my piece for S-USIH: the crisis
that anthropologists and historians of anthropology faced in the mid-late 1960s when they began to
reckon with their institutional credibility as a science of man, their historical roles in domestic and
international colonial projects, and growing hostility toward them from former research subjects.
Most of my archival research has sought to reconcile this turn with its contemporary story of
American Indian cultural politics and the late-century demands for object repatriation.
Within our field of intellectual history, what topics or approaches are you excited about?
Like many others who’ve responded for this series, I’m informed by the present in thinking about
what else historians will have to say about how changes to late-twentieth-century political economy
and capital have affected intellectual and cultural life. There’s a lot left to be explored beyond the
history of technology itself about how this has shaped the development of and people’s engagement
with media and the internet. And selfishly, this also relates to my interest in evolving concepts,
definitions, and groups of culture. How have intellectual networks changed? Who now shares
cultural experiences and signifiers? How should we adapt our studies of reception?
This year, our annual meeting theme is “Revolution and Reform.” Can you reflect on how
those ideas connect to your scholarship?
The history of anthropological culture and the story of its proprietors certainly intersect with what
we might call demands for a cultural-economic revolution through representation and redistribution
during the 1960s and a subsequent series of hard-won reforms in institutions of culture afterward.
One of the oddest materials that I’ve found in an anthropology archive is a sound reel of speeches
delivered by Indigenous people who had travelled to Washington, D.C. as part of the Poor People’s
Campaign in 1968 to confront the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for better living conditions. The
speeches themselves aren’t surprising, of course. It’s odd because I found the reel stashed inside an
unrelated record box for the short-lived Center for the Study of Man at the Smithsonian Institution,
which was staffed by an inter-institutional cohort of museum people and academics that generally
resisted those cultural demands when they had something to say about any reforms—like object
repatriation or new ethical standards in research—within museums, archives, and academic libraries.
Anthropologists were keeping a watchful eye on the movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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