Bancroftiana, Number 121 Fall 2002: From the Regional Oral History Office Berkeley Anthropologists Have Their Say

From the Regional Oral History Office
Berkeley Anthropologists Have Their Say

Anthropologist Elizabeth Colson doesn't often think of the past. If asked, however, she easily recalls the year 1946, when she first traveled to Africa. Taking field supplies from Johannesburg, she and two other researchers journeyed for three days to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). There she met a fellow anthropologist, J. Desmond Clark. "Desmond somehow knew we were coming, and he met our train," she says.

Colson, an American from Minnesota, and Clark, a Londoner, crossed paths that year when she became senior research officer and then director of the Rhodes- Livingstone Institute. He was curator of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum.

"With Desmond, of course, prehistory was everything," Colson says, "although as curator of the museum he had to be interested in contemporary things, too."

Desmond Clark's death in February 2002 ended this friendship of more than half a century. But the stories survive. Clark, Colson, and three other anthropologists recently documented their experiences through oral histories. Available as manuscripts and on the Web, the interviews complement Bancroft's other holdings in anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics.

As told in the oral histories, Colson and Clark each spent substantial time in Africa, directing institutions and lighting up the developing field of anthropology with their work. While he pursued prehistory, she explored social-cultural issues among the Plateau and Gwembe Tonga. Both joined the Berkeley faculty in the 1960s.

Two other interviewees, George Foster and the late Mary LeCron Foster, met at Northwestern University and did their graduate work at Berkeley, where he also joined the faculty. He was a founder of medical anthropology and a pioneer of long-term field research in social anthropology. She, a linguistic anthropologist, explored the relationship of gestures and body language to semantic significance.

George Foster and Burton Benedict, 1996

The Fosters chose Mexico as their principal research area. On a trip there in 1941, they took only an umbrella tent, dried food, blankets, and folding cots to live among the Popoluca Indians. George Foster recalls that a shaman, summoned to treat a young man's epileptic episode, later declined to discuss medical methods. "He was not a good informant," Foster says in his oral history. "In primitive societies medical knowledge is something people hang onto. They don't reveal it to others."

Suzanne Riess, who conducted all the oral histories except Clark's, found the material captivating. "Anthropologists are insightful people, really ideal subjects for interviews," she says. "George Foster saw the similarity between oral history and ethnology."

Riess most recently interviewed another social anthropologist, Burton Benedict, whose early fieldwork was in Mauritius and Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1968, serving as chair of anthropology and the first dean of social sciences in the College of Letters and Science. He also directed the anthropology museum for six years, where he mounted a major exhibition on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.

Benedict's inspired leadership of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology is just one of many successes celebrated by the Department of Anthropology during its 2001 centennial. Today, with the second century of anthropology at Berkeley underway, the oral histories stand as documentation of the past, but also as a bridge to current issues.

Elizabeth Colson and Mary LeCron Foster, 1995

Elizabeth Colson's research on social change caused by forced migration supplies a base for what has become a major concern with uprooting and resettlement. The longitudinal studies begun by George Foster in Mexico in 1945 and by Colson in Zambia in 1956 are reaching a new generation of long-range anthropologists. Mary LeCron Foster's commitment to peace and conflict studies led the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences to host a peace and conflict group.

In the world of paleoarchaeology, the skull and jaw fragments newly unearthed in the Djurab Desert of Chad suggest human ancestors lived nearly seven million years ago, far earlier than previously thought. Though Colson rarely recalls the past, she does think of her longtime friend Desmond Clark at such moments of prehistoric discovery. "Desmond would have been fascinated with all that," she says. "He would have wanted to see the fragments with his own eyes."

—Laura McCreery