An Interview with Andrew Hunter Whiteford

Abstract

IntroductionAndrew Hunter Whiteford, Bud to his family and friends, has enjoyed a long, diverse and distinguished career in anthropology, from archaeology in the Southwest and in the Southeast of the United States, to the anthropology of industrial relations, to innovative urban research in Latin America, to museum collecting and artifact stewardship. Born in 1913 in Winnipeg, he was an anthropology major at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, graduating in 1937. As a sophomore he was awarded the Logan Prize which financed his archaeological fieldwork on a project in Reserve, New Mexico. He pursued his MA at the University of Chicago, leaving for a job at the University of Tennessee archaeological laboratory where he worked on a Tennessee Valley Authority-Works Projects Administration archaeological project for four years. Returning to the University of Chicago, he took his PhD in 1951 working under W. Lloyd Warner (on Chicago anthropology, see Stocking, 1979). His dissertation (Whiteford, 1951) was based on fieldwork on union-management co-operation, conducted as part of a research team which included such Chicago notables as Warner, Everett C. Hughes, William Foote Whyte, Allison Davis and Burleigh Gardner. He then took a full-time position in the Logan Museum and Department of Anthropology at Beloit, where he stayed until retirement in 1976, and where he served as departmental chair for 20 years.Fieldwork in 1949, 1950, 1951-52, 1962, 1967, 1970, and 1974 in Poyapan, Colombia, and in 1957, 1958, and 1975-76 in Queretero, Mexico, resulted in perhaps his best-known works, Two Cities of Latin America (Whiteford, 1991 [1960]) and An Andean City at Mid-Century (Whiteford, 1977). In these books, he developed a pioneering focus on urban Latin America, and on social class, employing a perspective that considered class in a multidimensional way, foreshadowing later work that attempted to transcend the objective-subjective distinction in conceptualizing social class, class ideology and class status. As well, he was one of the first to examine elites, not just the poor. It was not until years later that it became fashionable to study up in order to understand power relations. The recipient of grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, among others, he conducted research on social change in Malaga, Spain, in 1961-62.In his praxis, Whiteford addressed critical issues in anthropology that have only recently come to the fore with the discipline. He was a committed teacher who thought undergraduates should do research (Whiteford, 1959). He displayed a pioneering commitment to training undergraduate cultural anthropology students, taking many of them on fieldwork trips to Latin America. One reason he took students on field programs was not just to expose them to Latin America, but to teach them to ask questions, to critically examine data and explanation and wrestle with interpretation. A good number of these students went on to get advanced degrees, although not always in anthropology.In many ways Whiteford forged a new paradigm of collaboration with Latin American colleagues. He trained Latin American students, he worked with Latin American researchers, and published his work in Spanish in Latin America. All of this was done years before North American researchers were criticized by colleagues in Latin America for taking their data home and excluding their Latin American counterparts in the process. He was one of the first anthropologists to made a commitment to training Latin American anthropologists. He had Latin American students in his field programs decades before anthropologists began to discuss training students in the country where they were doing research. Two Cities of Latin America was one of the first anthropology publications translated into Spanish and published in Latin America (Whiteford, 1963). Today, almost 40 years later, the importance of publishing where one does research and working with Latin American colleagues is acknowledged. …