An Interview with Anthony F. C. Wallace

Abstract

Like Jan Vansina, the subject of the interview published in the spring 1995 issue of the journal, Anthony F. C. Wallace will need little introduction for readers of Ethnohistory. His list of publications reads like a primer for practitioners of the ethnohistorical craft. He is perhaps best known for his pathbreaking use of documentary evidence to reconstruct and explain the psychosocial dynamics of dreaming; the roles of religious, social, and economic innovators; and the structure and function of revitalization movements. A forceful advocate of fine-grained, small-scale intensive analyses, he continually called on anthropologists to direct attention to relationships between individuals and their cultures at a time when most of his colleagues confined themselves to larger-scale studies of cultural collectivities. Wallace's recognition of the importance of the interplay between individuals and society is already evident in his first published book, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, an ethnohistorical account of the life and times of a complex and controversial Indian leader. Initially published in i949, and long recognized as a classic in Delaware ethnohistory, it was reprinted in i99i. Enlarging on this perspective during the next two decades, Wallace produced influential articles analyzing the structure and function of revitalization movements and assessing the psychosocial dynamics of dreaming. During this time he also wrote the major theoretical works Culture and Personality (i96i; rev. ed. I970) and Religion: An Anthropological View (i966). He then applied the theoretical perspectives laid out in these works in a series of seminal ethnohistorical case studies, most notably The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (I970), Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revo-