Fatal Errors: Ruth Landes and the Creation of the "Atomistic Ojibwa"

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines several aspects of Ruth Landes' depiction of the Boundary Waters Ojibwa. Based on field work in the 1930s, the Ojibwa were characterized ahistorically by Landes as atomistic individuals living in small bands having no indigenous political organization, driven by need to disperse widely in a meagre country. Research into Landes' published and unpublished materials, in conjunction with ethnohistorical research and Elder testimony, reveal major problems with Landes' field work and her analysis of the Ojibwa. Although Landes' work represents many of the biases and preconceptions of colonial anthropology, regrettably, she compromised her ethnographic portrayal by fabrications, by serious errors of fact and omission and by questionable methodology. These weaknesses limit Landes' work as a reliable source on the Ojibwa.Ruth Landes' work on the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwa) has long been considered an example of classic ethnography. Her interpretations arose from field work among Rainy River Ojibwa on Manitou Rapids Reserve, near the town of Emo in northwestern Ontario. In several publications during the 1930s, the Ojibwa were characterized as atomistic individuals living in small, mutually hostile bands having no indigenous political organization, driven by need to disperse in a poor country. Landes further portrayed Ojibwa women as culturally dispossessed and underprivileged. Her ethnographies from Manitou Rapids became a focus of the theory of particularity or atomism among the Ojibwa in the early 1950s and 1960s. Landes' interpretations of extreme individualism also engaged ethnohistorians, who sought to determine the origin of such late features of Ojibwa culture, in order to reconcile them with historical evidence for earlier collective institutions.Historical research and Elder testimony from Rainy River First Nations(f.2) demonstrate how Landes compromised her interpretation by a number of fatal errors, including mistakes of fact, omissions and use of questionable ethnographic methods. These errors severely limit Landes' work as a reliable source on Ojibwa culture and society on Rainy River and in the Boundary Waters.Ruth Landes and the Origin of AtomismRuth Landes died in 1991. She was a student of Franz Boas, a contemporary of Margaret Mead and a student and friend to Ruth Benedict. Landes' ethnographies of Ojibwa materials have been praised for systematically studying the culture from a woman's point of view (Hallowell, 1938; Cole, 1995a, 1995b). Her Ojibwa work was a principal reason for Landes' success as an anthropologist; she ended her career as Professor Emerita at McMaster University. Although it has been suggested that the body of Landes' work has been ignored and marginalized (Cole, 1995b: 168, 177), there is little evidence that Landes' Ojibwa work was ignored.Landes studied under Boas at Columbia University at a time when his analysis had moved inward into the relationship between the individual psyche and culture. Landes' background included a master's degree in social work and a strong interest in psychology and Afro-American Jews. Boasian paradigm which examined the individual under the stress of culture (Boas, 1938: 269) was taken up by another of Landes' teachers, Ruth Benedict. Her focus on culture as stress, or entrapment, magnified psychological components by focussing on neuroses, psychoses and general abnormality. Abnormality among the Ojibwa proved an important component to Landes' development of atomism and her understanding of gender, particularly male roles (1938: 24).(f.3)The essentials of Landes' portrayal were published in 1937 as The Ojibwa of Canada (1966) in a comparative study edited by Margaret Mead, Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples. Ojibwa Sociology was released in the same year, followed thereafter in 1938 by Ojibwa Woman (1971). Collateral articles were published in the journals Character and Personality (1937) and Abnormal and Social Psychology (1938). …