Leslie White's Hopi Ethnography: Of Practice and in Theory

Abstract

Leslie White is known as one of the most important cultural theoreticians of the mid-twentieth century. However, his ethnography, on the Keresan pueblos, is generally treated as irrelevant to his general evolutionary theory and vice versa. This paper argues that White's little-known work among the Hopi, where he led the 1932 Laboratory of Anthropology Field Training Course in Ethnology, reflects a more active conjunction of theory with ethnography. White's analytical perspectives contain valuable insights for current problems in Hopi ethnology. His arguments, in some brief published paragraphs, in correspondence, and in his field records, provide a flexible, processual model of Hopi social structure in accord with his cultural evolutionism. In some important respects, White's approach is more explanatorily adequate to the cultural reality than the conventional account established by two of his students in the field school, Fred Eggan and Mischa Titiev. White's contribution to Hopi ethnology is of neglected importance and reveals a substantive dialog between his ethnography and his evolutionist theory.