Scenes from the High Desert: The Life and Theory of Julian Steward

Abstract

Virginia Kerns, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003, xiv + 414 pages.Reviewer: Marc Pinkoski University of VictoriaA very strong argument could be made that Julian Steward was one of the most influential anthropologists of the 20th century. Virginia Kern's recent biography, Scenes from the High Desert: The Life and Theory of Julian Steward, goes a tremendous distance to demonstrate this assertion. In a thoroughly researched, accessibly written, and lyrically enjoyable text, Kerns has well documented the life, both academic and personal, of Julian Steward.Her study follows the life of Steward, as a boy from the east coast of the United States to the desert of California; from Berkeley to Utah to Washington, D.C.; and then on to New York, to Columbia University, and finally to the midwest (with stops along the way). Centring on one of Steward's key concepts, the patrilineal band, Kerns prepares a descriptive analysis of Steward's life and by association the seminal people in the formation of American materialist anthropology. Her analysis serves to explore the workings of this particularly anthropological concept, as it applies to the life history of its originator. Her success is that she creates an analysis that not only documents the life of someone worthy of a biography, but it also documents much of the focus, structure, and psychological workings in American anthropology, and particularly, the incredible prejudice experienced by women, within the academy mid-last century. Through the focus on Steward's life and career, Kerns has produced an effective biography that manages to situate the subject within his historic-academic context. The analysis is more than a simple biography; it is, in fact, an ethnohistory of American anthropology through an examination Steward's life.Steward's materialist arguments are often remembered or imagined as the introduction of Marxist analyses to anthropology. This effect, as Kerns' recognizes, places Steward in a key role in the history of American anthropology. She describes his approach as having ...a propensity for the concrete and that [h]e used an impressive array of ethnographic and archaeological evidence to support a range of creative, generalizing conclusions about how, in his own words, 'similar subsistence activities had produced similar social structures' (p. 3). This approach led him to develop the sub-field of cultural ecology, and to train several key materialist anthropologists in the process. For these reasons, it is fascinating to understand the details of Steward's life, and to come to a fuller appreciation of the lives that Steward was influenced by and in turn influenced.Beginning with Steward's formative years, Kerns argues that he was heavily influenced by problems inherent in the daily life of arid environments and the labour that it takes to organize irrigation work to solve them. Following this focus was Steward's initial academic and then professional material on the American Great Basin. Kerns demonstrates that the focus on the organization of subsistence labour and its relationship to the physical environment remained a central component in Steward's oeuvre on development and change. Detailing fully Steward's early ethnographic and archaeological work and demonstrating the full mix of personal responsibilities and professional desires for the ambitious young scholar, Kerns relates the stories of his development from both his first and second wives. These perspectives from both women well compliment the public and professional history of Steward's academic career. A particular example of this dynamic was his move from the University of Utah. This was due to the break-up of his first marriage and overlapped with his second marriage. …