The Handbook of South American Indians

Abstract

The factual portion of the Handbook of South American Indians has now been completed. It consists of four volumes each containing more than six hundred pages. A fifth one dealing with the geographical background, demography, physical anthropology, languages, and the comparative and distributional aspects of aboriginal South American Indian cultures is finished and only awaits printing. But since the final volume may not appear for a number of years, it seems only proper and just to attempt an assessment of this monumental work now. There is assuredly no need to indicate the nature of the problems confronting any editor attempting so vast a task. Dr. Steward has stated them clearly in the introduction to the first volume. Added to the usual difficulties were those imposed by the war. That in spite of all these obstacles the work was brought to completion in four years is a measure of the enthusiasm and the organizational ability that must have gone into its editing. For this we cannot thank Dr. Steward sufficiently. The original plan of the Handbook was to summarize the known facts of aboriginal South American ethnology. To this plan, in spite of all the temptations that assail the contemporary American anthropologist to seek for psychological characterizations and for broad and vague sociological generalizations, the editor has remained commendably loyal. Historians should be grateful to him. Only an anthropologist like the present reviewer can know how difficult this must have been. As in most handbooks and encyclopedias published in the United States, all the authors of the various articles agreed to follow an arbitrary outline which arranged their materials in a standardized sequence. This sequence, I feel, it is important to comment upon in some detail. An introduction and a geographical sketch (where possible) precede each tribal account. This is then followed by the enumeration of the