Antropologicheskij forum, 2020, no. 47

“JUST A YOUNG TOURIST IN OUR COUNTRY”: ARCHIE PHINNEY, A NEZ PERCE LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

Igor V. Kuznetsov

Indiana University, Bloomington
107 S Indiana Av., Bloomington, IN, USA
ikuznet()iu.edu

Abstract: Born in Culdesac, ID, Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé, was the first Native American to receive an undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. He collaborated with prominent Smithsonian anthropologists J. N. B. Hewitt and T. Michelson as well as the great Franz Boas; visited Leningrad after being invited by Vladimir Bogoras in the context of an academic exchange program; defended his candidate thesis at the Institute of Anthropology, Archeology and Ethnography (MAE); and returned to serve as an Indian agent in different reservations in the USA. The USSR scholarship of Phinney fell on a difficult yet crucial period in the history of Soviet ethnography, when it was not yet completely closed and remained receptive to the influences of Boas’ School. Through Phinney and other American researchers like him, who visited the Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet practice of “indigenization” had a reverse effect on J. Collier’s liberal Indian New Deal. Phinney collaborated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when the latter was on the Indian Commissioner’s post. Today, Phinney’s figure again attracts interest after some oblivion. The department of anthropology at the University of Idaho, Moscow, occupies a building named in his honor. The scope of the paper is based on the Boas Paper collection — his correspondence with Phinney, Bogoras, Averkieva, Barton and others, stored at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The analyzed materials, representing the general atmosphere in the 1930s Soviet academic community, are still little-known to the Russian-speaking reader.

Keywords: Archie Phinney, linguistic anthropology, history of science, Franz Boas, Vladimir Bogoras, Soviet-American contacts, Julia Averkieva, Nez Percé, indigenous minority peoples, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Acknowledgements: This research is supported by The Russian Science Foundation (Project no. 20-18-00159); the financing organization is The Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

To cite: Kuznetsov I., ‘“Prosto molodoy turist v nashey strane”: lingvist i antropolog nez-pers Archi Finni’ [“Just а Young Tourist in Our Country”: Archie Phinney, a Nez Percé Linguistic Anthropologist], Antropologicheskij forum, 2020, no. 47, pp. 53–83.

doi: 10.31250/1815-8870-2020-16-47-53-83

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/047/kuznetsov.pdf