Correcting the Record: Essays on the History of American Anthropology

The critique of twentieth-century American anthropology often portrays anthropologists of the past as servants of colonialism who ＂extracted＂ information from indigenous peoples and published works causing them harm. Herbert S. Lewis recovers the reality of the first century of American anthropology as a vital scholarly discipline that rejected established ideas of race, insisted on the value of very different ways of life, and delivered irreplaceable ethnographic studies. This volume presents powerful refutations of the accumulated damaging myths about anthropology’s history.

Herbert S. Lewis is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Some of his publications are Jimma Abba Jifar: An Oromo Monarchy (orig. 1965; Red Sea Press, 2001), After the Eagles Landed: The Yemenites of Israel (Taylor & Francis, 1989), Oneida Lives: Long-Lost Voices of Wisconsin Oneidas (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and In Defense of Anthropology: An Investigation of the Critique of Anthropology (Taylor & Francis, 2014).