Glimpses into My Own Black Box

George W. Stocking, Jr., has spent a professional lifetime exploring the history of anthropology, and his findings have shaped anthropologistsrs" understanding of their field for two generations. Through his meticulous research, Stocking has shown how such forces as politics, race, institutional affiliations, and personal relationships have influenced the discipline from its beginnings. In this autobiography, he turns his attention to a subject closer to home but no less challenging. Looking into his own "black box," he dissects his upbringing, his politics, even his motivations in writing about himself. The result is a book systematically, at times brutally, self-questioning. An interesting question, Stocking says, is one that arouses just the right amount of anxiety. But that very anxiety may be the ultimate source of Stockingrs"s remarkable intellectual energy and output. In the first two sections of the book, he traces the intersecting vectors of his professional and personal lives. The book concludes with a coda, "Octogenarian Afterthoughts," that offers glimpses of his life after retirement, when advancing age, cancer, and depression changed the tenor of his reflections about both his life and his work. This book is the twelfth and final volume of the influential History of Anthropology series.

George W. Stocking, Jr., is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Victorian Anthropology; After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951; Delimiting Anthropology, and The Ethnographer's Magic. He founded the History of Anthropology series published by the University of Wisconsin Press and edited its first eight volumes.

List of Illustrations	p. xi
Prologue
My Life under Surveillance	p. 3
Documenting Surveillance	p. 9
Autobiographical Recollections
From the Lincoln School to Harvard College	p. 23
Pascal's Wager and Communist Politics at Harvard	p. 28
Divergent Family Histories within a WASP Tradition	p. 33
Imagining a Future with Wilhelmina Davis	p. 58
Life in the Working Class during the McCarthy Era	p. 63
American Civilization and Positivist Historiography at the University of Pennsylvania	p. 68
Political Disillusion and Historiographical Assumption	p. 74
Social History and Historiography at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement Years	p. 76
The Berkeley Experience: Divorce, Family Breakup, and Consciousness Raising	p. 82
Tenure without a Book: Essays toward a New History of Anthropology	p. 87
Multicultural Travels with Carol Bowman: From Srpski Itebej to King's High Table across Boundaries in Time and Class	p. 94
From Huey Newton's Poster to the Harvard Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report: Settling in to a Cautious and Ambivalent Historicism	p. 103
Blocked Projects, False Starts, and Miscast Roles: The Travails of an Interdisciplinary Hybrid	p. 105
Disciplinary Marginality as a Condition of Productive Scholarship	p. 113
From Academic Striver to Disciplinary Doyen	p. 119
Conversations across a Widening Generation Gap	p. 126
Biography in an Autobiographical Context	p. 132
Historiographical Reflections
Inside an Historian's Study: The "Micro-technology" of a "Bottom-up" Historicism	p. 143
Intellectual Topographies, Concentric Models, Enduring Biases: Some Limitations of a Professed Historicism	p. 149
Interesting Questions and Blocked Researches: Notes on Anxiety and Method in My Historiography of Anthropology	p. 156
Revelatory Moments Unexplored: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and the Amplification of Anxiety in Present History	p. 160
From the Big Picture to the Biographical Vignette: The Ulterior Historiographical Motives of an Aging Old Historicist	p. 163
The Problematic Character of Influence: The "Gatekeeper" and a "New" History of Anthropology	p. 166
Doing "Good Work": Thoughts on the Craft of One Historian	p. 173
Octogenarian Afterthoughts: "Fragments Shored against My Ruins"
Further Steps down a Pyramid of Deterioration	p. 179
Conjuring a Readership: Yet Another Try at Influence	p. 184
Reconceptualizing Historicism: "Handling the Rich Complexities of the Lives of Others"	p. 187
Office in a Storeroom: Trashing the Icons of a Scholarly Life	p. 190
Becoming an Octogenarian and Accentuating the Positive	p. 192
The Audacity of Hope and the Politics of Mr. In-between Notes from the Edge of the Abyss: The Serenity Prayer and Pascal's Wager	p. 202
Epilogue
Penelope's Shroud, Zeno's Paradox, and the Closure of the Black Box	p. 205
Striving for Perfection and Accepting the Terminal Realities of Life: Final Notes on the Making and Completion of This Book	p. 210
Acknowledgments	p. 217
References Cited	p. 219
Index	p. 225
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Glimpses into My Own Black Box

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