From the Geil Archive (4)—Seeking Anthropology

Click here for the "From the Geil Archive" Resource Center
To learn more about Geil, click here for the Accidental Ethnographer Resource Center
A year ago on Round and Square (19 August 2012)—Rural Religion in China-15

Two years ago on Round and Square (19 August 2011)—Displays of Authenticity: Fresh Coffee

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Please Note: All photographs marked "DHS" are with permission of the Doylestown Historical Society. All marked "RL" are my own pictures. None of these may not be reused without permission (e-mail me about mine, and I will put you in touch with DHS if you need to contact them). Photographs marked "RF" are "royalty free."

[a] Anthropologist? DHS

Click here for other posts in the Round and Square series "From the Geil Archive":

               Introduction                          1-Southern Mountain Museum             2-Sacred Mountain Map           

               3-Hat and Cattle                   4-Seeking Anthropology                       5-Curly Fives
               6-How to Write the Book      7-Mortarboard Man                               8-Orator

William Edgar Geil certainly knew he was on to something, but it is not at all clear that he knew what that "something" was. As my own book research on Geil develops, I have begun to center on two very prominent themes, both of which have significant academic ramifications. First, Geil is a fascinating window onto a post-Civil War (and through World War I) United States that had grown to see itself very much as a part of the world. This, of course, had its ups and downs (ask Woodrow Wilson about the U.S. Senate and the League of Nations). Still, Americans flocked to other countries, and began an obsessive documentation of what they saw.

William Edgar Geil was a small part of this.

[b] Papa Franz RF

I need to emphasize the "small" here, because it is all-too-easy to make a recently rediscovered Geil into a towering hero of early twentieth century "discovery." He was not an innovator...except when he was (and that is why he is so fascinating).

Let me give you an image that has lasted for me as an example of the "smallness" theme. Not many weeks ago, while engaged in a research project funded generously by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, I was able to spend several weeks at the University of Chicago library, focusing on its collection of gazetteers from late-imperial China. In the course of that work, I stumbled onto the DS700 section of the library holdings when I tried to find a few references in Geil's published books. And there I stood—facing an eight foot wall of books about China, all published by Americans between 1900 and 1920. From that mammoth cavern I plucked Geil's Great Wall book. 

If I needed any reminder that Geil was not alone, this was it. No one should ever treat him as "the" explorer who wrote for Americans.

[c] Maggie RF

And yet...and yet...he was fascinating and a true window onto the period in ways that almost no one can match. I have worked hard here to dissuade anyone of the idea that he was the master key to it all. Having accomplished that (I hope—remember the wall of books), I can say that we was doing things that almost no one else thought to do.

He traveled the entire length of the Great Wall; he visited China's ancient capitals, he sailed the entire length of the Yangzi River, and he went to all five sacred mountains. He wrote books about each, and took hundreds of pictures. He also went to the South Pacific and crossed central Africa. He was doing something that looked a lot like anthropology.

 And yet...and yet...it just isn't, and there are precious few references to anything like anthropology in any of his books. I have a feeling that Geil sensed that anthropology was "on the horizon," but he just didn't quite see it—or like it very much. How would he have known that a young Margaret Mead was attending high school just down the road from him as he worked on his sacred mountains plan? Who knew?

The only piece of information we have that Geil ever thought about anthropology at all was this (see below). For those of you who don't spend your lives thinking about anthropology, Franz Boas (Columbia University) is known to most of us as "the father of American anthropology." 

Notice, too, that the name is crossed out. It is intriguing, and enough for me to call Geil "The Accidental Ethnographer." What was he thinking?

Click here for other posts in the Round and Square series "From the Geil Archive":

               Introduction                          1-Southern Mountain Museum             2-Sacred Mountain Map           

               3-Hat and Cattle                   4-Seeking Anthropology                       5-Curly Fives
               6-How to Write the Book      7-Mortarboard Man                               8-Orator

[d] Boasian Longings DHS