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Scenes from the High Desert: JULIAN STEWARD'S LIFE AND THEORY

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Julian Steward was a highly influential anthropologist who is often credited with founding the field of cultural ecology. Aside from his theoretical contributions, Steward also helped reorganize the AAA in the 1940s and influenced a number of his students who would go on to play important roles in post World War II anthropology. Despite the fact Steward's work is often sited, Kern's detailed and meticulous biography reveals a myriad of facts about his life I was unaware of. In short, her book is a model of anthropological biography.
Kern's work demonstrates that all too often the history of anthropology is not written by anthropologists but by historians such as George Stocking. Thus her work underscores the fact an adequate anthropological history of anthropology has yet to be written. I hope her biography will inspire other theoreticians and anthropologists to undertake similar studies for biography is woefully under represented in the discipline (this is the case despite the fact a number of biographies are being published by the University of Nebraska Press--see Sally Coles work on Ruth Landes, William Peace on Leslie White and Jerry Gershenhorn on Melville Herskovits).