Customer Reviews

W. H. R. Rivers: Pioneer Anthropologist, Psychiatrist of the Ghost Road

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This is a curious book about the fascinating WHR Rivers. The polymathic Rivers was a pioneering neuroscientist, psychologist, and anthropologist who made substantial contributions to all these fields in the peri-WWI period. Interest in Rivers increased in recent years because he appears as a major and particularly sympathetic character in Pat Barker's outstanding trilogy of novels on WWI. Slobodin's book, which is the only effort at a biography of Rivers, deals mainly with his work as a pioneering ethnologist. The structure of the book is odd. The book opens with a biographical sketch of Rivers' life, then proceeds to series of discussions of Rivers' anthropological work, and finishes with a selection of Rivers' writings on anthropology. Coverage of Rivers' work in Neurology, Neuroscience, and his work as a military psychiatrist during WWI is relatively cursory. Nor does Slobodin offer much in the way of historical context against which to judge Rivers' contributions. The last deficiency is particularly unfortunate as Rivers appears to have been situated within a particularly dense and diverse intellectual network. Rivers, for example, must be the only anthropologist to have worked with the great pioneering psychiatrist Emil Kraeplin.

Rivers was a somewhat ascetic and rather private man. He never married and there is little available documentation - letters, diaries, etc. - about this personal life. Slobodin appears to have decided that there was insufficient information about Rivers life to produce a substantial biography. Slobodin, himself an anthropologist, elected to concentrate on one aspect of Rivers career. This is probably a mistake. Rivers published a great deal of work in his chosen fields and he appears to have been one of those intellectuals who really lived for ideas. Based on the personal information available and Rivers extensive but varied writings, a real intellectual biography is certainly feasible and would make a very interesting book.

I recently check this out at a library and read it because I read a book called "Egypt and the Origin of Civilization" which is partially about Rivers. Slobodin's book does not cover enough of Rivers work in anthropology or ethnological writing. I would suggest others consider both books to get a more complete picture of what Rivers was capable of overall.