"This book greatly expands the literary canons of the early 20th century by extensively excavating previously unpublished archival and unexamined published material. Steeping the text in sophisticated theory and detailed history, Reichel demonstrates how these anthropologists' science challenged social Darwinian theories of evolution."—L. D. Baker, Choice
"So many of our visions of ourselves, and our images of what constitutes culture, alight on the written. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives interrupts this narrative with a thoughtful intervention."—James Dowthwaite, American Literary History
"Reichel has made a signal contribution both to the history of anthropology and to anthropology today."—Richard Handler, Anthropological Quarterly
“The only scholarly work with access to the complete archive, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives offers the first sustained literary study of the published and unpublished poetry written by three of the iconic figures of twentieth-century cultural anthropology. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s nuanced readings of individual poems and her persuasive explanation of their transdisciplinary relevance are certain to promote further scholarly engagement with the remarkably variegated array of creative projects that these anthropologists produced.”—Donald E. Pease, author of The New American Exceptionalism
“Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives is the definitive study of the often-noted but rarely examined poetry of three important and complexly interrelated Boasian anthropologists. In this innovative analysis, A. Elisabeth Reichel focuses on the broader perspectives of inter-media relations and anthropological notions of Primitivism.”—Ira Jacknis, research anthropologist at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley
“Harnessing intermediality and sound studies theories, A. Elisabeth Reichel explores Sapir’s, Mead’s, and Benedict’s poetry alongside their multi-media anthropological research. This timely interdisciplinary American studies monograph astutely elucidates highly problematic practices and politics of sound production and listening when imagining ‘Others.’”—Nassim W. Balestrini, professor of American studies and intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria
“The poet-anthropologist cuts a dashing figure in the pages of this book. . . . A. Elisabeth Reichel’s close readings through a critical lens of the published and unpublished poems and correspondence of the Benedict-Sapir-Mead trio bring out the underlying currents connecting their poetry to their anthropology, and vice versa. Given the recent vogue for ‘multimodal anthropologies,’ Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives represents a groundbreaking contribution to the ‘archaeology’ of the current conjuncture by exploring the first, tentative forays of these three illustrious figures across cultures via multiple media and genres.”—David Howes, professor of anthropology and co-director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal
“A groundbreaking transdisciplinary work. Uncovering and collecting an invaluable archive, A. Elisabeth Reichel provides the first extensive literary analyses of these key anthropologists-artists’ poems and their relation to cultural theory and modernist aesthetics. Setting this work in the context of their broader multimedia experiments Reichel further illuminates, with complexity and nuance, larger debates over media alterity and cultural alterity.”—Eric Aronoff, author of Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies and the Problem of Culture
“Thoughtfully argued and painstakingly researched, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives shows why three of the twentieth century’s most influential anthropologists turned to poetry to express their ideas about cultural difference. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s work gives new meaning to the truism that ethnography is a form of writing worthy of literary analysis. . . . A compelling, informative read.”—Brian Hochman, author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology
