General/Theoretical Anthropology: A Woman\'s Quest for Science: Portrait of Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. Peter H. Hare

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fects in both industrial and developing societies. As I see it, the major weakness of this book is that (with few exceptions) the contributors seem to be unaware of how we could do research that might provide objectively derived conclusions about the probable causes of war. Clearly, all the contributors would like (as I would) to see a world without war. But it seems to me that if we are ever to achieve such a world, we must go beyond the clinical, nontesting kind of discussion that mostly characterizes this book. The editor of this volume, and a few of the other contributors, are aware that theory, to be believed, must be subjected to the possibility of falsification. But I am not sure that the word “falsification” is really understood by most of the contributors. How do we falsify some belief? In science, there is really only one general way. We have to examine series of instances (preferably selected in some random way) that might or might not exhibit statistically significant associations between possible predictors or causes and their hypothesized effects. Verbal analyses, as we have here (or the currently more fashionable “thick descriptions”) will not do, because such clinical procedures cannot persuade a skeptic that there may be something to the theory suggested. If you rely on words, but I don’t share your loyalties or assumptions, I cannot be persuaded that you may be correct-even if you are! Words have to be transformed into measures and tests that can be statistically, that is, objectively, evaluated. The sooner we learn this lesson, the sooner we will rid anthropology of unproductive argumentation that does not reduce our uncertainty.

A Woman’s Quest for Science: Portrait of Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. Peter H . Hare. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985. 192 pp. $22.95 (cloth). ALICEKEHOE Marquette University This first book-length biography of the first woman president of the American Anthropological Association is written by her grandnephew, a professor of philosophy who discovered many of her personal papers stored in the Parsons family mansion. Hare is not particularly interested in anthropology, but he has been fascinated by his great-aunt’s pioneering feminism and unconventional life. Daughter of a Wall Street broker who saw business suc-

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cess as a “Christian mission” (p. 23) and of a socialite who spent thousands of dollars (1880s dollars!) every year to be the bestdressed lady in the Newport of the Vanderbilts, Elsie Clews spurned both her parents’ goals to enter Barnard College and go on to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia in 1899. Reluctantly submitting to the institution oflegal matrimony in 1900, she bore four children by 191l to Herbert Parsons, the man she loved deeply but was not content to pander to. Throughout her adult life, she took long trips with gentlemen friends and colleagues, among the latter Boas, Kroeber, and Ralph Beals, while Herbert found companionship with a somewhat more conventional woman friend and her husband. A staff of servants meanwhile maintained the family in its several residences. Parsons’s life reads like a fantasy, unconstrained by money needs, by mores, by physical or intellectual inadequacies. T h e only real flaw in her happiness apparent from Hare’s book was her admittedly irrational and unjustified jealousy of Herbert’s friend Lucy. Until World War I, Elsie Clews Parsons was a sociologist who devoted herself to “propagandizing” (Kroeber’s word, p. 137) social reform through a series of popular books that were, alas, not popular, though her first, The Family (1906), did gain her notoriety for her advocacy of trial marriage. A fervent pacifist, she seems to have been discouraged by World War I, the support she saw for it, her son John’s “craze” (p. 11 I ) for revolvers, her husband’s pride in his service in France. Increasingly drawn to the company of anthropologists, first Goddard, Lowie, and Kroeber, then Boas, she turned after the war to a commitment to professional anthropology. She had been collecting and publishing Afro-American, American Indian, and C a p e Verdian folklore for years, for which she was elected president of the American Folk-Lore Society in 1919. In 1918, she organized (and bankrolled) a “syndicalist experiment” (p. 148) to promote ethnological research in the Southwest. From this came her comparative studies of the Pueblos, deepened by fieldwork in both northwestern Mexico and in Oaxaca, and her great monograph of 1939, Pueblo Religion. She died in 1941 of complications from appendicitis, shortly before she was to preside over the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Parsons was magnificently her own person, and her grandnephew sketches in the details of her golden life. He makes no pretense at assessing fully her intellectual growth a n d achievements or of placing them in historical context. This awaits a historian of anthropology.