Irving Goldman

Irving Goldman (September 2, 1911 – April 7, 2002) was an American anthropologist, known for his acute ability to reconstruct the worldviews and systems of thought of the indigenous peoples whose lives and thought he analysed in several major works, some now regarded as classics in the field of anthropology.

Goldman was born in Brooklyn to Louis Goldman, an immigrant Russian carpenter, and his wife Golda, who died before he was six years old.

Three elder brothers had died from a plague epidemic in Russia before his parents took the step to immigrate to the United States.

He intended to make a career in medicine, and graduated from Brooklyn College as a pre-med student in 1933, but quickly changed directions and went, as an "eager but utterly unoriented student" to study under Franz Boas at Columbia University.

Under Boas's supervision, he completed his PhD, with a thesis on the Alkatcho Carrier Indians of British Columbia, having done research among the Modoc Indians in California in the meantime (1934).

He had joined the American Communist Party in 1936, but left it in 1942.

His first major publication consisted of four chapters of a book co-authored with its by editor Margaret Mead, namely, Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples, (1937).

When Boaz received a substantial grant from the Social Science Research Council, Goldman was the beneficiary, along with several of his colleagues, (Buell Quain, Jules Henry, William Lipkind, Bernard Mishkin, Ruth Landes, Morris Siegal, and Charles Wagley) to open up what was then a terra incognita for anthropology.

Goldman himself was assigned to study Chibchan-descended Páez of the Central Andes of Colombia.

However, he defied his Department and on his own initiative decided to venture into the Vaupés for his fieldwork.

The result was ten months of fieldwork in 1939-1940, from September to June, in the southern region of Vaupés spent studying the Cubeo people of the Cuduiarí, which at the time was an 'anthropological terra incognita'.

The result was a monograph, The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon, still regarded by specialists as "the very best book on the Vaupés region".

His work on the Cubeo, the name being a Europeanization of the Tukano jesting term Kebewá (meaning 'the people who are not') is still considered a classic in its field.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff called his structural analysis of Cuneo society 'among the best that have been written on the social organization of Amazonian Indians in general.

His acute observations combined with meticulous scholarship make this a book of lasting value.'

The expertise he gained from his field work in South America led to Goldman's recruitment as an analyst of the region.

He worked in Nelson Rockefeller's Bureau of Latin American Research.

When World War II broke out, he was drafted and assigned to intelligence work with Latin America as his area of analysis.

Specifically, he worked as a research analyst for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs from 1942–1943.

He was reassigned, with the rank of 2nd Lieutenant, to the Office of Strategic Services until war's end.

He was then transferred to the State Department, as Chief of Branch for the Office of Research Analysis, until he was released in July 1947 as a security risk.

Ruth Benedict managed to secure him an appointment to Sarah Lawrence College, in Yonkers, New York.

He was subsequently interviewed, in 1953, by the McCarthyist Jenner Committee.

part of the Senate Judiciary Committee but, while answering all questions regarding himself, he refused to divulge the names of other members of the Communist Party of the United States, citing his rights under the First Amendment, a risky tactic at the time, in the face of threats that he would be cited for contempt.

He returned for two stints of field research among the Cuneo in 1968-1970, and 1979 From 1980, he taught at the New School for Social Research until his full retirement in 1987.

After his significant work on the Cubeo Goldman went on to publish monumental, if controversial, studies on two other classic areas of anthropological interest, on Polynesian societies, and on the Kwakiutl of North America.

For him, the development of the discipline of anthropology best progressed, in his view, by a dialectical 'interplay between field and armchair', which he proceeded to undertake by advancing general interpretations.

His individual moral position was supported by Sarah Lawrence College and he was able to continue teaching there until his retirement in 1980.

In the postwar period, he conducted fieldwork among the Tzotzil of Chamula Indians in Chiapas, Mexico.

He died in 2002 at the age of 90.

Goldman turned his attention to what he saw as the twin features of early societies, religious worldviews and aristocracy.

Both of these latter two societies he regarded as examples of a primitive 'aristocracy'.

In his view, "civilizations are the product of developing aristocracy", and their impact operates predominantly through the medium of status-rivalry, status being analysed in 18 Polynesian societies in terms of mana, Tohunga (expertise) and Toa (military prowess).

Though the evolutionary reconstruction was dubious, the analysis of status and power gained acclamation.

The thesis behind work on Polynesia is contained in its keynote frontispiece quotation from Balzac:

At stake were three issues.

One was historical: the nature of Polynesian societies before contact with the West irremediably altered them (2) How did existing socio-political systems function?, and (3) what were the underlying dynamics that accounted for the differentiation of social forms?

In Alan Howard's view, given the virtual absence of reliable and detailed accounts of traditional Polynesian social systems, any attempt to reconstruct the ancient society was doomed to remain speculative, and yield only a theoretical sandcastle.

He compared Goldman's work to that of his comprehensive predecessors, Robert W. Williamson and the latter's editor Ralph Piddington, whose wariness about the possibility of working out a system of kinship structures from the large confusion of primary sources from dubious hands stood in marked contrast to Goldman's ambitious overview.

Marshall Sahlins, in a critique of an earlier version of Goldman's theory, had implied that 'status rivalry', if not the operation of a type of political system, looks in Goldman's approach to be some 'disembodied value' or 'attribute of the Polynesian psyche'