Speck was one of the first anthropologists studying eastern and southern American Indians to play an active role in processes of cultural change among his research subjects. Speck’s advocacy anthropology, also sometimes called participant intervention, marked a sharp departure from traditional anthropology, which insisted on maintaining professional distance. Allan Holmberg describes participant intervention as the process in which the investigator’s very presence influences the process he is studying. More specifically, participant intervention requires that the investigator assist the community in developing itself while at the same time studying the process of development as it takes place. According to Anthony Wallace, one of Speck’s graduate
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Through his attention to salvaging languages and cultural practices, as well as through his focus on racial purity, Speck used the perceived objectivity of science to give credence to the idea that genuine Indian identity could only be constituted through language, culture, and race. This meant that those who fell inside the bounds of Speck’s conception of Indianess gained an influential advocate who could scientifically validate their identity claims while those who fell outside the boundaries of Indianess as Speck defined it were, by contrast, found it difficult if not impossible to be regarded as “real” …show more content…
The first study examined the Jackson Whites of the Ramapo Mountains, which Speck detailed in a 1911 study published in the Southern Workman. Speck suggested that the Ramapo were descendants of eastern Algonquians and Tuscarora Indians who probably traveled through the Ramapo Mountains on their way to the Carolinas during the eighteenth century. In terms of physical appearances, Speck reported to have found “representatives…of all three elements, ranging from apparent full-blooded Indians through all possible degrees of intermixture.” However, “as regards the vestiges of native culture,” Speck concluded that, the Jackson-Whites were, aside from the few members who made and sold baskets and wooden utensils, “quite barren.” Unable to find any evidence of traditional folklore or to locate anyone able to speak an indigenous language, Speck surmised that the “Jackson Whites [had] lost the cultural traits of their ancestors” and as such had been reduced to a mere “imitation of that of white country folk.” Ironically, while Speck denied having found any evidence of the Ramapo’s cultural persistence, he also donated several baskets made by the mountain people to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to be showcased as examples of traditional Tuscaroran
Through his attention to salvaging languages and cultural practices, as well as through his focus on racial purity, Speck used the perceived objectivity of science to give credence to the idea that genuine Indian identity could only be constituted through language, culture, and race. This meant that those who fell inside the bounds of Speck’s conception of Indianess gained an influential advocate who could scientifically validate their identity claims while those who fell outside the boundaries of Indianess as Speck defined it were, by contrast, found it difficult if not impossible to be regarded as “real” …show more content…
The first study examined the Jackson Whites of the Ramapo Mountains, which Speck detailed in a 1911 study published in the Southern Workman. Speck suggested that the Ramapo were descendants of eastern Algonquians and Tuscarora Indians who probably traveled through the Ramapo Mountains on their way to the Carolinas during the eighteenth century. In terms of physical appearances, Speck reported to have found “representatives…of all three elements, ranging from apparent full-blooded Indians through all possible degrees of intermixture.” However, “as regards the vestiges of native culture,” Speck concluded that, the Jackson-Whites were, aside from the few members who made and sold baskets and wooden utensils, “quite barren.” Unable to find any evidence of traditional folklore or to locate anyone able to speak an indigenous language, Speck surmised that the “Jackson Whites [had] lost the cultural traits of their ancestors” and as such had been reduced to a mere “imitation of that of white country folk.” Ironically, while Speck denied having found any evidence of the Ramapo’s cultural persistence, he also donated several baskets made by the mountain people to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to be showcased as examples of traditional Tuscaroran