Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction

"A Communist at Horvard, a factory worker thereafter, a participant-observer of the Berkeley scene in the late 1960s, a historian among anthropologists in Chicago for some of the field's most turbulent decades: George Stocking is a relentlessly honest observer of himself and his times. This autobiography of a remarkable historian is also a portrait of a questing, self-critical age."---Lorraine Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

George W. Stocking, Jr., has spent a professional lifetime exploring the history of anthropology, and his findings have shaped anthropologists' understanding of their field for two generations. Through his meticulous research, Stocking has shown how such forces as politics, race, institutional affiliations, and personal relationships have influenced the discipline from its beginnings. In this autobiography, he looks into his own "black box," dissecting his upbringing, his politics, even his motivations in writing about himself. The result is a book systematically, at times brutally, self-questioning.

An interesting question, Stocking writes, is one that arouses just the right amount of anxiety. That anxiety may be the ultimate source of his remarkable intellectual energy and output. In this book he traces the intersecting vectors of his professional and personal lives, concluding with a coda that scrutinizes his life after retirement, when advancing age, cancer, and depression changed the tenor of his reflections about both his life and his work.

"George Stocking's scholarship, by rooting anthropological ideas in complex historical conjunctures, has had a major impact across the humanities and social sciences. His new book takes us behind the scenes of erudition to reveal a process of ceaseless, unsparing personal inquiry. A rigorous, deeply felt, courageous performance."---James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz

"An absorbing human story in itself that gradually takes on an air of well-deserved inevitability."---Robert McCormick Adams, Secretary Emeritus, Smithsonian Institution

George W. Stocking, Jr., is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Victorian Anthropology; After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951; Delimiting Anthropology; and the Ethnographer's Magic. He founded the History of Anthropology series published by the University of Wisconsin Press and edited its first eight volumes.