During the past century the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has borne witness to profound social, cultural, and technical changes, transformations that have affected anthropologists and the people they work with across the planet. In response to such global changes, anthropology continues to evolve into an increasingly complex and sophisticated discipline with a dynamic range of flourishing subfields. This volume contains the memorable stories of the seventy-seven men and women who have led the AAA during the past century. The list of the association's presidents reads like a roster of influential scholars from various specializations within anthropology. Their histories cumulatively reflect the trends in interpretive thought and fieldwork methodology that have emerged during the past ten decades. For each president the book provides a photograph and a biography replete with personal anecdotes, career highlights, and information about his or her contributions to the development of the discipline of anthropology. Important works by each president are listed separately in the back of the volume. An introduction by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach summarizes the first century of the AAA and contextualizes the individual stories.

The formative years of American anthropology were characterized by intellectual energy and excitement, the identification of key interpretive issues, and the beginnings of a prodigious amount of fieldwork and recording. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) was born as anthropology emerged as a formal discipline with specialized subfields; fieldwork among Native communities proliferated across North America, yielding a wealth of ethnographic information that began to surface in the flagship journal, the American Anthropologist; and researchers increasingly debated and probed deeper into the roots and significance of ritual, myth, language, social organization, and the physical make-up and prehistory of Native Americans. The fifty-five selections in this volume represent the interests of and accomplishments in American anthropology from the establishment of the American Anthropologist through World War I. The articles in their entirety showcase the state of the subfields of anthropology?archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology?as they were imagined and practiced at the dawn of the twentieth century. Examples of important ethnographic accounts and interpretive debates are also included. Introducing this collection is a historical overview of the beginnings of American anthropology by A. Irving Hallowell, a former president of the AAA.

The Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association is a collection of scholarly articles on anthropology, including topics such as ethnography, linguistics, and archaeology. This volume is a valuable resource for students and scholars of anthropology, as well as anyone interested in learning more about human cultures and societies. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.