Paper short abstract:

Examines the scholarliness and significance of the narrative history genre in recovering the significance of a Native American anthropologist, Peter Wilson, and the revolution he led in 1848 when ‘the warriors’ of his people overthrew corrupted ‘chiefs’ and formed a republic in upstate New York.

Paper long abstract:

Writing through the lens of character; of individuals and their unfolding loves, predicaments and strifes in ‘popular’ ways is sometimes contrasted with more scholarly approaches. It is ‘popular’, however, for the very reason that social life is about reading and projecting character and emotion as much as it is about structure and discourse. Social life is about, fear, hatred, pleasures &c. however these are inscribed into our lives. Words such as ‘visceral’ or ‘desire’ or ‘pleasure’ that increasingly pervade our texts and that are configured in relation to ‘embodiment’ are always trying to get at some of this, but they are concepts that never quite meet their own ambitions, deadened words that do not capture the living. Do we not all sometimes feel, instead, that it is the best of the novelists and playwrights emergent from the very worlds that anthropologists have hitherto presumed to study that best capture the way capital and debt, culture and death, actually shape and transform social lives? As these genre have developed, are they simply about ‘entertainment’? Or are they increasingly powerful tools to convey social worlds that we, too, should embrace more seriously? This paper reflects on the reach, scholarliness and significance of this genre for my current research that recovers for our discipline the significance of a Native American anthropologist, Peter Wilson, and the revolution he led in 1848 among his own people in which ‘the warriors’ overthrew ‘chiefs’ corrupted by land speculators, and established a republic in upstate New York.