Talk:Julian Steward

THE CONTROVERSY SECTION IS STOLEN WORK. PLEASE REMOVE IT.

Untitled
I have removed the "controversy" section at the bottom of the entry. It was taken without permission from an unpublished paper of mine. Please do not put it back up. If someone wants to make the claim of a controversy please utilise published, non-plagarised work.

According to what can only be called as the authoritative biography of Steward by Virginia Kerns (2003 University of Illinois Press), much of the information in this entry is incorrect. Please remove it until a new one can be added. It does no service to anyone to promote incorrect information. For example, beginning with the first sentence, Steward was not born into a family of devote Christian Scientists. His mother converted to Christian Science when Steward was 9 years old. This event seemed to precipitate his parents' divorce and motivated much of his work against religion (Kerns 2003: 19-26). Kerns' book corrects many inconsistencies, errors, and impossibilities in Shimkin (1964), Manners (1973), and Murphy (1977, 1981).

If you feel the entry on Steward is in error, then you should, as someone familiar with authoritative sources, correct it yourself. That is how wikipedia works Rex 03:32, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

-- John Curran writes I removed the opening two sentences his parents, their religion, and their divorce. Stylistically, they were bad, and seemed out-of-place, especially at the top of the article. The information is relevant, though, and important to understanding Steward. But they belong in a special section on Steward and religion.

I beefed up the section on Steward's education, and clarified his relationship with Farrand.

Steward did not have a long, 11-year relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). I think the previous contributor confused his work for the Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), a Smithsonian Institution, with his very short-lived contract work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1936. Although the BIA did finance, at least in part, one of his last trips to do Shoshone fieldwork, his involvement ended a few months later in the fall of 1936, when he submitted a controversial report (11 pages total, I think) that put him in an adversarial position with the BIA, and for which he was roundly derided. (Kerns 2003:199 see also 206-207)

It was also incorrect that he was an architect of the Indian New Deal. He arrived in Washington after the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. His views, as expressed in the 1936 unpublished (and suppressed!) BIA memo, actually ran contrary to the plans of the BIA and the Collier Administration at the time. He "took a dim view" of reorganization; he "opposed 'segregating' them on reservations, not only because it ran counter to their traditional way of life but also because it would impede assimilation." (Kerns 2003:199 see also 206-207)

I also removed any reference to cultural ecology as a "theory". Steward was adamant that cultural ecology was a "concept and method"; his theory of culture change, however, was a theory. The source for that is Kerns 2003:278-279.

Portions of the text I added -- about three paragraphs -- came from work I did for an Anthropological theory class at GWU, which I originally published at  —Preceding signed comment added by AiNewsDesk (talk • contribs) 19:34, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

-- John Curran writes

''"These factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time, thus this is the multilinearity of his theory of evolution." '' I'm not sure that is what Steward meant by 'multi-linear'. Or, at least, that it completely expresses what he meant by the term. I'll need to think about it, I'll and check my sources when I've got the energy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by AiNewsDesk (talk • contribs) 02:49, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

UTSA Class Project
An overhaul of this article is being done as part of a college class project that is being graded. Please resist changing anything in the next few days, although there shouldn't be a need to. Utsagroup9 (talk) 18:04, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The article has been posted, all that is left to be done is to format citations for Wikipedia. I'll get on that after work, hopefully. Do feel free to fix any links I may have broken though. Utsagroup9 (talk) 18:52, 22 April 2010 (UTC)


 * I have (twice) reverted the class project edits; they contain direct unquoted copies of sentences from Kerns book. For example, "Steward was one of about twenty students at Deep Springs, but he was the only one who responded so immediately and directly to his surroundings by becoming an anthropologist." comes word for word from page 50 of Kerns book. Another example is: "During his years at Deep Springs, Julian Steward also experienced what he called an “intellectual awakening.” In Kerns, the 2nd word is "these", but otherwise verbatim. There are other instances. Because the paragraphs in question do source to Kerns (although not all copied sentences do), we can't really call this plagiarism, there's no real intent to deceive, and an obvious effort to properly source, albeit sloppy/inept. And because the copying is minimal, a sentence here and there, it's not a legal copyright violation either. It is however, sloppy bad editing/writing, and improper practice. Sentences copied from Kerns need to be quoted, or need to be paraphrased into the editor's own words and, either way, consistently sourced. The class project edits are not a bad first draft, but are not ready for publication in the main article. Studerby (talk) 20:25, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Now, class
Now class, you left out something most every other major encyclopedic article has, a list or at least some mention of his works and what is in them.Botteville (talk) 15:39, 14 March 2015 (UTC)