ALFRED IRVING HALLOWELL

1892-1974
With the death of A. Irving Hallowell,
anthropology has lost one of its most distinguished and influential scholars and teachers. Anthropology, for Hal!3well, was truly
the study of man. Although much of his
scholarly career was devoted to the study of
the Northern Ojibwa, a people whose
society, culture, and thought he recorded
and analyzed with the meticulous detail of a
master craftsman, in almost all of his ethnographic accounts, h e was concerned with
discovering and displaying the general
through the particular. This explains in part
why he has had a marked influence o n a
large group of scholars who know o r care
little about the Berens River Saulteaux.
When, in addition, o n e considers the wide
array of subjects to which he made original
and pioneering c o n t r i b u t i o n s s o c i a l organization, psychological anthropology, acculturation, behavioral evolution, world view,
cultural ecology, history of anthropology-it
is all the more understandable that his
influence has been felt in psychology and
history, literature and sociology, psycho-

analysis and biology, as well as in anthropology.

As a measure of his wide influence,
Hallowell received numerous honors and
awards. He was, to mention only some, a
Viking F u n d Medalist; president of t h e
American Anthropological Association, t h e
American Folklore Society, and t h e Society
for Projective Techniques; chairman of t h e
Division of Psychology and Anthropology of
t h e National Research Council; a Fellow of
t h e National Academy of Sciences and of
t h e American Philosophical Society. Upon
his retirement, t h e University of Pennsylvania conferred upon him the honorary
degree of Doctor of Science.
From his early background, one could
hardly have predicted t h a t Hallow ell would
pursue a life of science and scholarship. Born
in Philadelphia o n 28 December 1892, it was
assumed by his conservative parents that he
would follow a business career. Consistent
with this assumption, he not only attended a
manual-training high school, but upon graduation he enrolled in the Wharton School of
Finance and Commerce of the University of
Pennsylvania. Soon, however, ideas of social
reform and the social sciences, especially
economics and sociology, began t o absorb
his interests. Lacking the financial resources
to pursue graduate studies, he became a
social worker for the Family Society after
his graduation in 1914, while taking sociology courses in his spare time.
While employed as a social worker,
Hallowell t o o k his first course in anthropology-with
Frank S p e c k - a n d under t h e
latters influence, he abandoned his sociological studies and decided t o become a n
anthropologist. With Specks assistance, h e
received a graduate fellowship t o study
anthropology a t The University of Pennsylvania, receiving his Ph.D. in 1924. While
studying a t Pennsylvania, he also traveled to
Columbia t o participate (together with Melville Herskovits and R u t h Benedict) in Franz
Boas weekly seminar. From Boas and
Speck, alike, Hallowell acquired a view o f
a n t h r o p o l o g y as a holistic discipline,
embracing ethnology, archaeology, physical
anthropology, and linguistics, a view t h a t
was later t o be reflected in the range of his
field researches and in the variegated publications that resulted from them. F r o m
Speck he also acquired his abiding interest
in, and indeed (as he himself said) his

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OBITUARIES
identification with American Indians. In
fact, all of his fieldwork took place among
American Indians: the St. Francis Abenaki
of eastern Canada in the 1920s, the
Northern Ojibwa of the Lake Winnipeg
region over the 1930s, and the Lac du
Flambeau (Wisconsin) Ojibwa in 1946.
Except for a three year period a t Northwestern University (1944-47), Hallowell
taught continuously a t t h e University of
Pennsylvania until his retirement, in 1 9 6 2 , a t
the age of 70, Subsequently, he was a
visiting professor a t the Universities of Washington, Wisconsin, and Chicago, a t Temple
University, and a t Chatham and Bryn Mawr
Colleges.
Hallowell died o n 1 0 October 1 9 7 4 , in
Wayne, Pennsylvania. He is survived by his
widow and intellectual collaborator, Maude
Frame Hallowell.
Hallowell was a rare scholar n o t only
because h e made original and enduring contributions t o a wide array of fields, but
because he continued t o pioneer in new
fields long after his previous achievements
had established him as a major figure. Thus,
for example, it was only in his later years
that his signal achievements in the history of
anthropology and in behavioral evolution
were accomplished. Since they appeared
subsequent to the appearance of Culture and
Experience (Hallowell 1955), and since, like
many papers that were brought together in
that volume, they are scattered across many
and diverse publications, it is all the more
fortunate that they are included in a forthcoming second collection of Hallowells
work, Contributions to A n t h r o p o l o g y , edited
by Raymond Fogelson (1976). These collections, together with his highly influential
distributional study of bear ceremonialism
(Hallowell 1 9 2 6 ) and his definitive historical
and ethnographic study of Ojibwa conjuring
(Hallowell 1942), comprise his major publications.
In examining these publications, it is
immediately apparent that here a special
mind is a t work. Although most scholars can
be classified as either foxes o r hedgehogs-the fox, according t o the Greek poet,
Archilochus, knows many things, while
t h e hedgehog knows one big thing (Berlin
1957)-Hallowell was one of the few who
transcends such dichotomies. While his work
deals with a great many things, i t is almost
always concerned with one big thing. Hence
it is that in much of his work he attempts to
integrate seemingly separate domains. He
builds bridges between culture and personality, he discovers continuities between
animal and human societies, he uncovers
systematic relationships between kin terms
and ecology, to mention only a few. This

609

same combination of hedgehog and fox is

reflected in his style. In one and the same
paper, one discerns t h e erudition of the
historical scholar (all those footnotes! as
one student p u t it), as well as the subtlety
and lucidity of t h e theorist.
To assess t h e importance of Hallowells
work in all of the fields to which he
contributed is obviously impossible in this
brief review; nor is it necessary, since some
of his contributions have already been
evaluated by others in their introductory
essays t o the papers comprising the Fogelson
volume. Hence, my remarks will be confined
t o his contributions t o culture and personality, a field of perduring interest for him,
and, because of space limitations, I shall
concentrate o n what I believe t o have been
his signal achievement in this field, his
delineation of the relationship between the
inner world of social actors and the human
social order. F o r what follows, the reader is
referred t o t h e relevant chapters in Hallowell
( 1 9 5 5 ) and Fogelson (1976).
Although he himself was importantly
influenced by stimulus-response psychology
(especially by learning theory), Hallowell
showed in a series of brilliant papers o n the
Ojibwa that action is n o t so much a function
of t h e objective properties (stimuli) of the
environment, whether physical or social, as
of their meanings for t h e actor. Taking as his
point of departure t h e gestaltists concept of
the behavioral environment, Hallowell
documented in rich detail that the environment t o which Ojibwa actors respond is not
the environment, but their environment, i.e.,
the environment which they perceive. Going
beyond the gestaltists, however, he demonstrated in masterful fashion that ( a ) Ojibwa
(and therefore human) perceptions are
mediated not through perceptors alone, but
through cognitive orientations that organize
and confer meaning o n them; and ( b ) these
latter orientations are acquired in large
measure from the actors cultural symbol
systems. The general conclusion is obvious.
Since human cognitive orientations are
derived t o a considerable extent from cultural symbol systems, and since perceptions
are shaped by these orientations, then the
human behavioral environment-the environment which they perceive, and therefore the
one t o which they respond-is culturally
constituted. To have established the
existence, and to have explicated t h e concept, of a culturally constituted behavioral
environment was, in its time, a remarkable
achievement, and a singular contribution t o
psychology and anthropology alike. For, t o
remark o n its anthropological importance
alone, in demonstrating how different
individuals, each initially encapsulated in the

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privacy of his own inner world, nevertheless come to share a common behavioral
e n v i r o n m e n t , Hallowell delineated t h e
process by which an aggregation of private
individuals becomes a group of social actors.
I n brief, by elaborating the notion of the
culturally constituted behavioral environment, Hallowell demonstrated in part how a
human social order is possible.
Although t h e cognitive orientations, perceptual sets, and symbolic meanings of social
actors are in large part culturally constituted, these (together with privately constituted cognitions, perceptions, and t h e
like) comprise only one dimension of their
inner world. And although this dimension
makes a human social order possible, for
Hallowell the social order is always problematic precisely because there are dimensions of the inner world t h at are not
derived from the cultural symbol systems of
the outer world. The latter dimensionsimpulse, affect, imagination, fantasy, and
the like-comprise a set of powerful stimuli
that are potentially disruptive of the social
order. Even when they d o not lead t o t h e
construction of behavioral environments
that differ (as they d o in mental illness)
from t h e culturally constituted environment,
they may lead to action that is inconsistent
with t h e normative requirements of the
social system. F o r the received anthropological wisdom of t h e time, this problem was
scarcely recognized, let alone coped with,
for by drawing rigid disciplinary boundaries,
it relegated these dimensions of t h e inner
world to psychology. Hallowell, who had
a profound knowledge of psychoanalysis,
not only recognized t h e problem, but in
attempting to cope with it, he elaborated his
seminal concept of the self. This was a
central concept in Hallowells thought, as
important as, and correlative to, t h e concept
of the behavioral environment.
Calling once again upon his detailed
knowledge of t h e Ojibwa, Hallowell demonstrated that t h e self, n o less than t h e
behavioral environment, is also culturally
constituted. Acquired by means of a set of
basic orientations provided by cultural
symbol systems, this unique cognitive structure lies a t the intersection of the inner and
outer worlds and mediates between them. As
mediator, the self protects the social order
from t h e potentially disruptive dimensions
of the inner world in t w o ways. (a) To act in
accordance with the normative requirements
of the social order, social actors must be able
in the first instance to distinguish stimuli of
the inner from those of t h e outer
world. In an elegant psychological analysis,
Hallowell demonstrated that it is through

[ 78,1976J

the development of self-awareness that they

are able to discern this distinction, and,
having discerned it, to adapt their perceptions t o culturally constituted cognitions,
and t o monitor their behavior by reference
to cultural norms. (b) But monitoring
procedures appraise, they dont control
behavior. Hence, when the demands of
inner urges become more powerful than
those of outer norms, it is the consequent
threat to the actors self-conceptions that
assures the persistence of norm-governed
behavior.
In sum, many years before the current
emic or phenomenological approaches
become fashionable, Hallowell insisted that
the objective constructs of culture and of
personality are in themselves inadequate to
explain the human social order. An adequate
explanation requires, as he saw it, the notion
of a phenomenologically conceived psychological field consisting of culturally constituted selves in interaction with a culturally constituted behavioral environment.
Upon Hallowells retirement, a group of
former students, together with some colleagues, presented him with a festschrift
volume, Context and Meaning in Cultural
Anthropology (Spiro 1965), and following
his death, a group of younger students
offered tw o symposia, entitled The Legacy
of A. Irving Hallowell, in his memory a t the
74th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1975. Neither
of these commemorations was an accident.
Hallowell was one of those few teachers who
evoked both intellectual respect and admiration, and personal regard and affection.
Although, as a teacher, he never persuaded
his students to follow his intellectual
interests (as the wide range of topics covered
in the festschrift and the memorial symposia
testify), his vast erudition, exacting intellectual standards, disdain for disciplinary
boundaries, and constantly searching mind
served the m as a model to be emulated, if
not achieved. More important, in his
teaching and writing, Hallowell focused his
vision o n one big thing-the nature of man.
Hence, although much of his teaching was
concerned with the ethnography of American Indians, his approach t o the uniquely
Indian was based on and informed by a
conception of the generically human; and
the latter conception projected a vision of
what anthropology could be, a vision that
most of his students found exciting and
captivating.
He will b e missed.
MELFORD E. SPIRO
University o f California, San Diego

OBIT WARIES
REFERENCES CITED
Berlin, I.
1957 The Hedgehog and the Fox. New
York: New University Library.
Fogelson, Raymond D., ed.
1976 Contributions to Anthropology:
Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hallowell, A. Irving
1926 Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. American Anthropologist 28: 1-175.
1 9 4 2 T h e Role of Conjuring in
Saulteaux Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

611

1955 Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Spiro, Melford E., ed.
1965 Context and Meaning in Cultural
Anthropology. New York: Free Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A fairly complete bibliography of Hallowells writings through 1954 can be found
in Hallowell (1955:430-434). It is supplemented and brought up to date by Fogelson
in Supplementary Bibliography of A. Irving
Hallowell (in Fogelson 1976). A bibliography of Hallowells writings through 1964
is also provided in Spiro (1965:417-425).