Mattina, Nancy.Uncommon anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American culture. 350 pp., illus., bibliogr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. $34.95 (paper)

Gladys Reichard, first-generation Boasian, is sometimes listed among better known contemporaries and referenced in histories of their generation as pioneering work on indigenous languages, a sidebar to a disciplinary moment. She has been acknowledged as a woman in an academic system still lacking diversity in its labour force and occasionally by the guild itself, as per Louise Lamphere's Presidential Address at the American Anthropological Association 2001 meeting, the organization's centennial. But even that recognition, praising her authorial dialogism and proto-feminism, has been obscured by Boasian DNA, as newer generations of US anthropologists belabour Boas's Americanist tradition as colonialist and, ironically, racist (p. x). Roused by this erasure, Mattina does an excellent, balanced job restoring Reichard to her long overdue position as a significant presence, indeed, as among the most anticipatory of Boasians for her cutting-edge practices. Reichard emerges as an innovative, enlightened practitioner whose scholarship foreshadows current trends. Mattina is a linguist whose work on Salish, whose first grammar Reichard wrote, brings her to Reichard's own as a linguistic anthropologist whose insistence on the interconnectedness of language and culture – a conceptual imperative for US anthropology today – was anathema to the dominant approaches of her time, contributing to her marginalization. Mattina draws richly from multiple sources to document Reichard's work and amply sustain her core proposition that this was and is a life worthy of restitution, much deserving of this first full-length biography as a predecessor whose work has been, at best siloed, at worst erased. The author draws on Reichard's published and unpublished work, personal and professional correspondence, archival material from institutions where she taught and worked (Arizona, notably) and, importantly, collaborators and critics’ archived papers. A substantial bibliography on the history of US anthropology, its institutions, and biographies and autobiographies of salient participants in its inception complements these sources. After a brief preface and prologue, chapters chronologically trace Reichard's life and career: her 1893 birth in Bangor, Pennsylvania, into a Quaker household, an educated childhood leading to undergraduate and master's degrees at Swarthmore College, and a PhD at Columbia University under Boas's supervision; her research on indigenous languages and societies, an academic career as Barnard's first anthropology faculty, life-long activism with her Navajo collaborators and communities, and role in establishing state institutions and resources for the advancement of indigenous languages and communities; finally, her death in 1955 – fittingly, in Arizona. An epilogue depicts the aftermath: this productive life persists, in subtle and understated ways through her publications, her activism, her historic place in academia as the first woman instructor in anthropology at Barnard, whose classes – on language, indigenous societies, race, theory – introduced the discipline to many undergraduates, including several who went on to anthropological careers, notably, Zorah Neale Hurston, with whom Reichard shares erasure. Mattina is an engaging writer who contextualizes this biography in both anthropology's history as well as in a twentieth-century United States caught – as now – in the contradictions between lofty ideologies of inclusion and dominant marginalizing practices. She makes a persuasive case that gender hampered Reichard's advancement, but, more importantly, that she was marginalized for her, now desirable, theoretical perspectives, ethnographic approaches, activism, and textualization practices: reflexivity without solipsism, the dialogic inclusion of one's collaborators’ voices and presences, participatory collaboration rather than extraction, interpretive and idiographic rather than nomothetic emphases, all now dominant, even normative. Some contemporaries come across very badly in Mattina's telling, which may raise some hackles. But the author is careful to document, contextualize, and muster solid evidence sustaining these portrayals. Sapir, Kluckhorn, Mead, and Benedict are particularly condemned as their own words, archived, ripe for excavation, expose them: anyone with any experience of academia's catty proclivities will recognize these dynamics. Reichard, after all, was very much Boas's mentee, even his family's lodger. What's not to envy about that? Anthropology is highly contested in the United States in an institutional context in thrall to the corporate university and buffeted by an ascendant neoconservative political order. The entrepreneurial character of the corporate university imbues faculty with an anti-canon mania as they predicate their advancement upon a spurious simulacrum of ‘innovation’, in which disciplinary history is given short shrift. Boasians have fared poorly as they are scapegoated for their generation's alleged colonialism. Cohorts of students and younger practitioners are being churned out scornful of one of the discipline's enduring accomplishments: a progressive perspective on sociocultural difference and the advocation for addressing it, while looking towards non-anthropological sources that have appropriated or parrot Boasian principles. In their uninformed cherry-picking and temporal-centrism, they eschew past scholarship at their own peril, undermining the discipline's relevance in a liberal arts education. We all labour in the contexts we are born into. Mattina's book is an excellent rectification to a history now misconstrued because younger anthropologists have imbibed the neoliberal Kool-Aid that so prevails in the United States today.