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Obituaries 235
and Senior Research Anthropologist (1965-79), Depart-
ment of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural His-
tory, from which he retired as Ethnologist Emeritus in
1979.
Ewers began his research career by studying portrai-
ture and paintings that depicted Plains tribes. His interest
was in Indian-European/American relationships on the
frontier as reflected in paintings and diaries. As a historian
and biographer, he investigated the ways that early Euro-
pean painters, explorers, missionaries, and fur traders had
recorded Indian life, concentrating on the 1830s through
the 1850s. He was especially knowledgeable about George
Catlin, Carl Bodmer, and Gustavus Sohon and their jour-
neys among the Flathead, Pend d'Oreille, and Mandan,
analyzing their paintings for their accuracy and for ethno-
graphic evidence on the period (1956, 1957, 1965). He
also used this material to explore early Anglo influences
on Plains Indian cultural forms (1957).
As a historian of the West, Ewers deepened our knowl-
edge about the fur trade and the men who were traders
(1954).
His publication of diaries and early ethnographic
descriptions of indigenous groups, such as Edwin T.
Denig's observations on the Sioux and the Crow
(1951,
1953),
are still used by ethnohistorians. During the 1960s
and 1970s he used his research skills for the benefit of sev-
eral tribes, helping the Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, Chippewa
Creek, and Little Shell Bandon in land-claims cases.
Ewers's central interest was in the study of traditional
material culture and art. An authority on Kiowa calendri-
cal histories and ledger art, he was concerned with how
continuing artistic expressions had changed because of
contact with whites and their collecting activities. Over
his lifetime he worked on pipestone carvings, pipes,
adornment, beadwork, tipi painting, sculpture, and horse
equipment, producing over 50 publications on these top-
ics.
His goal was to understand Native aesthetic criteria, as
well as how cultural contact and diffusion influenced ar-
tistic and cultural styles.
Ewers was an important museologist, an expert in
planning, collections management, exhibit techniques,
community relations, and administration. He was a con-
sultant to the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, and the Montana Historical Society and served on
the board of trustees of the Museum of the American In-
dian, Heye Foundation (1972-77). He wrote dozens of ex-
hibit catalogues and curated numerous exhibits for the Jo-
syln Art Museum, the Gilcrease Museum, the Smithsonian
Institution, and the American Museum of Natural History,
wheie he revised the North American Indian hall.
A
reflex-
ive scholar, he analyzed the history of museums and ex-
hibits,
providing a theoretical basis for the study of
museology. He wrote one of the first articles to deal with
issues of the control of information in museums and how
museums could more accurately reflect Native Americans'
concerns and interpretations (1943). He was also inter-
ested in the history of collecting and in recent years had
been compiling information on private collectors on the
Plains in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Ewers wrote for a readership much wider than his pro-
fessional colleagues, including books for young people on
Blackfeet culture and Native life on the Plains, and numer-
ous book reviews for the popular media. Like Tanner, he
was keenly interested in ensuring that anthropologically
based knowledge reached a public audience. John Ewers
died in Arlington, Virginia, on May 7, 1997.
REFERENCES CITED
Ewers,
John C.
1939 Plains Indian Painting.
A
Description of an Aboriginal
American Art. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
1943 Museum, the Blackfeet Have a Word for It. The Museum
News 20(18):12.
1951 Of the Sioux. Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society
7(2):185-215.
1953 On the Crow Nation. Buieau of American Ethnology
Bulletin 151:1-74.
1954 The Indian Traders of the Upper Missouri before Lewis
and Clark. Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society
10(4):429-446.
1955 The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture. Bureau of Ameri-
can Ethnology Bulletin, 159. Washington,
DC: U.S.
Govern-
ment Printing Office.
1956 George Catlin, Painter of Indians and the West. Smith-
sonian Institution Annual Report for 1955:438-528.
1957 Early White Influence upon Plains Indian Painting:
George Catlin and Karl Bodmer among the Mandan,
1832-1834. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
1958 The Blackfeet. Raiders on the Northwestern Plains. Nor-
man: University of Oklahoma Press. Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
1965 Artists of the Old West. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Tanner, Clara Lee
1957 Southwest Indian Painting. Tucson: The University of
Arizona Press Revised edition, 1973.
1960 The Influence of the White Man on Southwest Indian
Art. Ethnohistory
7(2):
137-150.
1968 Southwest Indian Craft Arts. Tucson: University of Ari-
zona Press.
1976 Prehistoric Southwest Craft
Arts.
Tucson: University of
Arizona Press.
1985 Interview, September
24.
The Daughters of the Desert.
Barbara
A.
Babcock and Nancy J. Parezo, dirs. New York:
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
CORRECTIONS TO THE OBITUARY OF
MORTON KLASS
HERBERT LEWIS
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Three paragraphs were inadvertently omitted from the
obituary of Morton Klass that appeared in American An-
thropologist
104:2, June 2002. Those paragraphs, with the
previously published summary paragraph, read as follows:
In 1962 Klass became coprincipal investigator in the
Columbia University India project under the direction of
Conrad M. Arensberg. This afforded him the opportunity
he had originally sought, to study Indian culture in the
South Asian homeland. He spent 1963-64 engaged in field
research on the effects of a bicycle factory, established in
236 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No.
1
• March 2003
1951,
on a farming community in West Bengal. In that
study, published as
From Field
to
Factory:
Community
Struc-
ture
and
Industrialization
in West
Bengal
(1978), he departed
from the then-common view of "the village" as the locus
of community and the appropriate unit for analysis in ru-
ral India. Following Arensberg's perspective on commu-
nity, Klass argued that "the community" in that region of
West Bengal could best be understood by attending to the
interrelationship of five different "structural elements,"
each of which had its own local name: (1) family circle, (2)
neighborhood circle, (3) village, (4) circle of caste mates,
and (5) circle of villages. His research into the impact of
the factory led him to stress both the differential effects
that the factory had on various caste
(jati)
groups, as well
as the ways in which local culture, especially caste, af-
fected the organization of the factory
itself.
Klass published a different sort of book about South
Asia in 1980. Caste, the
Emergence
of
the South
Asian
Social
System is an ambitious work, intended as a contribution to
the wider study of South Asian history and culture as well
as a theoretical statement and exercise. In it he addressed
the question of the origins of the caste system, a subject
no longer discussed at that time by either historians, who
deemed those origins lost in the mists of time, or by the
caste of South Asianist anthropologists whose ideas de-
rived mainly from the traditions of Durkheim, Radcliffe-
Brown, and Levi-Strauss. Beyond the quest for an explana-
tion of how this key institution arose, he had his eye on
current debates within U.S. anthropology regarding the
problems of causality, determinism, and cultural evolution.
Klass begins the book with a ringing and articulate de-
fense of "eclecticism" in anthropological analysis. Identi-
fying to some extent with the pragmatic Boasian attitude,
then under attack by Harris and others, he argues un-
ashamedly for an open and eclectic approach, accepting
whatever seems to work for the problem at hand and
avoiding the dogmatism and "theology" of monocausal
explanations and what today would be called "grand nar-
ratives." This was in keeping with Klass's own personality
and outlook on the world. He was the most generous and
open-minded of scholars, always looking for new insights
from whatever source, whether in different "schools" or
from individuals, whether well known and celebrated or
not. In the analysis that follows he maintains a respectful
attitude toward Harris's insights into South Asian econ-
omy but he refuses to be limited by them. "I have endeav-
ored to incorporate and synthesize the insights and argu-
ments of a wide array of contemporary anthropological
theorists, including Morton Fried, Fredrik Barth, Marvin
Harris, and Claude Levi-Strauss" (1980:188). In the rest of
the book he offers a hypothetical scenario of how such a
complex and distinctive set of interlocking institutions
known as the caste system could have arisen.
He pictures an "evolution" that is based on historical
developments occurring throughout the South Asian re-
gion, not derived from some presumed general evolution-
ary determination or the working of laws of the capture of
energy. At the end of his reconstruction he says,
There is no quantum jump in all this, but only the easiest
progression, seemingly the most minimal of transforma-
tions,
but it takes us from the "bear" to the "barber," from
unstratified "equalitarian" hunters and gatherers to the
complex and stratified agricultural production system
that is "the caste system." [1980:181]
[There was a minor error as well: The year of his death
is listed as 2000 in the heading and caption under his pic-
ture.
It should have been
2001,
as is correctly stated in the
first line of text.]