Lessons in Safe Logic: Reassessing Anthropological and Liberal Imaginings of Termination

Abstract

Building upon recent efforts to assess the history of anthropology in light of renewed calls for disciplinary decolonization, this paper turns to the role of US anthropologists in the infamous policy known as Indian termination, or the withdrawal of all federal aid, services, and protection from tribal members, as well as the end of reservations. Contextualizing the activism of the applied anthropologist John H. Provinse against the backdrop of broader shifts in post-WWII US liberalism, I argue that Provinse’s support for termination in the late 1940s reflected an embattled social democratic and pluralistic conception of Indian–US relations. This perspective contrasted with and was ultimately overshadowed by the assimilatory sentiments that would become institutionalized in the termination policies of the 1950s. Thus, Provinse provides an analytical opening from which to explore the discipline’s relationship with termination as well as the affordances and limitations of liberal anthropological activism. Moreover, such a case offers a generous rejoinder to more speculative assessments of the discipline’s many pasts.