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© 2013 University of Chicago Library
The Eggan, Fred. Papers were processed as part of the HEA Title II-C project, "Preserving and Improving Access to Social Science Manuscript Collections at the University of Chicago Library."
Photographs contained in Series III, Subseries 5, carry specific requirements for publication. For further information see series description. Series XI contains student evaluative material restricted until 2041. Series XII, Subseries 9 includes personnel and financial material restricted until 2039. The remainder of the collection is open for research.
When quoting material from this collection the preferred citation is:
Eggan, Fred. Papers, [Box #, Folder #], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
Fred Eggan was born in Seattle, Washington on September 12, 1906. His parents, Alfred J. and Olive Smith Eggan, later relocated to Lake Forest, Illinois, a north suburb of Chicago.
In 1923 Eggan came to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate and continued on to earn an M.A. in psychology with a minor in anthropology in 1928. His master's thesis was entitled "An Experimental Study of Attitudes toward Race and Nationality." From 1928 to 1930 he taught psychology, sociology, and history at Wentworth Junior College and Military Academy in Missouri. During this interval he maintained his connection with the University of Chicago by working summers with Fay-Cooper Cole at Native American archaeological sites in Illinois.
In 1930 Eggan returned to the University of Chicago as a doctoral student in anthropology, completing his dissertation in 1933. Following post-doctoral field research in the Philippines he assumed an instructorship at the university, part-time for the Extension program and part-time for the Department of Anthropology. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1940 and associate professor in 1948. Not long after his promotion to associate professor he received a full professorship. He chaired the Department of Anthropology from 1948 to 1952 and again from 1961 to 1963. He was appointed the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology in 1963.
Eggan is credited with having achieved a synthesis between the British and American schools of anthropological study. The British school, as exemplified by Eggan's first mentor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, was then dominated by the synchronic analysis of the function of cultural institutions. In contrast, American anthropologists, including Eggan's teachers Fay-Cooper Cole and Robert Redfield, focused on processes of diachronic culture change. Eggan united these two perspectives by attending to both structure and history using a method of analysis he called "controlled comparison." Based on results achieved by this method, Eggan's most important publication, Social Organization of the Western Pueblos, hypothesized that variations in the social structures of linguistically and culturally related Native American groups were the result of the varied historical circumstances experienced by each group. By applying this same method in his later work on the impact of modernity and Western culture on indigenous Philippine groups, Eggan formulated an inverse corollary: that differing social structures cause different linguistic and cultural groups to respond differently to the same historical circumstances. These insights concerning the interdependence of social structures and historical processes remain at the forefront of contemporary anthropological theory.
When Eggan enrolled as a graduate student in 1930, the Department of Anthropology had just become independent from the Department of Sociology, with Fay-Cooper Cole, Edward Sapir, and Robert Redfield as the core faculty. Sapir soon left the department and was replaced by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in 1931. Eggan became Radcliffe-Brown's first research assistant in 1931-1932 and began research on kinship and social organization of northern Native American tribes. Under Radcliffe-Brown, Eggan completed a report on the southeast, plains and southwestern tribes.
Eggan continued field research on native North America in 1932 when he was awarded a Laboratory of Anthropology Field Training Fellowship to support his work on the Hopi Indian reservation in Arizona. There he met Don Talayesva, an informant with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. Eggan based his doctoral dissertation, which he completed in 1933, on research from this field work. Social Organization of the Western Pueblos, published in 1950 by the University of Chicago Press, represents a substantially revised version of this work. Eggan balanced his studies of the southwest with his later work on the Philippines, returning to the Southwest almost every year until he retired.
While waiting for final arrangements for a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Australia, Eggan resumed field study among the Hopi at Oraibi and Second Mesa, Arizona. It was at this time, in the winter of 1933-1934, that Eggan began an association with John Collier and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier invited Eggan to participate in a conference between the Bureau and the Navajo regarding sheep reduction and soil conservation. Later in his career, Eggan continued his involvement with the Bureau, serving as an expert witness in Southwestern Native American land claim cases.
Returning to Chicago in the spring of 1934, Eggan learned that funds he was slated to receive could no longer cover the cost of field research in Australia. As an alternative, he arranged to go to the Philippines. Fay-Cooper Cole had worked there under the auspices of the Field Museum in 1907-1908, and wanted Eggan to record changes in Tinguian culture since the time of his original research.
In the late 1930s Eggan developed his field material from North America and published on the Hopi, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Choctaw. In 1941 he completed his first work on the Philippines, "Some Aspects of Cultural Change in the Northern Philippines." In 1938 he married Dorothy Way who was to become an anthropologist of the Hopi and Eggan's professional partner. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown left the University of Chicago for Oxford in 1937. In honor of his departure, Eggan edited Social Anthropology of North American Tribes.
In 1941-1942 Eggan's earlier acquaintance with John Collier led to participation in a pilot study on food and nutrition in the Southwest among Native American and Spanish-American communities. Graduate students conducted the research for this project under the direction of Eggan and Michael Pijoan, M.D. In October of 1942 Eggan was called to Washington to work for the Board of Economic Warfare. Three months later he was Chief of Research in the Office of Special Services for the Philippine government in exile. While carrying out research requested by President Quezon at the Library of Congress, Eggan again worked with Filipinos he had met on his first trip to the Philippines in the mid 1930s . After six months in this capacity, he attended the School for Military Government at Charlottesville, Virginia in preparation for setting up the Civil Affairs Training Program for the Far East at the University of Chicago. Eggan, as a Captain in the army, then returned to the University of Chicago to direct the Program from August 1943 to August 1945.
During and after World War II, Eggan's interests focused on the Philippines, although he still published on Native American subjects. Financed by a Fulbright grant, Fred and Dorothy Eggan spent the year 1949-1950 at the University of the Philippines. In 1953 Eggan won a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his work on the Sagada Igorots. That same year the Philippine Studies Program at the University of Chicago began operations. Eggan established the Philippine Studies Program with money from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and directed the program until 1977.
In 1958-1959 Eggan was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. At the Center, among other projects, he prepared a report on the social and ceremonial organization of the Sagada Igorots.
After the early 1960s Eggan concentrated his efforts on teaching. In 1961 he participated in the first Peace Corps training program at Pennsylvania State University for the Bikol region and Bisayas in the Philippines. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1963. In 1965 his wife Dorothy died.
Four years later Eggan married his second wife, Joan Rosenfeld. In 1970 Eggan was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He retired from teaching at the University in 1974, but stayed on to manage the final projects of the Philippine Studies Program until 1977. He made his last visit to the Philippines in 1975. Late in 1986 he and his wife, Joan, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he continued work until his death in 1991.
The Eggan, Fred. Papers consist of professional and personal materials ranging in date from the 1920s to the 1990s. The collection has been arranged into eleven series. The majority of the collection documents Eggan's career as an anthropologist from his years as a graduate student in the 1920s and 1930s until his retirement from the Department of Anthropolgy at the University of Chicago in 1974. The papers provide materials from nearly all phases and aspects of Eggan's academic life. The physical and conceptual core of the collection is Eggan's ethnographic research as consolidated in his Native American and Philippine studies files.
The collection contains numerous types of material including original drafts and manuscripts, reprints, research and lecture notes, course and seminar work, correspondence, and field notes, as well as published and unpublished papers and articles by other scholars. Also present are non-print materials such as photographs, microfilm, sound and video recordings. A restricted series of letters of recommendation written by Eggan on behalf of others has been placed at the end of the collection. Authorship of papers, presentations, and lectures should be attributed to Eggan unless otherwise noted. All course numbers and titles refer to University of Chicago course offerings, and Eggan is assumed to be the course instructor unless other indication is provided.
The arrangement and structural composition of the papers attempt to follow, as nearly as possible, Eggan's own organizational strategies. These strategies tend to be subject or content based. The ethnographic series reflect a geographic ordering of societies which share certain environmental and cultural traits.
The arrangement of each series or subseries moves from the general to the specific within a given subject area. Correspondence, notes, and bibliographies are usually found at the beginning of the series. These are followed by manuscripts and drafts of Eggan's written work, and lectures, as well as course and seminar materials. These are succeeded by material pertaining to other authors, institutions, and related subject areas. Miscellaneous items such as clippings and reprint sets are found at the end of each series.
Series XII is addendum to the main body of the Eggan Papers. The series includes personal and professional materials ranging Eggan’s early academic life in the 1920’s until his death in 1991. It has been divided into 9 subseries. Subseries I contains personal and posthumous materials including memorabilia, calendars, notes and newspaper clippings, and condolence letters and newspaper clippings of Eggan’s obituary. Subseries II contains materials pertaining to Eggan’s activities as an educator, his association with a range of professional institutions and associations, and his role in many anthropological projects during his late career. Subseries III: Correspondence includes both personal and professional correspondence. Notable correspondents include E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Triloki Pandey and Charles Briggs. Subseries IV incorporates a chronologically organized catalogue of Fred Eggan’s published writings, with some additional drafts and proofs. Subseries V: General Files contains reprinted articles, papers and other writings, some annotated by Eggan. The subseries is arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, or in the case of an unlisted author, by title. Subseries VI: Dorothy Eggan Hopi Dream Research incorporates chronologically-ordered original and photocopied transcriptions of Hopi dreams collected by Dorothy Eggan between 1940 and 1957, and a paper based on her research. Subseries VII: Degrees, Awards and Honors contains the degrees, awards and honors achieved by Fred Eggan during his long career. It incorporates oversize certificates as well as artifacts. Subseries VIII: Photographs, Slides and Negatives incorporates photographic media pertaining primarily to Fred Eggan’s research in the Philippines. It includes oversize photographic prints taken by Eggan and others, including notable Filipino photographer Eduardo Masferré. It also contains glass lantern slides and emulsion negatives that may derive from Fay-Cooper Cole’s research in the Philippines and Indonesia. Subseries IX: Restricted includes personnel and financial materials that are restricted for fifty years.
The following related resources are located in the Special Collections Research Center:
This series holds items ranging in date from 1918 to 1990, and is divided into three subseries. Subseries 1: Personal Papers, contains notes on the Eggan family history, autobiographical notes, curricula vitae, appointment calendars, and transcripts of interviews and reminiscences. No family correspondence is included in this subseries. Subseries 2: Appointments, Awards, and Lectureships, preserves correspondence, certificates, speech and lecture notes, photographs, notices and newspaper clippings relating to fellowships, awards, and honors received by Eggan. Subseries 3: Assessments and Critiques of Eggan's work, provides critical essays and commentaries on Eggan's work by a number of students and colleagues, including Ernest L. Schusky, Raymond D. Fogelson, and Mario Zamora.
This single series is arranged alphabetically by correspondent name. It combines much of Eggan's personal and professional correspondence, dated 1925-1991. Within the personal correspondence, once again there is a gap with respect to family correspondence. Eggan's professional correspondence documents his dialogue with many contemporary social scientists including Ruth Benedict, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, Max Gluckman, Alfred L. Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sol Tax, and Leslie White. Significant portions of correspondence are also found in appropriate subject areas throughout the collection. In addition to correspondence with students and colleagues, much of Eggan's administrative work for various institutions and professional organizations, including the University of Chicago, is represented in the series. This material appears within the alphabetical sequence according to institution or organization name.
This series has been divided into five subseries and contains items spanning the years 1895 to 1990. As a whole, this series focuses on particular individuals and their roles in the development of anthropology.
Subseries 1: General Files, is a collection of correspondence, biographical and autobiographical manuscripts and reprints, bibliographies, memorabilia, media clippings, and obituaries. Most of the individuals represented were personally associated with Eggan as friends, colleagues, students, and teachers. Eggan himself wrote or edited many of the biographies, memoirs, and obituaries and festschriften present in this and the following subseries.
The next four subseries highlight four key figures whose contributions to Eggan's thought and work were significant. Two of these figures, Lewis Henry Morgan (Subseries 2) and H. R. Voth (Subseries 5), were forerunners in the field whose anthropological concerns dovetailed with Eggan's. Morgan made early contributions to the study of Native American kinship and social organization, while Voth provided one of the earliest and most controversial ethnographic accounts of the Hopi. Eggan produced several important articles on Morgan's life and work, including texts for the 1964 Lewis Henry Morgan lectures at Rochester University and the 1977 Smithsonian Institution centennial of Morgan's classic Ancient Society.
Subseries 5: The H. R. Voth Collection, contains approximately 739 photographs of daily and ceremonial Hopi life reprinted from Voth's original 1895 negatives as well as a descriptive catalogue of the prints. By 1964 the original nitrate negatives, housed at Bethel College (North Newton, Kansas), had so severely deteriorated that the Arizona State Museum had five sets of prints reproduced. These sets were distributed to the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Arizona Historical Foundation, the Arizona State Museum, the Bethel College Archives, and Fred Eggan at the University of Chicago. Note: To reproduce any of the images in Subseries 5, permission must be granted by Bethel College, holders of the original negatives.
Subseries 3 and 4 represent A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Edward Sapir. They are noteworthy, not only for their theoretical contributions to the discipline, but for the formative roles they played in Eggan's life as teachers and mentors. Among the Radcliffe-Brown materials are detailed class notes taken by Eggan which document the courses taught by Radcliffe-Brown during his tenure at the University of Chicago.
Mennonite Historical Library, prints from negatives, catalog #621-2098 [please refer to the above "Catalog of Prints from the H.R. Voth Collections" for illustrative descriptions of each print], 1964 [ca. 1895]
Spanning the years 1924 to 1993, this series is comprised of six subseries: General; Historical Perspectives; Cultural and Ethnological Theory; Research Methodologies; Social Organization; and Development and Change. Throughout these subseries similar types of material predominate, namely manuscripts and reprints of articles by both Eggan and others, course outlines, syllabi, reading lists and notes, bibliographies, lecture and reading notes, correspondence, and conference programs, notes and transcripts.
This series reflects aspects of Eggan's theoretical and methodological interests. The most prominent sections of the series concern social organization and cultural and ethnological theory. Eggan's on-going interests in research methodologies, development, and social change are also well-represented.
Significant within this and the following ethnographic series is the concentration of course work and seminar material represented. These materials include not only those courses taught by Eggan, but likewise certain courses taught by other Chicago anthropologists such as Fay-Cooper Cole, Leslie Spiers, Robert Redfield and Milton Singer.
This series has been divided into nine subseries; three of which contain further subdivisions. While Eggan's primary ethnographic interests focused on the Philippines and native North America, Eggan collected an extensive amount of material on other parts and peoples of the world. These secondary interests are represented in subseries on Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Meso- and South America. The materials in these subseries are course syllabi, notes, and outlines, bibliographies, lecture and research notes, manuscripts and reprints, student papers, project proposals, and dissertations, correspondence, pamphlets, abstracts, and maps and charts. These materials range in date from 1913 to 1978, with the bulk of the series originating from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
Subseries 5: Europe, contains Robert Pehrson Research Materials. Pehrson was a doctoral student under Eggan and received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. His dissertation concerned the social organization of the Lapps or Saami of northern Scandinavia. After Pehrson's death in 1955, many of his papers, especially his Lappish, northern European, and northern Asian materials, were transferred to Eggan.
This series consists of field notes, reading notes, lecture notes, bibliographies, manuscripts, student papers, research proposals, reprints, abstracts, reviews, pamphlets, media clippings, correspondence, and maps and charts. The materials date from 1922-1990 and have been divided by geographical region into 15 subseries.
The structure of the North American Indian Files reflect Eggan's use of the culture area concept to organize his ethnographic materials. Each section begins, where available, with material pertaining to a given culture area. Linguistic groups are next, followed by groups with named cultural or tribal identities. These groups are ordered alphabetically. "Marginal" groups whose ethnic and cultural affinities are debated are placed within particular culture areas according to Eggan's classificatory decisions.
Various field data collected by Eggan and other researchers appear throughout the series. Eggan's field notes on the Choctaw are found in Subseries 6: Southeast, his Cheyenne and Arapaho notes in Subseries 7: Plains, and his Hopi field notes are located in Subseries 13: Pueblos.
Also present in this series are materials pertaining to research projects and court cases in which Eggan was involved or in which he took a special interest. The Foodways Project found in Subseries 12: Southwest, was originally conceived as a pan-American study of native food use, nutrition, and diet from both physio-medical and socio-cultural viewpoints. The Solstice Project, also contained in Subseries 12, concerned on-going archaeological research into the astronomical patterning of the architecture of Chaco Canyon Culture. Eggan played no direct role in the project. Nevertheless, he showed an acute interest in its findings, especially in the years following his retirement, collecting correspondence, manuscripts, reprints, abstracts, and memoranda on the subject until the year of his death.
The Hopi-Navajo land dispute documents, Subseries 14, record the long running territorial battles between the two groups. Eggan served on the American Anthropological Association panel which investigated these disputes. He testified in several court cases on behalf of the Hopi. Similarly, Eggan testified for Zuni plaintiffs in their land claims case against the federal government. (see Subseries 15).
This series spans the years 1904 to 1986, and contains field notes, correspondence, manuscripts, student papers, dissertations, research proposals, bibliographies, whole Philippine newspapers, and other media clippings, reports, travel diaries, and photographs. The files are arranged into 13 subseries with general topics such as linguistics, politics, social science research, and also by named cultural identity or tribe. The nucleus of the series is a large amount of field data collected by Eggan and many others concerning peoples of the northern Philippines. Specifically, these field data include maps, climate and language charts, kinship diagrams and genealogies, myth, folktale, and song texts, grammars, and descriptions of rituals. Many of Fay-Cooper Cole's original field notes from 1907-1908 are preserved here as well. Eggan established long-term connections with colleagues and informants in the Philippines who supplied him with ethnographic information in a variety of forms--correspondence, field notes, manuscripts, and diaries. Among the Ilongot materials is a considerable body of ethnographic and linguistic data originally compiled by ethnologist William Jones in 1908-1909. Eggan's own field notes concerning the northern Philippines are located in the sections on Bontoc, Nabaloi, Tinguian, Town Field Notes and Photographs, and Sagada. The final section of the Philippines Files series contains the findings of the American Anthropological Associations' special panel on the "Tasaday Controversy" chaired by Eggan in 1989. The controversy involved debate concerning the extent to which the Tasaday had lived in isolation and technological primitiveness prior to their "discovery" by Westerners in 1971. Series VII: Philippines Files
The material contained in Series VIII is currently restricted due to its physical condition or need for special equipment. The Sound Recordings series include both reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes. The content of the tapes is diverse, including interviews, talks, and addresses, ranging from 1933 (dubbed in 1957) to 1971. Most notable among them are six reels of stories and performances by Alfred Pacyaya spoken in the Sagada dialect of northern Kankanay. The cassettes are chiefly concerned with the 1989 American Anthropological Association session on the Tasaday, and the advanced seminar on "The Hopi Indians" held at the School of American Research in 1982. A folder containing correspondence related to the sound recordings appears at the beginning of the series.
The material contained in Series IX is currently restricted due to its physical condition or need for special equipment.
The microfilm in this series represents a variety of materials including manuscripts, reprints, seminar notes, maps, and charts. Of interest are microfilm copies of class notes and bibliographies from anthropology courses taught in the early 1940s by University of Chicago notables such as Fay-Cooper Cole, Robert Redfield, and W. Lloyd Warner. Also present is a substantial collection documenting portions of Hopi Agency correspondence from 1899 to 1917.
The Photographs series does not contain all photographs in the collection. Other photographs and visual images appear on occasion throughout the collection. The images in this series have been grouped according to content. Thus, the subseries on the American Southwest and Southeast Asia concern images of potential ethnographic value, while the Subseries Personal contains images of family, friends, home, and pleasure travel. There is some degree of overlap among the personal and ethnographic sections. Some images of Eggan's early fieldwork among groups of Choctaw, Cheyenne, and Wichita are located in Subseries 1: General. Types of visual materials contained in Series X include prints, negatives, mounted slides, contact strips, one glass slide, one reel of film and oversized contact sheets. The reel of film, located in Subseries 1, is restricted due to its physical condition or need for special equipment.
The material contained in Series XI is restricted and will not be open to researchers until the year 2041.