Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

3 results found

reorder grid_view

British anthropology and the idea of the 'primitive society' , c. 1920-1970

January 1, 2016

My PhD thesis is a study of British social anthropology. It is told through shifting concepts of the 'primitive society' between the 1920s and the 1970s. Broadly speaking, academic anthropologists in Britain ceased to see 'primitives' as evolutionarily backward and increasingly began to relativize concepts of culture and society. Despite this general shift in social scientific discourse, anthropologists' ideas about the 'primitive' were often conceptually incoherent. Was a "primitive society", James Ferguson asks, "Pre-industrial? Pre-literate? Pre-modern? Pre-westernized? Pre-complex-organization?" Social anthropologists in the British tradition were supposed to be post-evolutionist but their discussions of the relative 'primitivity' of their subjects point to the latent assumptions of development nested within their functionalism. These tensions between relativism and evolutionism are explored in the five main chapters of my thesis.

Creating Links between British and American Broadcasters in the 1930s

January 1, 2009

My research project centers on the links that the Rockefeller Foundation created and supported between British and American artists and institutions in the field of broadcasting. Though much of the groundwork here has been admirably laid by William Buxton and Brett Gary , my week in the archives allowed me to bring out the British element, notably in the initiatives undertaken by John Marshall, a long-time program officer in the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. I focused on three aspects of this work: fellowships provided to allow American broadcasters to study at the BBC and British broadcasters to visit and study in the United States; the support that the Rockefeller Foundation and members of the Rockefeller family provided to station W1XAL in Boston; and the project headed by Archibald MacLeish at the Library of Congress from 1939 to 1941. A thread that ties all three of these projects together, besides the work of John Marshall, is the career of Charles Siepmann, a BBC executive who came to the US under Rockefeller Foundation auspices and was involved in all three arenas (and several more as well). Another significant figure is John Grierson, the British documentarist who advised on some of these projects. My tentative conclusion is that Marshall's cultivation of links with British broadcasting had an enormous impact on the shape and direction of radio in the United States, and that this influence lingers significantly today.

The Commonwealth Fund, Child Guidance, and Psychiatric Social Work in Britain, 1918-1939

January 1, 2004

During and immediately after World War II considerable concern was being expressed in Great Britain about the future psychological development of the nation's children. Explicit links were drawn between what was seen as emotional and psychological deprivation and the emergence of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and, increasingly as the Cold War took hold, the Soviet Union. There was, therefore, a perceived relationship between mentally "healthy" children and political and social stability alongside a related emphasis on children's rights, rights which were to be placed in the broader framework of the post-war "welfare state" and the associated concept of social citizenship. It was in this context that I was working on an official Scottish committee -- the Clyde Committee -- which in 1946 was given the task of investigating the condition of homeless children and coming up with suggestions as to better provision for them. The Committee's findings, along with those of its English equivalent, the Curtis Committee, were crucial in determining the shape of one important constituent of the "welfare state," the 1948 Children Act.

Showing 3 of 3 results