by Diana Marsh and Katherine Christensen
Last March, a giant in the field of anthropology passed
away. Sydel Silverman (1933-2019) was a scholar of Italian and other (as she
called them) “complex” societies, as well as the history of anthropology. In
her doctoral work and first book (Three
Bells of Civilization: the Life of an Italian Hill Town 1975), she
combated stereotypes of rural communities through her ethnography of
Montecastello di Vibio, a small Umbrian hilltop town.
Silverman advocated for anthropology throughout her career. At
the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in the 1970s, Silverman argued
that anthropology was an “essential” discipline, convincing
Margaret Mead to join her fight. Robert J. Kibbee, then CUNY’s Chancellor, proposed a
restructuring plan that would eliminate the anthropology departments in a
number of CUNY’s colleges. As a result of Silverman’s activities, when the
restructuring occurred in 1976, no anthropology departments were affected.
In so doing, she resurrected the anthropology program at CUNY, turning it into
one of the top ten anthropological doctoral programs in the U.S.
Silverman’s perhaps most influential contribution to the
field was her leadership of the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research, anthropology’s most prominent
funding organization, where she served as President from 1987 to 1999. Through
Wenner-Gren, Silverman built anthropology’s intellectual community and reach. She
championed unity among all four of anthropology’s often disconnected
fields—archaeological, biological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology. She
also published on the field’s scholarly process, reflecting in her writing
about its networks and conferences (see The
Beast at the Table: Conferencing with Anthropologists, 2002).
Photo:
Sydel Silverman Papers in the National Anthropological Archives pod, Museum
Support Center, Suitland, Maryland.
Silverman was also a major proponent of preserving
anthropology’s legacy through archival records. She helped to found the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR),
which published works on the topic and created a registry of anthropologists’
archival papers. As Silverman said in 2014, “Those of us who
created CoPAR had as our primary objective to save the unpublished field notes
and other primary documents of field research for the benefit of scholars,
members of the subject communities, and others with serious purposes for
consulting this material” (Personal correspondence). For more on her
foundational CoPAR work, see this 2012 blog post. In 2015, Silverman participated in a workshop to revitalize CoPAR for the digital age, which initiated the development of new working groups and a new website (Marsh et al. 2019).
Photo: Screen
shot of the new Sydel Silverman Papers finding aid on sova.si.edu
This month, the NAA published a digital, keyword searchable
(‘encoded’, in archives-speak) finding aid (created by Katherine Christensen) to
Silverman’s collections. The collections are made up of about 25 linear feet of
material documenting Silverman’s fieldwork in Italy, educational and
administrative roles, participation in research networks, and vast collection
of informal observational notes taken throughout her career. Media include
field notebooks and journals, correspondence, news clippings, unpublished
writings, meeting notes, teaching files, photographs, slides, and audio recordings.
Given Silverman’s interest in anthropological legacies, we
look forward to seeing how Silverman’s legacy—archival papers now more easily searchable
online—are used and repurposed by the field’s next generation.
The
finding aid for the Sydel Silverman Papers is available online at https://sova.si.edu/record/NAA.2011-11
Acknowledgements
Funding for the processing of Sydel Silverman’s papers was
provided by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation; processing was completed
by Christy Fic. Funding to convert pdf and Word finding aids to encoded finding
aids was provided by the FY2019 Collections Information System (CIS) pool. With
this funding the
NAA has recently added 6 other finding aids to SOVA for the papers of Anthony
Leeds, Richard L. Hay, Marvin Harris, Ethel Cutler Freeman, Richard Lynch
Garner, and Chris Gjording.
Bibliography
Marsh,
Diana E., Ricardo L. Punzalan, and Jesse A. Johnston 2019. "Preserving
Anthropology's Digital Record: CoPAR in the Age of Electronic Fieldnotes, Data
Curation, and Community Sovereignty." The American Archivist (online
first): https://americanarchivist.org/doi/abs/10.17723/aarc-82-02-01
Schneider,
Jennifer 2019. “In Memoriam: Dr. Sydel Silverman,” The Graduate Center, The
City University of New York: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/getmedia/ad326c60-a6dd-484d-9cda-9d6425171cf7/sydel-silverman-in-memoriam-v2
Silverman,
Sydel 1975. Three Bells of Civilization: the Life of an Italian Hill
Town. New York: Columbia University Press.
Roberts,
Sam. "Sydel Silverman, 85, Dies; Defended Anthropology in
Academia." New York Times, April 5, 2019.
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