Roland Burrage Dixon

Influence of Franz Boas

Roland Burrage Dixon earned his PhD at Harvard under Fredric Ward Putnam, then studied linguistics and ethnology with Franz Boas. He participated in Boas’s Jesup North Pacific Expedition, specifically the Huntington Expedition from 1899 to 1905, working with Native American groups in northeastern California. His early papers are among the first influenced by Boas’s ideas on culture, though Boas did not fully develop those views until 1911, so Dixon’s work was less shaped by them than later students’ work was.

Their views clashed, especially over whether modern “Stone Age” cultures could serve as analogs for prehistoric archaeological cultures—Boas strongly disagreed. Dixon saw cultures as static, geographically oriented entities, with change driven mainly by migration. This geographical-historical approach was never adopted by later anthropologists.

Collaboration

Dixon was fellow Boas student Alfred Kroeber's closest professional colleague from 1897 until about 1906. They coordinated closely, published a number of papers jointly, and had an explicit agreement not to duplicate one another's work, Dixon working on languages and cultures in northeastern California and the northern Sierra Nevada, Kroeber in the remainder of the state.

Travel and field work

Dixon carried out ethnographic research in Siberia and Mongolia (1901); New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, and Fuji (1909); Mexico (1910); Himalayas, Assam and Upper Burma, the Malay Peninsula and Java, China and Japan (1912-13).

Ideas on race

Dixon was influenced in his ideas about race by his mentor, Putnam, who had been trained by Louis Agassiz and both of these 19th century anthropologists handed down a tradition of viewing the races as separate species. In his 1923 book, The Racial History of Man, Dixon disavowed earlier creationist polygenism while embracing a new evolutionary view of the races as coming from different fossil ancestors giving rise to different species of humans.

Recognition

In 1910, Dixon was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He was vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1910–1911 and president of the American Folklore Society from 1907 to 1908. He was professor at Harvard after 1916 and member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace (1916–1918) in Paris. Professor Dixon was a contributor to anthropological and ethnological journals.

Reputation

Obituaries by fellow anthropologists ascribed to Dixon an icy and demanding personality, with an attitude of "unsympathetic impartiality, of ruthless condemnation, or of detached approval."

Did You Know?

• Dixon spent his entire career at Harvard, from graduating in 1897 to his death in 1934.
• Obituaries described Dixon's personality as having an attitude of 'unsympathetic impartiality, of ruthless condemnation, or of detached approval.'