Anthony F. C. Wallace

Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace (April 15, 1923 – October 5, 2015) was a Canadian-American anthropologist who specialized in Native American cultures, especially the Haudenosaunee. His research expressed an interest in the intersection of cultural anthropology and psychology. He was famous for the theory of revitalization movements.

Early life and education Wallace was born in Toronto, Ontario, on April 15, 1923, and was the son of the historian Paul Wallace and his wife, a British national. After attending school in Annville, Pennsylvania, he enrolled into Lebanon Valley College, in 1941, where he studied French-Canadian folklore, and later, the oral literature of the Haudenosaunee and Lenape. A year later, Wallace joined the Army Specialized Training Program at the University of Cincinnati, and studied electrical engineering there for one year. In October 1944, he was assigned to the 14th Armored Division in Southern France where he remained until the end of the war in 1945.

After the war, Wallace returned to his studies and earned his BA in history in 1947 and an MA and PhD in anthropology in 1949 and 1950 respectively from the University of Pennsylvania. It was during 1947 studies, when he published his first article entitled "Woman, Land, and Society: Three Aspects of Aboriginal Delaware Life", and following its success, joined the Department of Anthropology after reading The Golden Bough by James George Frazer. During his graduate studies at Penn, Wallace was a student of American ethnologist Frank Speck and when professors Alfred Irving Hallowell, Loren Eiseley, and Ward Goodenough joined the faculty, Wallace became their student too.

The Cold War, which started around the same time, allowed Wallace to join the National Academy of Sciences Committee which was headed by William N. Fenton, an anthropologist and Haudenosaunee expert, at that time. During his stay with the committee, he was responsible for the study of aftermath of a tornado at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1953. A year prior to it, Wallace already published an article on Native American studies titled "Handsome Lake and the Great Revival in the West" which in 1969 was published as part of his book The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. His other notable works of that time were the "Mazeway Resynthesis: A Biocultural Theory of Religious Inspiration" and "Mazeway Disintegration" which were published in 1956 and 1957 respectively. At time when he was writing those articles, he wrote a report on tornado studies in Worcester, Massachusetts entitled "Tornado in Worcester: An Exploratory Study of Individual and Community Behavior in an Extreme Situation" which was later published under Rockdale and St. Clair, a precursor of his future career. His last publication in that field was in 1960. Entitled "The Meaning of Kinship Terms", the work was written by him and his colleague, a fellow anthropologist John Atkins.

Around 1971, Wallace, after finishing his term as department chair, he became an author of such books as Rockdale and Saint Clair which were awarded Bancroft and Dexter Prizes in 1987 and 1989 respectively. Until his retirement in 1988, Wallace served on the board of the Research Foundation of the University, the Faculty Editorial Committee of the University Press and the Ethnohistory Committee.

Retirement and death After his retirement in 1988, Wallace returned to the study of Native American culture, writing such books as The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians in 1992 and Tuscarora: A History in 2013. A decade before the publication, Wallace's wife, Betty had died. He had planned to move to western New York with her so that he would be closer to the Tuscarora Reservation.

Works (1949) King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung 1700–1763. (1952) The Modal Personality Structure of the Tuscarora Indians, as Revealed by the Rorschach Test, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. (1961) Culture and Personality, New York: Random House. (1966) Religion: An Anthropological View. (1969) The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, with the assistance of Sheila C. Steen, New York: Random House. (1978) Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. (1982) The Social Context of Innovation, Princeton University Press. (1987) Saint Clair: a Nineteenth Century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry, New York: Random House; 1988 with corrections, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. LCCN n/88/4772. (1993) "The Long, Bitter Trail", New York: Hill & Wang. (1999) "Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans", Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. (2012) Tuscarora: A History, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. (2013, December) "Commentary: 'Growing Up Indian': Childhood and the Survival of Nations" in Ethos (Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology) Volume 41:4, pp. 337–340.