E. Adamson Hoebel
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Edward Adamson Hoebel (1906 – 1993) was an American author and teacher. He was a Regents Professor Emeritus of
anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
at the
University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...
.


Career

Having studied under
Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...
, he held a PhD in anthropology from
Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
. There he also attended the seminars of Karl N. Llewellyn, who taught at the
Columbia Law School Columbia Law School (CLS) is the Law school in the United States, law school of Columbia University, a Private university, private Ivy League university in New York City. The school was founded in 1858 as the Columbia College Law School. The un ...
from 1925 to 1951. Llewellyn (1893–1962) was the most important figure associated with the American Legal Realism of the 1920s and 1930s, which held that the law was indeterminate on the basis of statutes and precedents alone and required study of the how disputes are resolved in practice. The "sociological" wing of legal realism championed by Llewellyn held that in American law dispute resolution was strongly influenced by norms such as those in mercantile practice. Llewellyn and Hoebel (1941) went to on to develop a means of determining legal practice from ethnographic description of trouble cases, including mediation and negotiation as well as adjudication. Their "case study method" applied both to social systems with and without formal courts. Hoebel taught anthropology at
New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
from 1929 to 1948, and subsequently at the
University of Utah The University of Utah (the U, U of U, or simply Utah) is a public university, public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Book of Mormon), Deseret by the General A ...
, 1948 to 1954, where he was also dean of the University College (Arts and Sciences). He served as a Fulbright professor in anthropology at
Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...
and law at the
Catholic University of Leuven University of Leuven or University of Louvain (; ) may refer to: * Old University of Leuven (1425–1797) * State University of Leuven (1817–1835) * Catholic University of Leuven (1834–1968) * Katholieke Universiteit Leuven or KU Leuven (1968 ...
. He retired in 1972 as Regents' Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota after teaching there for 18 years, 15 of them as head of the department. He served as president of the
American Ethnological Society The American Ethnological Society (AES) is the oldest professional anthropological association in the United States. History of the American Ethnological Society Albert Gallatin and John Russell Bartlett founded the American Ethnological Societ ...
and the
American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an American organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropo ...
. Between 1933 and 1949, Hoebel studied the legal systems of the
Northern Cheyenne The Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation () is the federally recognized Northern Cheyenne tribe and a Plains tribe. The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation is reservation located in southeastern Montana, that is ...
,
Northern Shoshone Northern Shoshone are Shoshone of the Snake River Plain of southern Idaho and the northeast of the Great Basin where Idaho, Wyoming and Utah meet. They are culturally affiliated with the Bannock people and are in the Indigenous people of the Grea ...
,
Comanche The Comanche (), or Nʉmʉnʉʉ (, 'the people'), are a Tribe (Native American), Native American tribe from the Great Plains, Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today belong to the List of federally recognized tri ...
, and
Pueblo people The Pueblo peoples are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited Pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the ...
, and the legal system of Pakistan in 1961. He was a close friend and colleague of
Max Gluckman Herman Max Gluckman (; 26 January 1911 – 13 April 1975) was a South African and British social anthropologist. He is best known as the founder of the Manchester School of anthropology. Biography and major works Gluckman was born in Joha ...
, founder of the Manchester School of British
Social Anthropology Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...
. Gluckman, also given to a realist orientation to the study of law, used and further developed Llewellyn that Hoebel's "case study method" of analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions used in trouble cases, and the influence of social norms and conflicts outside the law. The behavioral "case study" approach has continued and expanded in later anthropological works such as ''
Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems ''Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan'' is an anthropological and complexity science book by social anthropologists Douglas R. White, University of California, Irvine, and Ulla Johansen of the Un ...
'' (2005). His books include ''Anthropology: The Study of Man'' (1949), which was a widely used textbook for decades, and ''The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains'' (1961). The books of which he was a co-author include ''The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence'' (1941; 1st author, with legal scholar Llewellyn), and ''The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains'' (1952; 2nd author with Texas historian Ernest Wallace). In 1954 Hoebel contributed his major book on legal anthropology, ''The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics,'' on broadening the legal realist tradition to include non-Western nations. In doing so, he concluded with a statement about the need for contributions from the comparative legal realism tradition if progress was to be made toward world governance. Eclipsed by the
Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
, even the legal realist concepts of what constitutes law and government have failed to make an impact on political science and the concept of the state in the contemporary period. Hoebel's working definition of what is law is worth citing: "A
social norm A social norm is a shared standard of acceptance, acceptable behavior by a group. Social norms can both be informal understandings that govern the behavior of members of a society, as well as be codified into wikt:rule, rules and laws. Social norma ...
is legal if its neglect or infraction is regularly met, in threat or in fact, by the application of physical force by an individual or group possessing the socially recognized privilege of so acting". Because "government without law is limited to the administration of services", one of the implications of the legal realist tradition is that it is not necessarily in the capital city that one must look to define the government of a modern nation but to how the law "will develop its shape in the arena of action," "hammered out as specific issues catalyze action for the trouble case at hand". Hoebel's definition, unlike that of
neoconservative Neoconservatism (colloquially neocon) is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and ...
thought and its invocation of
Leo Strauss Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was an American scholar of political philosophy. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students an ...
for justification of government deception, is that to be legal, law must be based on social norms, and norms on agreements within communities, rather than the dominance of the few. Hoebel was elected to the
American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
in 1963.


References

* *
E. Adamson Hoebel Papers 1925–1983


Footnotes


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hoebel, E. Adamson American ethnographers Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni New York University faculty University of Minnesota faculty University of Utah faculty 1906 births 1993 deaths Presidents of the American Anthropological Association 20th-century American anthropologists Members of the American Philosophical Society