Radin, Paul
RADIN, PAUL (1883–1959) was an American anthropologist. Born in Lódź, Poland, Radin was brought to the United States by his parents while he was still an infant, in 1884. Upon completing his studies in anthropology at Columbia University, he spent his life as a vagabond scholar, teaching at numerous colleges and universities in the United States and lecturing at most of the major universities of western Europe. Among them were the University of California at Berkeley, Cambridge University, Fisk University, the University of Chicago, Kenyon College, Black Mountain College, and Brandeis University. He was never offered, nor did he seek, tenure anywhere; devoted to his studies of the cultures of primitive societies, he was content to be institutionally rootless.
Radin was perhaps the most cultivated anthropologist in the history of the discipline. He was a man of paradox: a skeptic with a strong sense of the sacred, an agnostic who was fascinated by all religious phenomena, a Jew who disclaimed the uniqueness of the revelation contained in the Hebrew scriptures. In deconstructing the specificity of Old Testament claims, Radin's work follows that of Andrew Lang and others on the ubiquity of high gods among primitive—that is, pre-class, or stateless—peoples.
Radin was always equivocal about primitive religions. In Primitive Religion (1937) he argues for a Freudian explanation of religious concepts, and a "Marxist" awareness of the potential for domination in religious establishments, but he does not thereby deny the authenticity of a given faith stripped down to its core. In his arguments, Radin clearly indicates a belief in the irreducible universality of religious faith, which universality is an essentially phenomenological matter. On the other hand, he was fully aware of the exploitative potential of all significant religious figures and movements. These include the primitive shaman who could conceivably dominate others through his peculiar capacity to evoke religious states. Nonetheless, as he makes clear in Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), Radin did not imagine that structures of domination, as normally understood, could be found in primitive societies. In fact, Radin's sense of the comparative deficiencies of civilization is evident throughout his work.
Radin brought to the study of religion a powerful sense of human fatality and historical contingency. It is probable that his own personality, continuously shaped by a very broad understanding of human experience, led him to focus on the ambivalent figure of the trickster, which is given free reign in primitive societies but is repressed in more advance civilization. More than any other aspect of his work, this concern—presented in The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956)—commended him to philosophers and psychologists alike. For Radin, the trickster reflected the double image of God: an androgynous figure, bursting with energy, without values, both creator and destroyer, the cosmic villain, and, at the same time, a bumbling fool. This definition of the trickster, which has become a classic, probably represents Radin's most striking contribution to the development of anthropological thinking.
Radin's interest in primitive religion covered a wide range of subjects. The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian by Sam Blowsnake (1920), which Radin edited and translated, is a pioneer work that represents, presumably in the protagonist's own words, the cultistic efforts to compensate for a lost culture, and the conflicts that ensue. Radin had a particular concern for people caught between faiths.
However, it is not Radin's focus on religious matters that commands attention, but rather the great sweep of his thinking and his powerful, indirect critique of modern secularism (see The World of Primitive Man, 1953) and the depths of his humanity that bound him to the primitive peoples and sacred societies he studied. If Paul Radin was the most cultivated anthropologist in the history of the discipline, he was also the most faithful, in every sense of the word.
Bibliography
Besides the works cited above, most of which are available in reprint editions, the following books represent important contributions made by Radin to anthropological studies: The Genetic Relationship of the North American Indian Languages (Berkeley, Calif., 1919) and The Method and Theory of Ethnology: An Essay in Criticism (New York, 1933).
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