The title of this biography aptly describes its author’s approach. Virginia Kerns is interested in the influence of “autobiographical memory and the personal construction of meaning” on Julian Steward’s work, especially his theory and method of cultural ecology (p. 14). Drawing on his published writings and extensive archival sources, as well as on interviews with many colleagues and relatives (including Dorothy Nyswander, Steward’s first wife, Jane Cannon Steward, his second wife, and noted colleagues and students such as Sidney Mintz, Robert Murphy, and Gordon Willey), Kerns constructs a moving, yet meticulous, account of Steward’s life (1902–72) and career. Above all, she explores the experiential, familial, and social factors that, she argues, shaped his work. This is not, then, a narrow account of intellectual influences, but an extended meditation on the relationship between Steward’s life and times and his scientific work and career.

Steward was born in Washington, D.C. in the year of John Wesley Powell’s death (indeed, a paternal relative had accompanied Powell on one of his expeditions). Between 1918 and 1921, he attended the Deep Springs school near Death Valley, California, then went on to Berkeley (where he took his first anthropology course, team-taught by Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and Edward Gifford) and Cornell, where he studied the sciences, especially geology, graduating in 1925. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, studying with Kroeber, Lowie, and the geographer Carl Sauer. Steward’s interest in “subsistence” (in environment, work, and social organization) struck Kroeber as eccentric, but his training with Sauer and his growing friendship with fellow student Duncan Strong reinforced his scientific inclinations. Between 1928 and 1933, he taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Utah, but then struggled, nearly unemployed for two years, until he landed a job with the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), where he edited the Handbook of South American Indians. He accepted a professorship at Columbia in 1946 and then at the University of Illinois in 1952.

Kerns argues convincingly that both the high desert environment at Deep Springs and the social organization of the school—in which male students and teachers cooperated in their studies and in the ranch work that supported life at the school—made an indelible impression on Steward, one that was later expressed in his devotion to “Basin-Plateau” ethnography, his research focus on cultural ecology, and, especially, his emphasis on the patrilineal band. Steward’s two marriages are also a crucial part of Kerns’s story. Steward met Nyswander, a psychologist, in 1925 and married her in 1930, leaving Michigan to join her at the University of Utah, where she was an established professor. Kerns suggests that Nyswander’s influence on Steward can be seen in “the many behaviorist elements” in his doctoral dissertation (p. 111) as well as in his later work, with its emphasis on the observable details of subsistence activities. Yet his marriage to Nyswander influenced him more greatly, Kerns argues, in a negative sense, as he came to believe that his “matrilocal” move from Michigan to Utah—where, “to his lasting disgust,” he was occasionally addressed as “Mr. Nyswander” (p. 134)—had led him to sacrifice his career mobility to hers. He made no such mistake in his second marriage, as Jane Cannon was willing to follow him (“patrilocally”), in a marriage geared to the necessities of his career.

Although Steward’s immediate anthropological forebears were Boasians (Kroeber and Lowie), his scientific orientation was perhaps more profoundly shaped by the 19th-century U.S. scientific tradition represented by Powell and the BAE. At Columbia, Steward referred to himself as a “forester” and to his students as “city-slickers” (p. 244). It is only a small irony that many of his students furthered his research interests by combining his cultural ecology with various strands of European social philosophy, especially Marxism, which Steward himself dismissed.

In remarkably even-handed, and frequently eloquent, prose, Kerns argues that Steward’s experiences in the high desert, his “subsistence” struggles during the Depression to establish himself professionally, and the gender politics of his milieu overdetermined (as a Marxist might say) his anthropological work. She notes in particular his unwillingness to give up on the idea of the patrilineal band as the “normal” form of hunter-gatherer social organization—despite the fact that in his own fieldwork, he never discovered unambiguous evidence for its centrality. In her biography, Kerns brings a sustained feminist critique to bear on the work of a major, mid-century male anthropologist, all the while recounting his life just as a good ethnographer should—that is, with great skill and sympathy.