Fred Eggan - Research Emphasis

Research Emphasis

Eggan’s research has been primarily focused on “Native American kinship and social systems”, making use of archeological, linguistic, and general ethnographic evidence. With his work in North America, Eggan attempted to create a theory to illuminate Boasian empiricism, which was a theory developed by Franz Boas that all knowledge was derived from sense-experience. Eggan’s work in Santa Fe analyzed each Western Pueblo social structure and compared and contrasted them to the Eastern Pueblos. His most important contribution to archeology, and possibly anthropology in general, was his demonstrations how the variations currently observed in the Pueblo social structures are related to cultural adaptations to ecological niches. Eggan’s time spent studying the Cheyenne and Arapaho served as a basis for one of his most famous works, “Social Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Comparison.” He demonstrated how it was possible for the Cheyenne to change from a predominantly agricultural based lineage type kinship system to a system that was predominantly nomadic involving a heavy dependence on hunting and gathering in bands to increase their efficiency. Eggan theorized from his extensive research that this was a result of being forced by other tribes onto the Plains out of their land, which was in present day Minnesota. The result of Eggan’s work in the Philippines can be found in his paper on “Cultural Drift and Social Change.” It is in this paper that he claims as one travels from the interior down to the coast, there are patterned series of changes in a definite direction in many important cultural institutions such as social, political, economic, and religious.