Clark Wissler - Employment History

Employment History

Clark Wissler performed his field research from 1902 until 1905 on the Dakota, Gros Ventre, and the Blackfoot. Wissler's fieldwork provided comprehensive ethnographies of each Native American culture, especially the Blackfoot. While Curator, Wissler funded ethnological and archaeological fieldwork of the Northern Plains and the Southwest. Wissler also "encouraged physical anthropology, built up collections of worldwide scope, planned exhibitions, and oversaw the publication of about thirtyeight volumes of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History."

Wissler's best contribution to anthropology is his Culture-Area Approach. "He was the first anthropologist to perceive the normative aspect of culture, to define it as learned behavior, and to describe it as a complex of ideas, all characteristics of culture that are today generally accepted." Wissler wanted to compare different cultures, but in order to do that he first needed to define what a culture is. The concept of Culture Area had been around before Wissler, but he redefined the concept so it could be used analytically. Wissler revolutionized the study of culture to a theory of cultural change and as an alternative to the Boasian style of anthropology. Wissler shifted the analytical focus away from the culture and history of a specific social unit to "a concern with the trait-complex viewed in cross cultural perspective." "The correspondence of a well-defined geographical area with a group of cultures that share many features is the basis of the concept of the culture area." Wissler states that the principal barriers that preserve the distinctness of a culture area as physical: surface, climate fauna, and flora. Wissler was trying to make cultural anthropology more scientific by forming a definition of culture that could be used to compare similar or different cultures. With a set of parameters for what a culture can be based upon, variables such as climate, environment, resources, food, water, and population size etc., researchers could now compare their studies of Plains Indians to their studies of Great Basin Indians. Wissler also helped introduce statistics with the Pearson Correlation Coefficient Formula which could be used to compare different artifacts in relations to their geological location. This could help understand where a certain artifact, piece of pottery, or type of tool originated by testing if there is a high correlation of a certain artifact with sites in certain areas.