Career
Steward went on to establish an anthropology department at the University of Michigan, where he taught until 1930. The department later gained notoriety from the appointment and guidance of Leslie White, with whose model of "universal" cultural evolution Steward disagreed. In 1930, Steward moved to the University of Utah, which appealed to Steward for its proximity to the Sierra Nevadas, and nearby archaeological fieldwork opportunities in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon.
Steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work — an approach Kroeber regarded as “eccentric,” original, and innovative. (EthnoAdmin 2003) In 1931, Steward, pressed for money, began fieldwork on the Great Basin Shoshone under the auspices of Kroeber’s Culture Element Distribution (CED) survey; in 1935 he received an appointment to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), which published some of his most influential works. Among them: Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938), which “fully explicated” the paradigm of cultural ecology, and marked a shift away from the diffusionist orientation of American anthropology.
For eleven years Steward became an administrator of considerable clout, editing the Handbook of South American Indians. He also took a position at the Smithsonian Institution, where he founded the Institute for Social Anthropology in 1943. He also served on a committee to reorganize the American Anthropological Association and played a role in the creation of the National Science Foundation. He was also active in archaeological pursuits, successfully lobbying Congress to create the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (the beginning of what is known today as 'salvage archaeology') and worked with Wendell Bennett to establish the Viru Valley project, an ambitious research program centered in Peru.
Steward searched for cross-cultural regularities in an effort to discern laws of culture and culture change. His work explained variation in the complexity of social organization as being limited to within a range possibilities by the environment. In evolutionary terms, he located this view of cultural ecology as “multi-linear,” in contrast to the unilinear typological models popular in the 19th century, and Leslie White’s “universal” approach. Steward’s most important theoretical contributions came during his teaching years at Columbia (1946–53).
Steward's most theoretically productive years were from 1946-1953, while teaching at Columbia University. At this time, Columbia saw an influx of World War II veterans who were attending school thanks to the GI Bill. Steward quickly developed a coterie of students who would go on to have enormous influence in the history of anthropology, including Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Roy Rappaport, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Morton Fried, Robert F. Murphy, and influenced other scholars such as Marvin Harris. Many of these students participated in the Puerto Rico Project, yet another large-scale group research study that focused on modernization in Puerto Rico.
Steward left Columbia for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he chaired the Anthropology Department and continued to teach until his retirement in 1968. There he undertook yet another large-scale study, a comparative analysis of modernization in eleven third world societies. The results of this research were published in three volumes entitled Contemporary Change in Traditional Societies. Steward died in 1972.
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