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How It Came to Be: Carl 0. Sauer, Franz Boas, and the Meaning of Anthropogeography. William W. Speth. Ellensburg, WA: Ephemera Press. 268 pp.
How It Came to Be brings together eight previously published articles, two unpublished manuscripts, two biographical pieces, appendixes featuring geographers' and anthropologists' correspondence to the author focused on Sauer's relations with Berkeley Boasians, and a detailed set of endnotes. Since filing his geography dissertation "Historicist Anthropogeography: Environment and Culture in American Anthropological Thought from 1890 to 1950" (1972), William Speth has been the most devoted and adept student of Carl Sauer and his Berkeley School's relations to anthropology and with anthropologists. This collection should establish Speth, an independent scholar, as the key excavator and interpreter of these and related aspects of Sauer's long and significant career. As was the case until recently with Boas, book-length biographical treatment of Sauer has yet to appear, though at least two studies are said to be in the works. And like Boas, collected essays and numerous articles have been published on Sauer and his historicist cultural geography. Despite the various similarities and connections between the Boasian and Sauerian enterprises, a full-scale systematic study of these relations remains undone. Speth's volume offers multiple points of both precis and departure, as well as likely provocations for such a project. It would seem that Speth's writings have largely escaped notice by anthropologists. For example, there are no references to Speth's work in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic (1996), volume 8 within Stocking's History of Anthropology series. Given that collection's focus on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition, some citation might be expected. Save for "The Anthropogeographic...