| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Bradley J. Parker and Lars Rodseth, editors. Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 2005. Pp. vi, 294. $50.00.
Late twentieth-century demographic and intellectual revolutions in the American academy precipitated powerful assaults on frontier as a useful category of historical analysis. Some historians of the American West even urged the retirement of what Patricia Nelson Limerick dubbed "the f-word." Among scholars of the United States, frontier became shorthand for a narrative of nineteenth-century history in which a white man's republic eradicated, exploited, or ignored different peoples and landscapes. To argue that an extended process of settlement and community building had created a distinctive democratic society seemed naïve at best and dangerous at worst. Indeed, to invoke the frontier was to indulge in an uncritical celebration of the expansion of the United States. Historians committed to recovering the voices of people who had resisted the expansion of the United States or contested its expansion from within believed the term hopelessly ethnocentric and nationalistic. It was as morally offensive as it was intellectually quaint.	1
Ironically, however, a plethora of conferences at the end of the century intended to deconstruct "frontier" ended up rehabilitating the term, in large part because of the turn of many historians to international and interdisciplinary perspectives. Investigating the etymology of frontier revealed that American historians' use of the term was as ethnocentric and provincial as that of American nationalists. Different people have defined frontier in different ways for different purposes, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with the United States. For twentieth-century "European historians and geographers ... a frontier was usually an imperial boundary" (p. 6). As important, scholars other than historians were fascinated by places in-between, places where meaning and power were contested even in the most mundane of human activities.	2
Scholars found, in fact, that debating the nature of open-ended areas from a variety of angles helped them think creatively about cross-cultural exchange and conflict. The value of frontier studies lay less in what the term meant than in the conversations people had about what it meant. Thus when historian Bradley J. Parker and anthropologist Lars Rodseth write that on frontiers "it is possible both to escape from the cultural conventions of one's own society and to make contact with people carrying other conventions, other ways of living, thinking, and organizing social groups," they are describing both the subjects of the essays here collected and the process that gave birth to their book.	3
In the spring of 2002 Parker brought together a group of scholars to "open an interdisciplinary debate about the processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts" (p. 3). Now Parker and Rodseth have published the papers in a collection designed to untame the concept of the frontier; that is, to wrest it from the familiar and revive "its power to excite the scholarly imagination" (p. 3). At least in theory, the editors were less interested in detailing subject and content; time and place are less important than thinking through the multiple dimensions of frontiers. The nine contributors include historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists.	. . .

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