D’Arcy McNickle, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana, was a novelist, political activist, and anthropologist of Native American cultures. His life bookended two major changes in anthropology in the twentieth century, and he lived during two significant periods of literary history, Modernism and Postmodernism. When he was born in 1904 the newly emerging field of anthropology was undergoing a significant paradigm shift that redefined the concept of culture and made possible the notion of “cultures”. When he died in 1977 the field began to undergo a second radical transformation that challenged fundamental disciplinary assumptions about fieldwork and the discipline as an objective science. During his life, McNickle was an important figure in…
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Citation: Kent, Alicia. "D'Arcy McNickle". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 August 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12936, accessed 13 October 2024.]