Sol Tax was born in Chicago on October 30, 1907 to Morris Paul Tax and Kate (Hanwit) Tax. His family moved to Milwaukee, where Tax received his elementary and secondary education. As a teenager, he participated actively in The Newsboys' Republic, a Milwaukee labor organization for youth; he served as editor of the organization's newspaper, The Newsboys' World, and campaigned vigorously for the offices of President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Newsboy's' Republic, running on The Peoples' Party ticket.
Sol Tax began his undergraduate career at the University of Chicago, entering as a freshman in the spring of 1926; he later transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in his junior year at Wisconsin changed his major from economics to anthropology. At Madison, Tax studied closely with the anthropologist Ralph Linton, and in 1931 graduated with a Ph. B. degree in anthropology.
While still an undergraduate, Tax joined an archaeological expedition sponsored by the Logan Museum, spending the spring of 1930 at a dig in Algeria, and the summer and fall touring prehistoric sites in Europe; his first publication, "An Algerian Passover," (The American Hebrew, April 1931), comes from this period. In the summer of 1931 Tax participated in a group fieldwork project at the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation (New Mexico), under the sponsorship of the Southwestern Laboratory of Anthropology. The project was directed by Ruth Benedict, with linguistic studies supervised by Harry Hoijer.
Tax began graduate work at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931; his M.A. thesis, " The Social Organization of the Fox Indians," was completed in 1932, and in 1935 Tax received the Ph.D. Tax's M.A. and PhD research were directed by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the dominant figure in Social Anthropology at the time. While at Chicago, Tax also participated in Beardsley Ruml's " Dean's Seminar" with Mortimer Adler and Robert Redfield. It was with Redfield that Tax established a lasting professional association. Redfield guided Tax's ethnological work in Guatemala, starting in 1934, and the two soon became colleagues both in Middle American ethnology and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Tax served as ethnologist for the Carnegie Institution of Washington from 1934 to 1948, during the period of his intensive fieldwork in the Lake Atitlan region of Highland Guatemala. Over the years from 1934 to 1958, the year of Redfield's death, Sol Tax and Robert Redfield produced a voluminous correspondence, documenting a long and fruitful intellectual dialogue between the two men.
In 1940, while still affiliated with the Carnegie Institution, Tax was appointed Research Associate at the University of Chicago. He became Associate Professor in 1944 and Professor in 1948, becoming Professor Emeritus of Anthropology in 1977. Tax held a number of administrative posts, including Associate Dean of the Social Sciences Division under Ralph W. Tyler (1948-1953), Chairman of the Committee on Education, Training and Research in Race Relations (1952-1955), Chairman of the Department of Anthropology (1955-1958), Member of the Board of University Publications (1949-1953), section leader of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division (1962-1963), Dean of University Extension (1963-1968), and Co-chairman of the concentration in Cultural Dimensions of Social Change in the Divisional Program in the Social Sciences (1975-1979).
As chairman of the Committee to Reorganize Curriculum in Anthropology from 1945-1947, Tax played a major role in the development of Chicago's nationally prominent anthropology curriculum. Tax also chaired a course in the Scope, Methods, and Interrelations of the Social Sciences (1946-1948), and was Director of the Ford Foundation Self-Study of the University's Behavioral Sciences (1953-1954).
At the University of Chicago, Tax's teaching duties included Anthropology and Social Sciences core courses, North American and Middle American Indian Studies, and his consistently popular Workshop in Action Anthropology. He also served as visiting professor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City (1942-1943), where he trained Mexican students in Social Anthropology field methods and at the University of California at Berkeley (summer 1950).
Sol Tax conducted his first extended ethnological field work among the Algonquian-speaking Fox (or Mesquakie) Indians at Tama County, Iowa, in the 1930s. His intensive study of Fox kinship and social organization formed the basis for his M.A. and PhD theses, in which a variant of the Omaha-type kinship system is exhaustively described using groundbreaking methods of analysis.
In the late fall of 1934, Tax began field work with the Maya Indians of Highland Guatemala and adjacent Mexico: in the Panajachel-Lake Atitlan region (1934-1944), in Chiapas, Mexico (1942-1943), and in northern Guatemala (1942-1944). His exhaustive study of Indian-Ladino economic organization in Panajachel resulted in the 1953 work Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy; related field research provided material for numerous articles on cultural pattering, Indian world view, acculturation, and social and ethnic relations in the Maya area.
It was not until the late 1940s that Tax developed" action anthropology," the major theoretical approach for which he became known. Returning to the Fox Indians of Tama, Iowa in 1948 with a group of University of Chicago students, Tax and his students discovered that it would be impossible for them to remain detached, aloof observers of the culture under investigation. " Action anthropology" thus emerged, in the first instance, out of the particularities of the Fox situation in the late 1940s; soon, however, Tax, working with his students, developed " action anthropology" into a unique formulation of anthropological theory and (field-centered) methodology.
Tax defined " action anthropology" as " an activity in which an anthropologist has two coordinate goals, to neither of which he will delegate an inferior position. He wants to help a group of people solve a problem, and he wants to learn something in the process" [Tax 1952:103]. " Action anthropology" sought to assist a group in pursuing a self-identified course of action based upon a thorough understanding of different options and their implications. The decision makers in this process are always the members of the group themselves, in contrast to applied anthropology, which is characterized by intervention on behalf of a group.
" Action anthropology" perhaps found its clearest expression in the Fox Project (1948-1962), and in contemporaneous work at the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Graduate students who received their first exposure to fieldwork and to " action anthropology" in the Fox Project and at Fort Berthold include Frederick Gearing, Lisa Peattie, Robert Reitz, Steven Polgar, and Robert Merrill, among many others. (The majority of Tax's papers on the Fox Project and the Fort Berthold Project have been deposited at the Smithsonian Institution, along with most of the materials generated by the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference.)
Tax continued to direct action research in the Carnegie Cross Cultural Education Project among the Cherokee Indians at Tahlequah, Oklahoma (1962-1968). A new group of students worked under Tax's guidance at Tahlequah, notably Robert K. Thomas, Albert Wahrhaftig, and John K. White.
In 1959, Sol Tax founded Current Anthropology. He established the journal as a forum for cooperation and communication between scholars in the human sciences world-wide, and as an experiment in community-building, a " participatory democracy." Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology's unique editorial process involved the publication of a given article together with the written comments of as many as 40 scholars in the field, and concluding with a response to those comments by the author of the original article. As founder of Current Anthropology and its editor from 1959 to 1974, Tax played a central role in reshaping relationships among professional anthropologists around the world. The editorial records of Current Anthropology constitute a separate body of material within the Archives.
The same spirit that informed " action anthropology" and encouraged wide-scale, frequent professional communication through Current Anthropology is visible in Tax's many efforts to draw scholars of widely diverse backgrounds together in conferences, seminars, and congresses. Tax's action philosophy clearly was a motivating force behind the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference; one outcome of this unprecedented gathering of over 450 Indians (representing 90 tribes) was a document, the Declaration of Indian Purpose, which was presented to President Kennedy at the White House on 15 August 1962.
Other conferences in which Tax played a key role include the Viking Fund Seminar on Middle American Ethnology and Social Anthropology (1949), which drew together Middle American specialists and resulted in the publication of The Heritage of Conquest (1952), edited by Tax. Other major conferences organized by Tax that resulted in publications edited by him include the Darwin Centennial Celebration in 1959-1960 (Evolution After Darwin, 3 Volumes, 1960); The Community Service Workshop in 1966-1967 (The People Versus the System, 1968); the Conference on the Draft 1966 (The Draft, 1967); and the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (World Anthropology, 100 Volumes, 1975).
Tax's reputation and expertise often made him a natural choice as advisor to government, foundations, and institutions. He served on the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology (1946-1954), the Committee on International Relations in the Behavioral Sciences (1966-1968), the National Institutes of Mental Health Cultural Anthropology Fellowship Review Committee (1967-1971), and President Johnson's Special Task Force on American Indian Affairs (1965-1969), and acted as consultant to the U.S. Office of Education (1965-1970). He was also chosen to serve on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO (1959-1965), holding membership in the Executive Committee in 1963-1965. Tax was a member of the Board of Directors for the Illinois State Museum (1954-1970), and worked closely with the Smithsonian Institution from 1965 through 1977, first as a Special Advisor to the Secretary of Anthropology, and later as Director for the newly created Center for the Study of Man (1969-1977). Tax was associated with the Wenner-Gren Foundation throughout his career, in his editing of the Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology and Current Anthropology, as convener of many supper conferences, and as an advisor and evaluator of grant applications.
Tax participated actively in professional organizations, serving as president of the American Anthropological Association (1958-1959), and of the International Union of Anthropological Sciences (1968-1973). He also assumed editing duties for the American Anthropologist, acting as both associate editor (1948-1952), and editor (1953-1956). Honors received by Tax from professional organizations and foundations include the Viking Fund Medal in Anthropology (1961), the Distinguished Service Award from the American Anthropological Association (1977), and the Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology (1977). A fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Tax also attained honorary membership in the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1956), the Chilean Anthropological Society (1963), and the Czechoslovakian Anthropological Society (1965). He was chosen a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1969-1970), and received honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1969), the University of the Valley of Guatemala (1974), Wilmington College (1974), and Beloit College (1975).
Sol Tax passed away in 1995.
From the guide to the Tax, Sol. Papers, 1923-1989, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)
