John Adair is well-known for his work in visual anthropology. He enjoyed photography and film-making in its own right and used his talent to create extensive visual documentation of his fieldwork. He also did some applied work, becoming engaged in the communities that he worked with.
John Adair is well-known for his work in visual anthropology and he also did some applied work. Adair first started school in 1932 as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin where he studied with Ralph Linton. Linton knew of Adair’s immense interest in art and decided to send him to do fieldwork for the first time assisting Clyde Kluckhohn in his research among the Navajos of New Mexico during the summer of 1937. While in New Mexico he became fond of the southwest and developed an interest in Navajo and Pueblo cultures.
In 1938 Adair began his first research studying the Pueblo and Navajo silversmiths. He was intrigued by the relationship between the artisans’ craft and culture. In 1944 he published a book about his findings: The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. Because of his extensive knowledge about silversmiths he was asked to do a survey for the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. The purpose of the project was to encourage the development of Native craftwork in the United States. Directly following the conclusion of his study, he began working as the manager of the Navajo Arts and Crafts Guild in Window Rock, Arizona.
In the fall of 1939 Adair began graduate school at the University of Michigan. During the same year he married Caroline (Casey) Helmer. From 1942-1945, he was called upon to serve in the Army Air Corps in California during World War II. After the war, he moved to the University of New Mexico to finish his graduate studies. He became the University’s first doctoral candidate in anthropology. Adair than moved to Zuni with his family to gather information for his dissertation: The Veterans of World War II at Zuni Pueblo, which explored the impact of returning Zuni soldiers on the community after their experience abroad. It was never published.
Adair was hired by Cornell University in 1948 to teach a series of field seminars in the Southwest with Alexander Leighton. Their research from the seminars was published as First Look at Strangers in 1959. In 1955 Adair joined the Cornell-Navajo Field Health Research Project at Many Farms, located on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. He, along with many other anthropologists, played an important role in this project. They used anthropological insight to help the Navajo community understand and accept Western medicine. Adair and two other anthropologists published a report of the project in The People’s Health in 1970 and later revised the report in 1988.
Following the project Adair joined the National Institute of Mental Health from 1961 to 1964. At the conclusion of his work in the NIMH, he became Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. He remained a professor there until his retirement in 1978.
In 1966 Adair began a Navajo filmmaking project in Pine Springs with Sol Worth, a professor of visual communication. They taught a group of young Navajos how to use movie cameras and how to cut and edit film. The point of this project was to let Navajo students, who had never been exposed to film culture, present stories they had chosen. This gave them an opportunity to depict their culture from their own point of view. A description of the project was published in 1975 and revised in 1997. It was titled Through Navajo Eyes.
Adair soon became ill and was later confined to a wheelchair. He came to Pine Springs in May of 1997 with friends and family to talk about how his archives may be useful to the community. He, along with Benjamin Kahn, a Pine Springs community leader, began to put his papers and photos into the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He wanted to make all of these documents accessible to the people in Pine Springs, where he did most of his work. Because Adair knew that his life was coming to an end, he felt that this project was necessary because of his love of Pine Springs and of the Southwest. This was Adair’s last contribution as an anthropologist before he died in 1997.
References
Adair, John
1944 The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Adair, John, and Kurt W. Deuschle
1970 The People’s Health: Medicine and Anthropology in a Navajo Community. New York: Meredith Corporation.
Powers, Willow Roberts
1999 John Adair Obituary. American Anthropologist 101(3):611-614.
Worth, Sol and John Adair
1997 Through Navajo Eyes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Written By: Courtney Muth, 2001. Edited by Melissa Lorentz, 2008.