Theall on McLuhan and Carpenter

From:Donald Theall, Thu, 31 Jan 2002.
Peter is quite right when he stresses the importance of Carpenter's role as the person who initially interested McLuhan in many of his borrowings from anthropology. If you look at McLuhan's work prior to 1950 or thereabouts and compare it with his work by 1953 or thereabouts, you will notice his growing interest in anthropological questions. It is worth noting that he first met Carpenter at a meeting with Innis in 1948, but he actually became deeply involved with Carpenter in 1951. I can personally attest to this, since I was taking an anthropology course with Carpenter in 1950-1 and taking a course with McLuhan and working under him on my Master's thesis in the same period. I believe the first personal social encounter they had was when we invited both of them and their wives for an evening to our apartment. Marshall and Ted really clicked and they became colleagues and friends who talked frequently. In the winter of 1952-3. I acted as a secretary to their discussions of the application to the Ford Foundation and assisted in doing preliminary drafts for them. The other contributor at this time was Marshall's lifelong friend, the political economist, Tom Easterbrook. who had a lot to do with McLuhan's initially becoming interested in Innis. But Carpenter was the prime influence opening up Marshall's interest in the newer interest in anthropology Sapir, Boas, the culture and personality school, Whorf, the Smiths, Hall, etc., supplementing the knowledge of anthropology that Marshall had developed from his literary studies and Joyce Levi Bruhl, Malinowski, Marcel Jousse and other such figures. Carpenter also encouraged Mcluhan's reading into major figures in the history of anthropology such as Edward Tylor.

Another vital area was Carpenter's own field work, especially in the North, which plays an important role in early investigation of modes of space and time, questions of language and communication and the like. And when Explorations started in 1953 (Carpenter's idea actually), Carpenter brought in the anthropological and social scientific side like Dorothy Lee.

Essentially it was a cross-fertilization, since they sparked off one anther's interests so it was possible to see Carpenter coming to speak of _Ulysses_ as a mode of anthropology. Since they became such close friends, the relationship is complex and fully discuss it would take a lot more space. For those interested I think that Bob Dobb's suggestion of Carpenter's appendix in _The Virtual Marshall McLuhan_ is helpful in this respect. And perhaps some of the discussion in passing of Carpenter and McLuhan complement it, although unfortunately I did not go as deeply into the anthropology connection as I would have liked. It is, as Peter suggested, most important.

Donald Theall

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