NO. I ETHNOGEOGRAPHIC BOARD BENNETT 1/ 



office of the Directorate was "the Board." Throughout this report 

 the term "Board" is used to refer to the advisory body, the Director- 

 ate, or to both combined. Where activities are described, the term 

 usually means the Directorate ; elsewhere, as in discussions of policy, 

 it more often refers to total organization. As the emergency activities 

 of the Directorate diminished the question of its relationship to the 

 Board was sharpened. Should the closing of the Washington office 

 automatically dissolve the Board? We now know that the Board 

 expired when its right arm was amputated, l)ut a skilled surgeon 

 could theoretically have kept it alive. 



In operation the Board and the Directorate were thoroughly inter- 

 locked. The Director attended every Board meeting, made his report 

 of progress, and received advice and suggestions. The Chairman of 

 the Board made frequent visits to Washington, and the executive 

 committee also kept in close touch with the Director. The Washington 

 office had liberal authority to initiate its own activities and was never 

 merely an executive branch of the Board. In fact the minutes of 

 the Board meetings when compared to the accompanying Director's 

 reports sometimes show an amazing gulf between theory and practice. 

 Had the Board ever shown any inclination to assert its independence 

 by a show of action, the issue of relationship to the Directorate would 

 have been raised. However, it never did. 



The Board kept in touch with the cooperating committees by having 

 the Director attend their committee meetings, by appointing the com- 

 mittee heads as consultants, by having the Directorate mimeograph 

 and distribute the committees' personnel lists and reports. The Area 

 Roster in the Washington office was the master file for all the com- 

 mittees' specialized personnel data. Only the Committee on Asiatic 

 Geography expressed a slight resentment of the role of the Board 

 as a central distributing agency. In general the cooperation with all 

 committees was effective, although best with those on Oceania and 

 Africa, not only because they were two basic creators of the Board, 

 but also because they were composed of anthropologists, all of whom 

 were old personal friends of the Director. 



Representatives of the sponsoring institutions attended every Board 

 meeting and the Director of the Board went to each annual meeting of 

 the Sponsors. The National Research Council, the fiscal agent of the 

 Board, received bimonthly reports, and all four Sponsors got the 

 minutes of every meeting as well as special progress reports : 



The Ethnogeographic Board, June i6 to October i6, 1942. A Report to the 

 Sponsoring Institutions. 



Director's Report of Progress, January 14 to August i, 1943. 



