Prepared by William Kelly for Anthropology 500
Session
five notes:
Franz Boas (1858-1942) and the American Historical
School
I.
Boas and Malinowski: origin myths, personality cults, or paradigm shifts?
II.
Boas among the Kwakiutl
III.
Boas’s theoretical foundations: science, history, and natural history
IV.
Boas and his anthropological credo
V.
Boas the text-collector
VI.
Boas as public intellectual: anti-racism
from evolution to eugenics
VII.
Boas as teacher
VIII.
Boasian anthropology as personality cult or paradigm shift? later
appraisals
I. Boas and Malinowski:
origin myths, personality cults, or paradigm shifts?
A
recent dictionary entry for Franz Boas takes measure of his stature with the
following paragraph:
“When Boas began his ethnographic work in 1883, anthropology had neither
a solid base of data nor a scientific theoretical approach. Anthropologists relied on travelers’ accounts,
missionary reports, and popular stereotypes for their information about non-Western
peoples. Out of these dubious
materials, they constructed elaborate theories of evolution, racial types,
and the primitive mind. With a
missionary’s zeal, Boas fought to replace such practices with reliable information
and careful theorizing. To the extent that anthropology became
a science in the early twentieth century, it was due to Boas’s work.” (Andrew Buckser,
"Franz Boas” in Barfield 1997:43).
Each
of the sentences in this characterization is so exaggerated as to test the
line between history and hagiography.
And yet the general claim, that Boas was a figure of genius, is probably
widely felt. We will see similar portraits of Malinowski
that verge on disciplinary deification, and indeed there are intriguing parallels
between the two figures. Both of these striking intellects and personalities
began as immigrant marginals before becoming dominant figures.
Boas from Bismarck Germany and Malinowski from Poland ended up in the
United States and Great Britain respectively, the two leading imperial countries. Neither was initially trained in anthropology.
However, in the course of their encounters with anthropology, both
embraced the discipline but firmly rejected three major tenets of the anthropology
of the time:
1. They rejected the so-called armchair
method for direct, sustained participant-observation. That is,
you will recall my point that 19th-century anthropologists came
after explorers, soldiers, missionaries, merchants, colonialists—if
they came at all. Despite a few
notable exceptions (LH Morgan, Baldwin Spencer), 19th-century anthropologists
tended to be armchair scholars, at the higher end of a scholarly division
of labor between data collection and theorizing.
2. They rejected social-evolutionary theory
(ascending typological stages of societal complexity) for other explanations
of the diversity of human collective lifeways (e.g., diffusion, history, and
functionalism)
3. They firmly opposed the racial ideologies
that were both a motive force and an idiom in which were cast the evolutionary
explanations for human behavioral and mental variability, and they postulated
instead the "psychic unity of mankind."
Thus,
on opposite sides of the Atlantic in their adopted countries and in novel
institutional settings, Boas and Malinowski each established both methods
and concepts for studying lifeways intensively, in midst of several overlapping,
competing frameworks (including evolutionism, diffusionism, historical particularism,
and functionalism).
As
dominant figures they raise a number of issues in understanding our discipline
historically. First, should we see them as origin
myths, personality cults, or paradigm shifts? To George Stocking, Boas is something of
all three. For example, he opens
his 1974 Boas reader with an important introduction on "The Basic Assumptions
of Boasian Anthropology," which itself acted to revive our awareness
of Boas's central role in shaping twentieth-century American anthropology:
Although German-born and deeply rooted in the intellectual
traditions of his homeland, Franz Boas more than any other man defined the
"national character" of anthropology in the United States. There has been debate over whether it is
appropriate to speak of a Boas "school" (Leslie White 1966:3-4),
but there is no real question that he was the most important single force
in shaping American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. And while his influence has been greatly
attenuated in the last two decades, it continues to be felt down to the present
day, in some cases even in the work of anthropologists who are conscious of
no specific debt to him. To take
a closer look at the fundamental assumptions of Boas' anthropology may therefore
serve other purposes other than those of individual intellectual biography.
It may also provide the basis for a more systematic investigation of
Boas' broader intellectual influence.
It may tell us something about what differentiates American anthropology
from other national anthropological traditions.
And it may cast light on certain enduring epistemological antinomies
that characterize anthropological inquiry generally. (Stocking 1974:1)
II. Boas among the Kwakiutl
A. Fort Rupert, November-December,
1894
Readings:
Franz Boas, "The Potlatch," (pp. 77-104) , in his Kwakiutl Ethnography,
Helen Codere, ed. (University
of Chicago Press, 1966) [also recommended are chapters 7-8 on "The Winter
Ceremonial" (pp. 171-241)]
selected
entries from his "Letter-Diary," in Ronald P. Rohner (ed.), The
Ethnography of Franz Boas: pages 33-41 (on Boas's first visit to the Kwakiutl:
Nawiti, 1886) and pages 176-191 (on Boas's Nov-Dec 1894 stay at Fort Rupert
during the Winter Ceremonial) (University
of Chicago Press, 1969).
Boas’s
first field experience was among the Eskimo of Baffin Island in 1883-1884
(resulting in perhaps
his only fully formed ethnographic monograph, The
Central Eskimo, published in the Bureau of American Ethnology annual
report for 1888). It was a difficult experience but one
that was to change his life. In
a famous passage (quoted in the video documentary), which he wrote after
a twenty-six hour dogsled trip under dangerous weather conditions, he
expresses in embryonic form—and rather romantic tone—the
sentiments that were to shape his anthropological scholarship
However,
it was a three-month trip to the Pacific Northwest coast two years later,
in 1886, that established his abiding interest in the indigenous groups of
that region, and in particular the southern Kwakiutl groups at the northern
end of Vancouver Island and the mainland across the strait.
The readings packet includes a bio-chronology of Boas’s life assembled
by Ronald Rohner, and it and the video documentary will give you a basic guide
to his career.
The
details of his research and anthropology’s continuing attention to Northwest
Coast studies are far beyond our time in this seminar (they total some 5000
pages in about 175 publications on the Kwakiutl and another 5000 pages published
on other groups in the region). However,
if we had to pick one representative moment in Boas's long, productive, and
momentous life, we might well select the two-month visit he paid to Fort Rupert
at the end of 1894. He had already
been to the Northwest coast on three earlier research trips, but this period
was a watershed period in his life, both intellectually and professionally. I have given you readings about the potlatches
that he observed and sponsored at that time, as well as letters that he wrote
at the time. I hope that we can
spend some time considering the nature of his ethnographic writing and the
formulations of the potlatch that he expresses here.
Boas
had spent much time on the trip buying artifacts which he hoped to sell on
his return to recoup some of the costs.
He had little luck selling the collection, but he did complete direction
of the "Life Groups" at both the Smithsonian and the AMNH. His benefactor Putnam had moved to the
American Museum of Natural History, and worked on the philanthropist-president
of the museum, Morris Jesup, to create a curatorial position for Boas. Putnam also was successful in persuading
the Columbia University president to authorize a lecturer appointment for
Boas in 1896 (in physical anthropology; Boas began teaching ethnology courses
in 1899). Putnam secured a secret
subsidy from Boas's uncle Jacobi for the Columbia salary.
Boas
initially thought that the museum would be the better venue for professional
scholarship, However, in 1905, after a decade, he abruptly quit his position
at the AMNH following a contentious dispute on May 17th with Jesup,
still the Museum's president, and Hermon Bumpus,
the Museum Director. He turned
all of his energies to the university department and to graduate training. He deliberately and strategically set out
to establish a social network of students, and seeded a number of universities
(and museums) with his students.
Among
the vast corpus of writings about Boas and the Kwakiutl, two that I would
recommend you turn to first are monographic catalogues of two exhibits mounted
at the American Museum of Natural History.
The first, written by Aldona Jonaitis, accompanied an exhibit of the
museum’s vast collection of Northwest Coast art, From the Land of the
Totem Poles (1988). The text by Jonaitis has much on the history
of the museum, its research and expeditions, and Boas. Pages 136-149 describe “Boas’s 1894 Trip
to the Northwest Coast” and include a long account of the Winter Ceremonial
that he witnessed. Pages 150-152
describe the “life groups” he made for the Smithsonian and AMNH, and pages
154-169 detail the Jesup North Pacific Expedition that he organized and which
began in 1897. See also pp. 170-185
on George Hunt. Throughout, the
objects are fascinating and the commentary on each is instructive. In addition, there are a great many historical
photographs.
Similarly,
a second exhibit specifically on the Kwakiutl potlatch was staged in the early
1990s at AMNH and other venues. Jonaitis
edited the beautiful catalogue, which included stunning photography of the
objects and potlatches over time and essays by Douglas Cole, Wayne Suttles,
Ira Jacknis, and others. See the
Boas bibliography for further leads.
The
Jessup Expedition of 1884 (named for a wealthy Canadian industrialist—not
the Jesup who was president of the American Museum of Natural History) was
organized to map the coastal peoples along the Pacific Northwest. These were not uncontacted peoples; they
had been involved as wage labor in European commercial shipping and fisheries,
they traded in artifacts and commodities, and they had appeared at Expositions
in Germany, Chicago, St. Louis, and New York (Vincent 71, quoting Knight 1978).
There had been trading posts for a long, long time, and major settlements
had begun in 1858.
The expedition was jointly funded by the
Canadian industrialist, the BAAS, and the Canadian government. Edward Tylor was a member of expedition
committee as director, and Boas was the chief fieldworker. Tylor in fact gave Boas an advance copy
of his 1888 paper that we read and discussed in the fourth session on the
statistical correlations among institutions. The Kwakiutl were a sub-language group
divided into tribes, which in turn were composed of clans and their constituent
families. Boas took immediate
note of the ranking of these kin groups, and the way that rank was expressed
through names and titles that were acquired through competitive ceremonial
giveaways. This came to be the
central theme of his Kwakiutl studies. [Some have suggested that George Hunt
and collection of texts may have given undue coherence to Boas's view of Kwakiutl
as well as undue emphasis on rank.]
The fact of the matter is that the ranked kin groups Boas found
along the coast in 1886—corporate descent groups that traced their genealogies
through seven generations—existed in a milieu dominated by Christianity
and commerce. It was their ranked
relationship rather than their form or function that force itself upon the
ethnographer, a tendency accentuated, perhaps, by Boas's dependence on George
Hunt's texts, which led him to place particular emphasis on names, ranks,
and titles. Rank was acquired
by means of a ceremonial giving away of property, so Boas' attention was drawn
to the Kwakiutl potlatch—at the expense, perhaps, of other motors of
political inequality within Kwakiutl society.
Although he refers to nobles and slaves and suggests differences of
class within the population at large, Boas found his co-workers and informants
mostly among Kwakiutl families known to Hunt, which were notable for the economic
and political enterprise. (Vincent 71)
A
Canadian national law against potlatching went into effect in 1884, but it
was ambiguous and had little effect (except to make Kwakiutl suspicious of
unknown foreigners like Boas as possible government agents) and on Boas’s
first trip in 1888 he became immediately involved.
He himself sponsored a potlatch (he wrote that it cost him $14.50),
which, he further claimed, provided him entrée into the seasonal ceremonies.
Boas
collected texts, speeches, songs, title histories, seating plans, dances,
masks, "the way to be walked by a true chief" etc. relating to potlatches. The Kwakiutl potlatch was part of a broader
NW Coast pattern (= "ceremonial distributions of property to guests specially
invited to witness and recognize assertions and demonstrations of social prerogative
and status" [Handbook 7:370]).
It
was through family lines that titles, crests, names, and other legacies were
passed down—a
kind of complex inheritance system. The
potlatch itself was like a coronation, in that the person was formally assuming
a name and its privileges that he had already been designated to inherit.
The text describes a common life cycle of serial names (at birth, receiving
a first name, and then a second at one-to-two years-old, then a third name
at 10 or 11; one’s elders loan blankets to enable these name ceremonies,
which the youth then works to return in a year at 100% interest).
Once
one assumed the inherited privilege of giving away property, the next task
was to make the name “heavy”—giving more over time and more than others
(“fighting with property”). Note
that despite Boas’s chapter, females too could also have titles and give
away property.
We
enter a paradox here. Mauss’s
fundamental insight was that gifting was not the single interaction of giving
and receiving, but a more open-ended cycle of reciprocity:
giving
à
receiving à giving back àreceiving
à giving back ….
Here,
however, the gift is intended to break the cycle of reciprocity, to render
the recipient unable to reciprocate; failure to repay strips one’s own name
and title of weight. And indeed,
one is obliged to repay “with interest,” in an escalating spiral of competitive
gifting.
Beyond
Hudson’s Bay blankets in value and prestige were the coppers, which were
“sold” to rivals (usually from other tribes); if offered, one must buy it,
and at the offered price (again, embedded in an elaborate ritual sequence). And beyond the sale of coppers was the
deliberate destruction of property—burning piles of blankets, canoes,
fish oil, and other items and/or breaking a copper.
So
here (and elsewhere) Boas sets out to show that the potlatch is not wasteful
extravagance but an expression of a systemic principle of the “interest bearing
investment of property,” even though “its strongest expression” is the
calculated but frenzied destruction of property.
That is, it was both a "method of acquiring rank" and "interest-bearing
investment" [that is, goods and property were given with the knowledge
and intent that recipient would pay back later “with interest”].
However, Boas here seems to have confused the giving away at the potlatches
with the prior loans to seed the interest-bearing return payments that allowed
one to be able to do a potlatch.
[Edward S. Curtis argued that they gave for pride not greed, but this
interpretation was ignored.]
Among
the subsequent interpretations are the following (See Karen Warner's '99 project for
further details)
1. Marcel Mauss viewed the potlatch as "the
monster child of the gift system," found in societies midway between
egalitarian kin groups and individual contract.
2. Ruth Benedict characterized potlatches
as massive giveaways to destroy one's rivals by destroying wealth. They were a maniacal form of conspicuous,
wasteful consumption in a drive for personal prestige. The whole economic system was bent to the
service of this obsession.
3. Marvin Harris argued the reverse—that
status rivalry was in service to the economy. The potlatch functioned to transfer food
and other valuables from centers of high productivity and to areas of low
productivity. Others had assume
that the Kwakiutl environment was quite rich and so the potlatch bore little
relation to the economic and ecological base. Harris, though, argued that it had micro-variations
and unpredictable fluctuations in fish runs, berry crops, and animal movements.
The potlatch was advantageous from the standpoint of the regional population. This eco-logic was extended and modified
by others—see Suttles on the Coast Salish; Andrew Vayda, who generalized
Suttles’ point to the whole Northwest Coast; and Stuart Piddocke, who offered
yet a different twist.
4. Helen Codere, a respectful student of Benedict,
came to view the Kwakiutl potlatch in specifically historical terms.
Potlatching and warfare, she noted, varied inversely over time—from
1837 to 1924, warfare declined and potlatching—a surrogate for fighting—increased. 1849 was a key date in this history, when
four Kwakiutl tribes moved to form a super-tribe at Fort Rupert, establishing
that settlement as the expanding center of Kwakiutl life. In 1884, 2 years before Boas's first trip,
the potlatch had been outlawed by Canadian government as demoralizing and
heathenish. Boas recorded some 600 named social positions, each with a title, crest, ceremonial privileges,
and each gained through ceremonial property giveaways. In 19th century, European diseases led
to population decline but the number of positions remained same. It was thus increasingly easy to gain such
ranks, even to the
point, Codere calculates, that there were more positions than eligible individuals.
This, however, did not depress the resources necessary for assuming
the titles; European trade goods and wage labor.
It was literally "fighting with property," as Codere put
it in her title and interpreted it as an adjustment to colonial order.
Codere's argument was that previously warfare had been conducted largely for
social prestige, and under the enforced pacification of white order, potlatching
became a 'domestication' of this form. By the 1920s, values had so inflated
that few coppers transfers were completed and potlatches included boats, pool
tables, sewing machines, gramophones, furniture, etc.
Still, Kwakiutl potlatching continued, and enjoyed a resurgence in
the 1970s, during a period that celebrated Native Canadian rights.
5. Homer Barnett back in the 1930s had suggested
that the potlatch was less an accommodation to White colonial conditions than
a resistance to the colonial order. This view was apparently less compellingly
than Benedict or Codere—at least until the 1970s, when it was resurrected.
C. Winter Ceremonials [see Handbook, p. 85]
To
Boas, both crest system and Winter Ceremonies were reworking of widespread
North American beliefs associated with guardian spirits.
The dances and accompanying songs and ritual were seen as valuable
inherited privileges, graded in rank, that had as their principal function
the manifestation of the prestige of the noble families.
Recipients
of dance privileges were said to be motivated by the supernatural beings whose
original contact with the dancer's ancestors began the tradition. The dances were dramatic reenactments of
ancestors' adventures or demonstration of the power or characteristic actions
given them by supernatural beings. The
ceremonials involved the return of the spirits from the spiritual world.
The
two main figures were the Warrior-of-the-World (tall, blackened body) and
Cannibal-at-the-End-of-the-World (a man-eating monster whose body was covered
by blood-rimmed mouths). They?
came and captured young people, infused them with spirit, thereby initiating
them into a secret societies, in particular the Cannibal (Hamatsa) Society
and the Warrior spirit (associated female spirit Toogwid;
wedge through the head).
These
were very complex ceremonials, with many types of participants and ranks. Two groups of dancers, the Fools (long
noses and drooling mucous) and the Grizzly Bears, acted as kind of ritual
policemen ("order through violence"). The participants were divided among:
ordinary
men =
those without privileges
seals
=
active dancers and initiates
sparrows
=
those with dance privileges but inactive
Each
dance privilege had four phases:
abduction
of initiate by the motivating spirit
return
and capture of the initiate
demonstration
by initiate of the appearance or power of the motivating spirit
taming/pacification
of the initiate
Ruth
Benedict: saw chief dancer as striving for
Dionysian ecstasy, capable of terrible acts like eating flesh
Stanley
Walens: saw Kwakiutl world view embodied in oral
metaphors. The Cannibal Dance
was a morality play demonstrating that humans can control the world by controlling
its most important force--hunger
III. Boas’s theoretical foundations:
science, history, and natural history
A. radical disjuncture or lines of continuity?
Anthropology in the United States from Morgan to Powell to Boas
Even
in 1894 the thirty-five-year-old Boas was still without a professional
position, but he had already defined a fundamental orientation towards
his life work. This is why I have selected several of
his early articles for our readings, because they articulate a vision
of anthropology that was distinctive and oppositional.
Now there is a complex historiographic
issue here. There was much
that was fundamentally subversive of contemporary orthodoxy and radically
innovative in Boas’s work and orientation, but his own struggles to
establish his position and the respect bordering on adulation by his
students have lead many to
overestimate the sharpness of an institutional and epistemological break
with late nineteenth-century anthropology in the United States. We don’t have time to pursue this in this
session, but Hinsley, George
Stocking (in some of his Boas essays), and especially Regna Darnell
are particularly good on the affinities and lines of influence that
extended from Lewis Henry Morgan through John Wesley Powell to Boas. See especially Hinsley’s chapter 5. Darnell
argues, in fact, that “during the crucial transitional period beginning
with the founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879, there
were as many continuities as discontinuities between the work of Boas
and that of John Wesley Powell and his Bureau. Boas
shared with Powell a commitment to the study of aboriginal languages,
to a symbolic definition of culture, to ethnography based on texts,
to historical reconstruction on linguistic grounds and to mapping the
linguistics and cultural diversity of native North America. The obstacle to Boas’s vision of anthropology
was not the Bureau but the archaeological and museum establishments
centered in Washington, D.C. and in Boston.”
B. contextualizing culture
Reading:
"On Alternating Sounds," American Anthropologist 2(1):47-51
[1889]
This
is the text of a paper that Boas read to the British Association for the Advancement
of Science in the summer of 1888 after he had returned from his second trip
to the Pacific Northwest Coast. Here
he is addressing the problem of “mishearing” and “misspelling,” auditory
and transcription problems he and many others faced as field linguists. He notes the tendency of such linguist
fieldworkers to "mishear" sounds in terms of their native languages.
George
Stocking, early in his work on Boas, decided that this was one of the key
articles in the whole of Boas’s vast corpus: "It is impossible to exaggerate
the significance of this article for the history of anthropological thought...
Much of Boas' later work, and that of his students after him, can be viewed
simply as the working out of implications present in this article” (1968:157) [Robert Ulin (1984:1-5) also makes much
of this paper.]
The
argument that Boas advances is that such "sound blindness" (which
is to say, "alternating sounds") originates in "alternating
apperception." The question
for you to think about here is, what does he mean by this and how does he
go about making the argument?
C. the tension between the historical and
the scientific
Reading:
"The Study of Geography," Science 9(210):137-141 [1887]
Boas,
and we will later see Malinowski also, draw our attention to a perduring debate
about whether anthropology is and should be art, science, or history. That is, we often describe our discipline
as torn between being an art, with understanding its goal, and a science,
with explanation as its aim. This
is the tension/paradox that John Beattie formulated in the essay you read
last semester in 500a. This is
true, but it is rather too general a formulation. Within that dichotomy, there are a number
of agonies that persist in creative tension in the works of our most influential
forefolk. For our immediate purposes,
I want to suggest to you that we might usefully think of Boas and Malinowski
as embodying two distinct tensions:
Boas: science vs. history
Malinowski: science vs. romanticism
In
the case of Boas, his intellectual trajectory is often characterized as a
move "from physics to ethnology," from science to history.
This was Kroeber's early opinion.
However, Marian Smith among others has argued that in understanding
Boas, we must appreciate just how deep-rooted natural history was in
German education and outlook. [Lesser
says Kroeber came to acknowledge that.] This was of course classification, but
it also required empirical gathering in situ—giving the collector an
appreciation of context as essential to meaning.
This
viewpoint emerges clearly in Boas’s early paper on "The Study of Geography"
(1887; reprinted in Boas 1940; see Stocking 1992: 121-122, 126, 279, and 340).