The History of Anthropology - Essay Example

Running head: BOAS AND ANTHROPOLOGY Boas and Anthropology s Boas and Anthropology Over the past twenty-five or so years of interdisciplinary conversation between anthropology and literary studies, something like a consensus has emerged on one fundamental point: that anthropology, though working within the language and methodologies of social science, also involves a writing practice comparable in many respects to that of the literary text. Many of us are now comfortable elaborating upon the principle that the ethnographic text is as full of rhetorical devices, sweeps of imagination, blindnesses and insights, as an interesting work of, say, prose fiction. This recognition has a number of corollaries, including one that invites us to think about ethnographic texts -- and anthropology as a discipline -- in the terms we have traditionally used in periodizing literary history. Many of us now speak of a "Victorian" as opposed to a "modernist" anthropology. This essay represents an attempt to complicate the basic assumptions of this interdiscipline on a number of grounds, and from a number of different perspectives. First, I would like to trouble the border we often imagine existing between Victorian and modernist anthropology, a gesture which I hope will have its implications for the literary border as well. I am interested in this project not so much because I see periodisations as inherently misguided, but rather the opposite: because I think such distinctions are only as good as the specific historical instances that both support and challenge them. Second, I would like to challenge the largely textual basis of the grounds on which we may be tempted to delineate this border, and suggest that, having established the textual nature of ethnography, we may wish to turn our attention to other social and institutional similarities between ethnographic work and the artistic and literary practices of a given period. I am especially interested here in the changing conditions of intellectual labor in the epochal moment of the turn of the twentieth century. To address these issues I will take as my subject the early career of Franz Boas, who for various reasons has come to be regarded as the "father" of American anthropology (by which is really meant professional anthropology, a point to which I shall return at some length). Born in 1858 to a free-thinking Jewish family in Minden, Westphalia, and dying in 1942 after a lengthy career as the preeminent anthropologist in the United States, Boas could be said not only to have traversed centuries and continents, but to have charted a path from the German Enlightenment to the modernist era.1 He is, moreover, frequently cited as an important, even a founding, figure of a new "modernist" anthropology. However, a comparison with the other frequently-identified founder of modernist anthropology immediately suggests why Boas is a complicated figure for thinking through the historical transitions from one practice to another. Boass history shares a number of significant similarities with that of Bronislaw Malinowski. Both were central figures around which developed, in the 1920s, identifiable new schools of anthropological thought; both were immigrants to the countries in which they spent their working lives; both died in the U.S. in 1942 -- one, a wartime refugee from Europe, the other a laborer in the anti-fascist causes of intellectual freedom and refugee relief (Geertz, 1998). Julia Liss has convincingly argued that Boas and Malinowskis common experiences of alienation and immigration, reinforced in the experience of fieldwork and resolved in their theoretical searches for cultural coherence and social functioning, is the central thread which makes both figures "cosmopolitan" participants in the "modernist sensibility" (Geertz, 1998). But beyond this common sensibility, and beyond the significant biographical similarities between the two men, Malinowski makes a rather more compelling exemplar of modernist anthropology on a number of largely textual grounds. In various accounts of modernist anthropology, the publication of Malinowski Argonauts of the Western Pacific ( 1922 ) serves as an epochal event -- akin to the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky The Rite of Spring or the New York Armory Show of modern art of that same year -- for a number of narratively satisfying reasons. Not only did Argonauts put into monograph form the theory and practice of participant observation and signal the beginning of functionalist theory (and a challenge to evolutionary comparativism), but it appeared in 1922, which also saw the publication of James Joyce Ulysses and T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (Geertz, 1998). Moreover, given Malinowskis highly readable ethnographies and diaries, and his famous statement (a gem to the interdisciplinarian) that he wished to be anthropologys Conrad to W. H. R. Riverss Rider Haggard, we can easily see how Malinowski has come to exemplify not only a significant sea-change within his own discipline, but anthropologys parallel and equivalent to a fully developed literary modernism. It is much harder to make the same kind of case for Boas as a representative figure of an anthropological modernism by way of these kinds of literary-historical analogies; hence he may be a more interesting figure to consider in light of the question of periodisation. Though Boas and his students would, retrospectively, insist that they too had long been engaged in participant observation in the field, it was nevertheless Malinowski who produced the textual concretization of the experience, and who first came to represent the very idea of the ethnographer in the field (Stocking, 1982). By contrast, Boass fieldwork with the Kwakiutl, begun in 1885, and continuing sporadically to 1930, was not published as a single ethnography until well after his death ( Boas, Kwakiutlxi-xxxii). Indeed, one could say that it was not Boas at all, but his student Margaret Mead, who produced the Boasian answer to Argonauts, with her extremely popular and influential ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa ( 1928 ). On the other hand, we may complicate our periodisations by thinking seriously about the Boasian claim that Boas too had been a participant ethnographer all those years, in terms of what it might say about the problem of genre in modernist ethnography. It is occasionally argued that genres are retrospective formations: that it is only after the second or third work of a genre is written that the first can be identified as the founding work of its type (Stocking, 1982). After Argonauts, all sorts of things could now be seen, retrospectively, to have its generic characteristics. In this sense, Boas, his students, and subsequent readers would certainly have been right to say that they had been doing much that was akin to what Malinowski concretized as a particular textual form. Of course, the same could also be said of a lot of other figures -- all the Rider Haggards from a century or so of contacting, conquering, and surveying the other -- who wrote texts bearing the signs of subsequent developments. Besides, Boass texts themselves offer relatively little to go on: they tend to be dry, and specific to particular problems or observations. Insistent was Boas on the need to record and understand cultural particularities that some of his own students saw him as frustrating the formation of theoretical generalities in anthropology. This was true of Edward Sapir, who wrote of his famous teacher: "It is clear that Dr. Boas unconscious long ago decreed that scientific cathedrals are only for the future, that for the time being spires surmounted by the definitive cross are unseemly, if not indeed sinful, that only cornerstones, unfinished walls, or even an occasional isolated portal are strictly in the service of the Lord" ("Franz Boas" 1974). Certainly, it is one of the central complexities of Boass career that, though he is widely associated with the significant theoretical development of the modern culture concept, he said frustratingly little on the subject of the meaning of "culture" until well after his own students -- notably Sapir and Alfred L. Kroeber -- had written extensively on the topic.4 The father of American anthropology, widely remembered for his connection to "cultural relativism," did not actually offer a definition of culture in print until 1930, more than a decade after his students had begun to use the word as a technical term. Here again, in the terrain of theoretical developments, we have the figure of Boas emerging as a kind of retrospective inventor, significant, to various period-defining developments, but not significant in any direct or obvious way. Are we wrong, then, to see Boas as a figure of historical transition, or to see his work as parallel to developments emerging in British or continental anthropology? It is relevant here to turn to the most commonly held explanation for Boass historical significance: while Boas did not produce the important ethnographic monograph that would turn him into North Americas answer to Malinowski, and moved only haltingly toward the great theoretical innovation of his own -- Boasian -- school, Boas significantly challenged the Gilded Age establishment in his public opposition to scientific racism. The story is, in fact, so well known that it may easily be overstated: Boas is often described as having instantiated (or at least, as being central to) a monumental intellectual shift in thinking about human populations. By strongly challenging the predominant racist social evolutionary paradigm of the late-nineteenth century, Boas created (or otherwise importantly enabled) the "cultural" paradigm of the twentieth century, in which human groups were understood to differ from one another along the lines of their different (but comparable) "cultures." Somewhere, I would argue, "culture" figures into the periodizing problem we are trying to address, as does Boass anti-racist critique. So, too, does another important polemic of his early career, involving the institutional home of anthropology. While both of these sites -- Boass anti-racist polemic, and his challenge to the museum establishment of anthropology -- may not show us the origins of "culture," they both offer other ways for thinking about the transition to a distinctive modernist moment and practice. Indeed, my argument here is dependent upon those that have used periodizing language of a different kind, to talk of Boass role in the transition from the "Museum Period" of American anthropology to its "classical" phase in a moment contemporaneous with Malinowski publication of Argonauts. It is easy to see in Boass phrasings the outlines of an emergent culture concept. In his quick references to the "character of a people," we see the beginnings of the idea of "culture" as it would later be defined by Boass students: as a complex set of life ways of a given group of people. Also implicit in this early work is another piece of the culture concept, cultural relativism and its corollary, the critique of celebrations of nineteenth-century "civilization." As Boas put it in a subsequent article on curatorial practices, "civilization is not something absolute, but . . . it is relative, and . . . our ideas and assertions are true only so far as our civilization goes" (Geertz 1988). However, some of the significance of Boass criticisms of the Smithsonians ethnological displays lay not in the theoretical developments it foreshadowed, but in its symbolic function as a direct critique of the established anthropological practices of the time. The impetus for his criticism of the Smithsonian came from Boass visit to the museums collections in 1885, and his resulting impression that his research was hampered by Masons display methods. His challenge was, in other words, not only to the theory behind the method of display, but to the utility of the displays as tools for the kind of scholarship he wished to pursue. Though curatorial practices would change (indeed, at the time of Boass critique Mason had already begun of his own accord to reorganize the exhibits according to "culture areas"), Boass challenge was more fundamentally to the museum as a site of serious anthropological research (Stocking, 1982). In this respect, Boass early essays foreshadowed an important institutional change in Boass career and in the history of anthropology: the museum would eventually be replaced by the university as the central site of anthropological work. Of course, this change is also related to the development of the culture concept, in that each institutional site in effect implied an object of study: for the museum-based anthropologist, it was the ethnological artifact; for the university-based anthropologist, it could be something as abstract as "culture." The transition from museum to university, and from salvaged artifact to "culture," was gradual. Indeed, a number of academic anthropology departments (including those at Harvard, Berkeley, Pennsylvania, and Boass own Columbia) were formed around ethnological museums, which were important sources both of teaching materials and of funding for fieldwork. Between 1895 and 1905, Boas himself held both an academic position at Columbia and a curatorial position at the nearby American Museum of Natural History. But, as Ira Jacknis has argued, Boass own rather troubled relationship with the American Museum was a portent of the separation between these institutions that was to become the norm. Though the museum funded much of Boass fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest, Boas resigned his position as curator of the ethnographic displays because of basic conflicts with the museum directorship -- again, over the question of the proper methods of displaying artifacts. Boass displays, organized to illustrate technical points in ethnographic research, were regarded by the museums directors as being over-specialized, confusing, and unattractive to the museums patrons. As Boas himself would subsequently note, ethnological museums served the multiple functions of "entertainment, instruction, and research," but Boas was far more interested in the last of these roles than were his superiors in the museum hierarchy ( Jacknis, "Franz Boas"86). In this respect, Boass conflict with the American Museum was typical of the heated debates then brewing in curatorial circles that opposed populist goals of entertainment and education against more scholarly interests in collecting, studying, and preserving valued objects. In these battles, the evaluation and display of ethnologic artifacts was especially vexed. For the popularisers, a number of whom took the new department stores as their models for satisfying museum experiences, ethnologic specimens were both intrinsically interesting exotica and important elements in the pedagogy of consumerism, demonstrating (as in Masons view) the primitive origins of modern technology, and naturalizing the consumption of various objects as common to the desires of humanity as a whole. Not surprisingly, this change had strong consequences for the practice of anthropology. Jacknis has persuasively argued that when the institutional site of ethnology relocated from the museum to the university, the very terms and objects of study changed ( "Ethnographic"). The salvaged artifact, a trophy that could be put on display for the satisfaction of museum visitors and patrons, would eventually make way for less tangible objects of knowledge, including language-based data, complex rituals and performances, and eventually, that interesting conceptual object, "culture" itself. Of course, understanding these objects required highly specialized language skills, interpretive abilities, theoretical knowledge, and other kinds of laboriously acquired expertise. By comparison, the older practice of rounding up material artifacts seemed unskilled, the work of dilettantes. Boas himself was remembered as having said, "If a man finds a pot, he is an archaeologist; if two, a great archaeologist; three, a renowned archaeologist!" . Though his comment may have been a disparagement of archaeologists in particular, it was also generally directed at those who saw the collection of artifacts as in itself a serious intellectual pursuit. The institutional transition from the museum to the university also brought on other, more obvious changes. The university enabled the codification of professional credentialing in the granting of degrees and the development of rites of passage, such as fieldwork, associated with the inculcation of professional identity. Eventually, a doctorate based on fieldwork would become the professional norm for practicing anthropologists. In the university, moreover, would develop the theoretical apparatuses that would define the difference between "professional" knowledge and what would soon be disparagingly dubbed the "amateur" work of anthropologists such as Mason. In this respect, Boas is not only a counterpart of his fellow German-trained philologists who were simultaneously producing a specialized academic literary scholarship, but also an exemplary agent in a social phenomenon typical of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the creation and consolidation of professional identity. The consolidation of a wide variety of new professional statuses in this period was, in turn, but one component of a dramatic expansion of the middle class, particularly in the "professional-managerial" strata Professionalisation had the important effect of allowing upward mobility for those who had access to training and professional certification. This was especially evident in new academic fields like anthropology and the other emerging social sciences, which were far less affected by the social exclusivity which in that period pervaded the humanities. Thus, the personnel of anthropology also changed, from the genteel explorers and military men who comprised the ethnologists of the nineteenth century to a much more socially diverse group, including immigrants, scholars with working class origins, women, and Bohemian proponents of diverse radical opinions.10 Professional anthropologys emphasis on the specificities of cultures also brought into question the moral basis of the nineteenth century progressive project. For some "amateur" proponents of anthropology, the field was not only part of the project of enlightenment, it was also particularly accessible. According to Mason, anthropology had "no priesthood and no laity, no sacred language" because of the simple fact that the fields object was humanity itself. everyone was already a potential investigator, informant, and object of study (Stocking 1982). We may now see the Boasians conceptual deemphasis of the idea of one humanity with a common trajectory in favor of the idea of individual cultural contexts as both an intellectual intervention and a professional gesture, one that would resist the view that everyone had equal access to the object of study. Rather than sharing in a common experience of humanity, anthropologys "amateurs" could now only be impressed by the facts of cultural distance and strangeness brought back to them from afar via the institution of professional anthropological fieldwork. On the other hand, the newly professionalized anthropologists were not necessarily immune from the experience of distance and estrangement. Their own critical position left them no more comfortable with the concept of "humanity," and indeed, encouraged them to think in newly estranged ways about the condition of the so-called civilized world. In the years that saw the consolidation of anthropology as a profession, Boas and his students were similarly subject to these competing propositions about professionalism. Anthropological specialization and expertise potentially conflicted with the older view of science as a broadly humanistic undertaking. Fascinatingly, however, Boasian anthropology eventually finessed this potential dilemma, to suggest that the supposedly moral and humanistic world of nineteenth-century science was both scientifically illegitimate and immoral. I would suggest that this was one of the significant ideological effects of cultural relativism as a theory: it offered both an evaluatively neutral, professional, way to discuss "culture," the new "object" of the field, and it proposed a new moral position for anthropology that evoked a strongly ethical and humanistic respect for the complexity and integrity of cultural others. The professional and affective success of this theoretical and moral position is perhaps best measured by the degree to which contemporary (professional) American anthropologists still strongly identify with this theoretical proposition as the core of their disciplinary identity (Geertz, 1988). But even before the emergence of cultural relativism as a field defining theory, Boasian anthropology resolved some of the dilemmas of expert knowledge and social justification through another, by now familiar, gesture. Released from the burden of representing a coherent "humanity" and possessing a specialized knowledge of cultural diversity, Boas and his students became experts in the manipulation of cultural estrangement for the purposes of social critique. Indeed, it is a distinctive feature of Boasian anthropology that it turned a great deal of critical attention on contemporary American life. We see this feature of the Boasian project in some of its best-known texts: in Mead critique of sexual repression in American society in Coming of Age in Samoa; in Ruth Benedict culturally relativist rejection of American anxieties about homosexuality in Patterns of Culture (1934 ); and in Boas own popularizing texts, The Mind of Primitive Man ( 1911 ) and Anthropology and Modern Life ( 1928 ). Anthropologists in effect advertised their professional expertise to society in terms of their ability to offer contrastive examples of other societies. While the gesture of inter-cultural comparison became a familiar critical tool, thanks in part to Boas, it is significant that much of Boass central polemic against scientific racism was engaged in the more traditional register of "professional" expertise versus "amateur" pseudoscience. This may well have had to do with Boass early role in the professionalisation of the discipline, and it is a point that I think may clarify some ambiguities in Boass reputation as an important figure in anti-racist battles of the early-twentieth century. Though this proposed program of what we might today call reflexive critique largely finessed the conflict between classed interests and professional detachment, we may nonetheless see it as indicative both of the direction Boasian anthropology was to take in its "classical" phase in the 1920s and of another (I would say, central) feature of Boass basic modernism. As the twenties progressed, Boas became less invested in the natural history approach to ethnographic data, and more interested in the psychological aspects of the study of culture. This change both conformed to and enabled the work of students such as Mead and Benedict, who would instantiate in their ethnographic work something like the approach Boas suggested here: a relativist appreciation of other cultures, combined with a critical eye toward the prejudices of their own society. References Clifford Geertz, Worsk and Lives: The anthropologist as author. Polity Press, 1988 Franz Boas, "Anthropology", in George Stocking ed., A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911. University of Chicago Press, 1974 Franz Boas, "The aims of anthropological research" in Race, Language and Culture, University of Chicago Press, [1940] 1982 George Stocking, "Franz Boas and the culture concept in historical perspective" in Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. University of Chicago Press, 1982 Read More