A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
makeup that determines the difference between modern and primitive art production and art appreciation” (p. 356). With these words on art, Boas aligned himself with those intellectuals and scholars—many of them anthropologists like himself—increasingly drawn to ideas of social equality and the universality of our humanity. His ideas, along with those of other liberal and leftist intellectuals, would become more widely accepted as the spirit of the New Deal took hold of the United States in the 1930s.45
Franz Boas’s research on the history of art—and I stress the word history here—began as part of his multiple-pronged attack on evolutionism. A fundamental assumption of evolutionism was that single answers to questions could be found, that a kind of universal law governed the understanding of nature and culture. Recently, such grand universalizing discourses have been discredited as significant manifestations of elitism and social, racial, and ethnic hierarchies. Particularly troublesome is the fact that these texts, written by omniscient experts who remain outside and above their product, create a timeless discourse that purports to represent authenticity and truth.46 Although he did not use the jargon in vogue today, Boas would have agreed with the critique of evolutionism as a metanarrative that disempowers Native people.
In keeping with the efforts of many modern scholars to question the validity of cherished truths, some writers have scrutinized the concept of “culture.” Culture—meaning that which is learned within a particular community or society—was Boas’s alternative to evolutionary theories to which so many late nineteenth-century anthropologists adhered. Finding unacceptable the racial foundations of evolutionism, Boas explained differences between western and nonwestern peoples as manifestations of different, yet equal, cultures, thus using anthropology to promote the concept of human equality. Moreover, for Boas, one of the most compelling deficiencies of evolutionism from a methodological perspective was its tendency to create laws prior to actually analyzing the data those laws purportedly explained; he objected strenuously to using formulae to interpret a priori ethnographic material. Boas, for both scientific and ethical reasons, rejected the imposition in anthropological research of what we in the late twentieth century would label an evolutionist grand narrative.
As is sometimes the case in the history of ideas, a liberating theory in one moment can have elements that at a later moment prove to be less liberating. Valuable as a challenge to the racism of nineteenth-century evolutionism, culture today is one of the grand universalizing definitions of humanity that some scholars have been dismantling. James Clifford was one of the first in recent years to draw attention to the fact that the concept of a unified culture is anachronistic in a multi-cultural world (1988:95).47 Clifford points in particular to collecting artifacts as one manifestation of the search for “wholeness, continuity and essence” (1988:233).48 The supposedly coherent, unified, static, and essentially ahistoric features that have characterized discourses on Native cultures distinguish them from the diversified, dynamic, and historical features of Euro-American societies.49
It must be stressed that the current criticisms of “culture” are far more applicable to the theories of the British structural/functionalists than to Boasian historical particularism. For Richard G. Fox (1991:100–104), an adequate assessment of Boas requires understanding his concepts both of culture and of culture history; elements of the latter concept provide some responses to contemporary criticisms of the former.50 Culture history postulates that cultures are assemblages of traits, some of which were invented locally, others obtained by diffusion from elsewhere. Being the products of history, cultures are not necessarily integrated totalities; indeed, it would be erroneous to assume a priori that any cultural elements within a group are necessarily related without careful scrutiny of the data. Boasian culture history, in keeping with Boas’s critique of evolutionism, eschewed the imposition of any theoretical framework on any body of data, and appears to be quite far removed from any kind of grand universalizing discourse.
Indeed, Boas’s concept of culture, especially as it relates to art history, can result in liberation rather than disempowerment. One significant feature of this is the openness with which Boas’s notion of culture allows for inconsistencies that ultimately allow room for multiple voices. In an ironic twist to the postmodernist attacks on the grand narrative of culture, some have criticized Boas for the apparent randomness of the information given in his publications, which prevents the reader from obtaining a unified picture of any one culture.51 Arnold Krupat (1990, 1992) reads Boas from the perspective of the late nineteenth-century turning away in philosophy and science from absolute certainty to relativity and suggests that Boas also appears to have had, at some level, “a commitment to sustaining contradiction” (Krupat 1992:90). While Krupat expresses uncertainty as to whether Boas worked in this fashion to forestall a premature synthesis or to prevent any synthesis, he does point out that in the 1932 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published later as the first essay on “culture” in Race, Language and Culture (1940), Boas explicitly asserts that laws governing culture cannot be found. And, while Boas most often was interested in the coherent and orderly phenomena of culture, he did on occasion display a fascination with chaos, “an old-fashioned variant of postmodern free play” (Krupat 1990:144).52
Although Krupat, appropriately, warns against reading Boas as a precursor to postmodernism, some current intellectual trends illuminate features of Boas’s art history that might in the past have been bypassed. Reading and rereading the essays reprinted in this book as well as Primitive Art (1927) makes it very clear that we are not dealing with a grand narrative; indeed, a major motivation in Boas’s art history is to reject the false premises of evolutionism and to promote the complexities of historical and psychological processes. Boas warned against too rigid an interpretation of art as solely the product of culture that ignores the influence of history:
It has often been observed that cultural traits are exceedingly tenacious and that features of hoary antiquity survive until the present day. This has led to the impression that primitive culture is almost stable and has remained what it is for many centuries. This does not correspond to the facts. Wherever we have detailed information we see forms of objects and customs in constant flux, sometimes stable for a period, then undergoing rapid changes. Through this process elements that at one time belonged together as cultural units are torn apart. Some survive, others die, and so far as objective traits are concerned, the cultural form may become a kaleidoscopic picture of miscellaneous traits that, however, are remodelled according to the changing spiritual background that pervades the culture and transforms the mosaic into an organic whole (Boas 1927:6–7).
Although Boas ends this quote with a reference to the totality of a culture, he does give it history. At a moment in time, the elements that constitute culture might fit together nicely, but historical changes can disrupt that fit. And, in what could be considered an almost contradictory refinement to his representation of the “organic whole,” later in Primitive Art, Boas both warns against “treating tribes too much as standardized units,” pointing to the individualism inherent in both primitive and western societies (1927:84–85), and stresses that under no circumstances are “primitive forms … absolutely stable” (1927:150). With these words, Boas set the stage for subsequent scholars who would address the histories of continuity and change in Native American art.
A Brief Summary of Boas’s Art History
A. Formal considerations
1. Certain universals do exist: symmetry, rhythmic repetition, emphasis on form.
2. Technique plays a major role in the development of an art style.
3. Relative naturalism or stylization of art results from a variety of factors both technical and cultural.
B. Iconographic considerations
1. Meaning in art is culturally determined.
2. Groups assign meaning to images from outside groups appropriate to their culture.
3. Meaning is sometimes universal within a group, sometimes individual.
C. Historical considerations
1. Designs originate among one group and diffuse elsewhere.
2.