A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
To reconstruct art history, the distribution of style and meaning—which are independent of one another—must be analyzed.
D. Psychological considerations
1. Pleasure in the act of technical virtuosity is an important element in the creation of art.
2. Conservatism and cultural conventions impose restrictions over artistic creativity and innovation.
3. Within cultural restrictions, creativity and originality are evident among all artists.
1. Also see Haberland 1988 for an interesting discussion of the Bella Coola in Germany in 1885–86.
2. On the anthropology and career of Franz Boas, see especially Cole 1985, Rohner 1969, Stocking 1968 and 1974, Jacknis 1984 and 1985, Lesser 1981, and Krupat 1990.
3. I use the term “primitive art” here to cover the material Boas dealt with in his book.
4. For an intriguing study of the British evolutionists, see Stocking 1987.
5. Ernst Grosse even argued that art played a role in social survival: “… art is no idle play, but an indispensable social function, one of the most efficient weapons in the struggle for existence” (1897:312).
6. The biological model informed the work of some of the most important early cultural evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward B. Tylor. (See Haller 1971, Stocking 1987, and Kuper 1991 for more on this.)
7. Lewis Henry Morgan (1877), for example, believed that despite each advance primitive peoples might make, the more advanced groups would forever be outdistancing them. W J McGee (1903 speech, quoted in Haller 1971:107) described how the lower races could not “keep up” with the more advanced, and thus were “the mental and moral beggars of the community who may not be trusted on horseback but only in the rear seat of the wagon.” And Edward B. Tylor (1881:74) stated, “History points [up] the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers between such tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the Old World nations who overmatch and subdue them.”
8. The inferiority of the nonwhite races supported by social evolutionism provided a useful justification for imperialism. See Manganaro 1990:28; Stocking 1991:4.
9. For more on Franz Boas and politics, see Stocking 1979.
10. See Suttles and Jonaitis (1990:74–77) for a summary of Boas’s contributions to Northwest Coast anthropology.
11. See Goldwater (1986:15–50) for an excellent summary of early attitudes to primitive art.
12. The relative value of “primitive art” as compared to the art of more developed cultures is still, surprisingly, not universally accepted. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, Douglas Fraser would describe his colleagues’ disdain for this type of art. Even today, members of an art history department at a major university have questioned the “maturity” of Native American art history.
13. Just as evolution continues to serve a useful purpose in anthropological theory (see pp. 4–5), it also remains a viable concept for some art historical analyses. See especially Munro 1963 for a sophisticated treatment of evolution in art.
14. However, Boas (1908b:321) notes that in 1905, von den Steinen had begun to emphasize technical considerations in art. Moreover, Stolpe and von den Steinen had differing opinions about the nature of these progressions from naturalism to stylization. See Goldwater (1986:22–30) for a discussion of the theoretical nuances of these and other early students of primitive art.
15. Thoresen (1977) correctly points out the significance of the writings of other turn-of-the-century anthropologists, especially Kroeber (1900a, 1901) and Wissler (1904), as manifestations of this shift away from evolutionism. Although both Kroeber and Wissler studied with and were enormously influenced by Boas, each apparently provided him with interesting material and ideas in return. See also Jacknis 1992 for a useful and subtle discussion of this.
16. See Jacknis 1992 for a similar discussion of the development of Boas’s art theory.
17. See Jacknis 1984 for more on Boas’s use of photographs in the field.
18. Virtually all this material reappeared in his monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897b:366–91).
19. In this essay I use Boas’s names for the Kwakiutl and Nootka which were in use at the time he wrote. Today these people prefer being called Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth, respectively.
20. The actual origin of totem poles is obscure, although they definitely date to precontact times. Early descriptions of interior posts were frequent in the writings of the first explorers and traders in the region, but the only records of large exterior freestanding poles were from the Haida village of Dadans on the Queen Charlottes and the Tlingit village at Yakutat Bay. None was described among any other group. Within a short period of time, however, poles became common among other coastal groups, probably because of both the availability of metal tools and the intertribal contacts that resulted from the fur trade (Cole and Darling 1990:132).
21. The “winter dances” referred to here are the Red Cedar Bark or Tseka ceremonies of the Kwakiutl, which took place over several weeks at the end of the nineteenth century and included masquerades, dancing, and feasting. See Holm 1990a, Suttles 1991.
22. Note that Boas later modifies his position on the centrality of the Kwakiutl in Northwest Coast art history and credits the northern groups with much artistic innovation. See below, pp. 27–28.
23. Boas repeated these points in his 1899 “Summary of the Work of the Committee in British Columbia,” written for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. See Stocking 1974:102–5 for Boas’s brief summary about Northwest Coast art.
24. The guidebook to the hall (Boas 1900a) briefly mentions several of Boas’s principal points about Northwest Coast style.
25. It is perhaps relevant that Putnam, Boas’s mentor and supporter, was on staff at the American Museum of Natural History and instrumental in Boas’s being hired there in 1895 (see Jonaitis 1988a: 135).
26. Although Edmund Carpenter (1975:16) asserts that it was George Emmons who informed Boas about the identification of Northwest Coast animal images, Frederica de Laguna (1991:200) comments that while Boas and Emmons may have discussed this topic, Emmons’s manuscript on Tlingit art (1991:200–209) is evidently influenced by Boas.
27. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902, was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and organized by Boas (see Jonaitis 1988a: 154–213). The aim of this expedition was to study the ethnological relations between the peoples of the Northwest Coast of America and northeastern Siberia (Boas 1898a). The American Museum of Natural History subsidized a monograph series, the Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, which included several volumes on art. Those publications are part of a larger Museum monograph series, American Museum of Natural History Memoirs. The same volume, therefore, has two different volume numbers, that for the Jesup Publications and that for the Memoirs; this has created some confusion.
28. In this essay, Boas described the Salish as being a “receptive race, quick to adopt foreign modes of thought” (1900b:390), perhaps due to “a low stage of development of their early culture, or to social conditions unfavorable to the continued growth of their own culture” (1900b:387). The first explanation sounds rather evolutionist, whereas the second is far more in keeping with his concept of cultural receptivity. See Suttles 1987 for more on the question of the position of the Salish in the Northwest Coast; and Suttles 1990 for recent studies on the Salish.
29. Boas chose this piece, as well as his Alaskan needlecase essay (1908b) and “Representative Art of Primitive Peoples” (1916), to include in Race, Language and Culture (1940); this would suggest that he too felt that these three essays represented his most significant statements on art historical issues.