A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
matter) very thoroughly in his art historical writings. In the concluding essay to this volume, I suggest some possible reasons for this that fit into his theoretical interests (see below, p. 314). Another reason, however, less closely tied to his scholarship, could be practical. While conducting research on the Nootka whalers’ washing shrine, Richard Inglis and I (see Jonaitis and Inglis 1992) found a 1902 letter that Boas had sent to Hunt in which he said that the Kwakiutl collections were complete and now it was time to start working on the Nootka. Presumably Boas realized that to accomplish his goals to reconstruct Northwest Coast art history, he needed more abundant materials from the west coast of Vancouver Island than the American Museum of Natural History had. Perhaps because Hunt spent a very long time purchasing the whalers’ shrine (Cole 1985; Jonaitis 1988a:182–83), he had little time to collect anything else from the area. Unfortunately, Boas left the American Museum in 1905 and thus could not realize his goals of acquiring more Nootka materials that would have enriched the collections upon which he based his scholarship.
31. Fox (1991:100–101) discusses this article in the context of Boasian culture history.
32. Wissler briefly studied with Boas. See Freed and Freed 1983.
33. See Boas’s “Decorative Art of the North American Indians” (1903). This point is in keeping with semiotic theory of Saussure (1964), who points to the arbitrary connections between the signifier and the signified in linguistics.
34. In his essay on Sioux decorative art, Clark Wissler made the following not dissimilar point, “The assumption that the law of growth in decorative art is from the representative to the conventional reduces the problem to one of analysis. It is conceivable, however, that the same result could be reached in the reverse order; viz., by synthesis” (1904:232).
35. Harvard University Press issued an American edition of the Oslo work in 1928; in 1955, Dover reprinted the book.
36. Swanton’s monograph on the Haida (1905:147–54) quotes Boas at length on notes taken in 1897 from Charles Edenshaw regarding a set of gambling sticks. In Primitive Art, Boas gives only a short paragraph to this material (1927:212), although he does reproduce the gambling sticks (figs. 200, 201).
37. It was Bill Holm (1965) who first named these stylistic elements. See below, pp. 309–11.
38. By including these other arts in his book, Boas foreshadows the later interest of African art historians such as Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson in performance art. I am indebted to Janet Berlo for this observation.
39. I have included a brief summary of Boas’s principal ideas about art at the end of this essay.
40. In his book on anthropology and social theory, Robert Ulin (1984:2) states how Boas’s opposition to “unilineal evolutionism within anthropological theory was paralleled by his opposition to racism and other social inequities within American society.”
41. For a fascinating account of how international expositions reinforced a racial hierarchy with scientific credibility, see Rydell (1984).
42. Some of the better known of these are A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, and Margaret Mead.
43. As George Stocking has pointed out (1968:270–308, 1985:114–15), there was a brief reaction in the anthropological establishment against the antievolutionism of Boas and his students at the end of World War I. This reaction was, of course, ultimately unsuccessful.
44. This is not dissimilar to some of Tylor’s ideas. See Lowie 1937.
45. However, as Torgovnick (1990:249) points out, Boas’s progressive, egalitarian ideas need repeating in today’s world.
46. See, for example, Foucault 1972 and Lyotard 1984.
47. Several Northwest Coast ethnographers, including Margaret Blackman, Frederica de Laguna, Philip Drucker, Wilson Duff, Michael Kew, and Wayne Suttles, have produced works that acknowledge acculturation and its consequences.
48. In an especially assertive critique, Virginia Dominguez (1992) insists that any discourse on culture is elitist, even when what is being described as culture is populist. As Dominguez states (pp. 34–35), “It is tempting to read the use of ‘culture’ to refer to nonelite circles or to large, diverse communities as an adaptation of a populist, anthropological sense of culture. But the fact is that in these situations ‘cultures’ are being evaluated and placed on some hierarchical scale of comparative value with an objectified European culture sitting pretty at the top. This is the elite European/Eurocentric sense of culture masking itself as populist.”
49. Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) accepts the premise that the notion of culture carries with it a vehicle for separating different peoples and thus maintaining a state of hierarchy and proposes that anthropologists “pursue, without exaggerated hopes for the power of their texts to change the world, a variety of strategies for writing against culture” (pp. 137–38).
50. Fox (1991:100–101) briefly discusses Boas’s art history, noting that Kroeber and Radin both thought Boas did not do enough actual history of art.
51. It is, for example, bewildering to read all of Boas’s Kwakiutl materials, which offer vast amounts of information about myth, art, religion, social organization, and technology, without presenting a neatly packaged representation of Kwakiutl “culture” that can be understood as a unified whole. See also White 1963, 1966 and Goldman 1975:vii–xi.
52. In “Irony in Anthropology: The Work of Franz Boas,” Krupat’s principal focus is “the trope identified by the West for the expression of skepticism as a response to uncertainty” (1990:135).
1. Tattooing of the Haida
This brief note on Boas’s presentation to the New York Academy of Sciences on Haida tattooing includes an early statement by Boas on his belief that the Kwakiutl originated some motifs which the Haida developed to the highest stage.
Stated Meeting.
The President, Dr. Newberry, in the chair.
Thirty-five persons present.
Dr. Franz Boas exhibited a number of photographs of tattooed Indians from the Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C. This people, the Haida, are the only ones in the habit of tattooing their whole bodies—wrists, arms, breast, back, legs, and feet—the designs being conventional representations of animals, the “crest” of the person on whom they are tattooed. The tattooing is done by puncture and by rubbing soot into the wounds. The patterns are exactly analogous to the paintings and carvings of those people. Tattooing is not unknown to the neighboring tribes, but chiefly confined to marks on the wrists and eventually on the ankles. Such designs are found, for instance, among the Tsimshian. Tattooing on the arm and breast is also found among the Nutkas [Nuu-chah-nulth] of the west coast of Vancouver Island, but in this case it is connected with religious practices, not with the social organization—the totems of the people—as it is among the Haidas. A photograph of a Nutka was exhibited, showing a human figure on the breast. The same individual had long, parallel cuts running from the collarbone down to the belly, and from the shoulders all along the arms. These wounds are inflicted at the initiation of the young man into a secret society and are called “Tlo-koala,” a word borrowed from the Kwakiutl language.
Besides these photographs of tattooed men, others illustrating a few types of Indians were shown, and attention was called to the broadness of their faces, the light color of their skins, and the shortness of their heads. Deformed heads are found only as far north as Milbank Sound and Gardner Channel. A few photographs of excessively deformed heads from the north point of Vancouver Island showed the effects of bandaging, which results in a great elongation of the occipital part of the head.
Replying to a question of the chairman, Dr. Boas stated that the style of art of the northern Tlingit, the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nutka, and Salish can be easily distinguished. He believes that certain designs originated among the Kwakiutl, but reached their highest stage of development among the Haidas. The Salish have some peculiarities not shared by any of the other tribes.
The President referred to his own observations