A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz

       Introduction: The Development of Franz Boas’s Theories on Primitive Art

      ALDONA JONAITIS

      In 1885 the young Franz Boas assisted Adolph Bastian in preparing an exceptional array of British Columbian art, recently collected by Adrian Jacobsen, for the new North American exhibit at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin (Cole 1985:58–67). Soon after, when a troupe of Bella Coolas visited Berlin in January 1886, Boas had the opportunity to meet several Northwest Coast Indians and see them dancing in masquerade, wearing Chilkat blankets, and creating rhythmic music with carved rattles (Cole 1982).¹ In an article published in the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas wrote about the elegant art of the Bella Coolas: “Here we behold with amazement a wonderful technique in the use of carver’s knife and paintbrush and a finely developed artistic sense.… Wonderously beautiful are some of the carved house posts which are erected by this tribe and which represent the family tree; no less notable are the beautifully carved stone implements, axes, hammers, bowls and the like. The repeated motif of all decorations on these objects, as also on the clothing, is a stylized eye” (translated in Cole 1982:119, 122).

      Later that year, Boas made the long trip to the North Pacific region to gain first-hand experience among these Indians whose art fascinated him so, and began a lifelong attachment to the natives of British Columbia.² Boas treated art as an element of culture in his monographs on the Kwakiutl, “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians” (1897b) and “The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island” (1909). The 1897 monograph is particularly important in this context, as it offers extensive detailed information on the ceremonial context of much Kwakiutl art.

      In addition to including art in these rather comprehensive studies, Boas wrote several essays that addressed issues of style and symbolism. His earliest art historical articles dealt solely with art of the Northwest Coast Indians, while his later ones included art of other Native American peoples. His culminating art historical statement, Primitive Art (1927), added examples from Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and Siberia. Boas’s art historical literature has profound historical value since it embodies a major change in primitive art theory from the evolutionism that dominated the nineteenth century to a twentieth-century form of relativism, usually referred to as historical particularism.³ As such, Boas’s art history is of a piece with his social anthropology; as George Marcus and Michael Fischer state in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: “Boas used ethnography to debate residual issues derived from the framework of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and to challenge racist views of human behavior, then ascendant” (1986:130). Boas’s art history was part of his broader scientific agenda that included not simply discrediting evolutionism but offering alternate explanations if possible. In terms of art, Boas was ultimately to stress the roles that culture, history, and the artist’s psychology and creative processes play in the development of an art style.

      NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONIST ANTHROPOLOGY

      To understand fully the significance of Boas’s art historical analyses, it is necessary to summarize the prevailing evolutionist anthropological theories he challenged.⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century, social evolutionism had thoroughly permeated the study of anthropology, and the notion of “survival of the fittest” appeared in diverse texts, serving to explain many cultural phenomena, including art.⁵ Briefly, the several versions of the theory agreed that humankind had evolved from lower primates in a series of phases which progressed from simple to more complex forms, culminating in the Caucasian race, the highest and to that point the most perfect product—the “fittest”—of the sequence. A corollary proposition held that as culture followed biology, the most primitive societies were the simplest, while the more highly evolved western cultures were the most sophisticated and complex.⁶

      In their cultural studies, evolutionist anthropologists applied what is called the “comparative method,” which equated prehistoric groups with living primitive societies. In its most simplified version, this history of human development suggested an analogy between the growth of an individual human and the development of society, with primitive society being equivalent to a child, and civilized culture being like an adult. As they progressed toward civilized perfection, following a course strictly governed by universal rules, all ethnic groups passed through the same stages. As a result, even groups geographically distant from one another shared similar manifestations in areas as diverse as social structure, technology, and art style. At the heart of this theory was the concept of independent invention, which hypothesized that all peoples at the same level of cultural development tend to invent the same artifacts and ways of living (Stocking 1968:112 ff.).

      It is important to point out that not all nineteenth-century anthropology was based on totally erroneous theories, and that some evolutionist concepts remain in the corpus of anthropological thinking. For example, the practice of interpreting archaeological evidence by making analogies with ethnographic groups is still being done, under the ethnoarchaeological approach. Moreover, social evolutionism as an interpretive tool is still being used, particularly by Marxist anthropologists. The two fundamental differences between what was promoted by the nineteenth-century anthropologists and what is now understood by contemporary cultural evolutionists are that (1) no one seriously argues that all groups pass through the same series of stages, and (2) no one claims that any group is culturally superior to any other on the basis of its evolutionary position.

      During the period we are discussing, however, anthropological evolutionism carried with it a predisposition to racialist explanation. Indeed, as Marvin Harris (1968:130) states, “no major figure in the social sciences between 1860 and 1890 escaped the influence of evolutionary racism.” Either implicitly or explicitly, this theory suggested that one group, the whites, had evolved the farthest and thus was mentally, biologically, and morally superior to all others. Some anthropologists of this era believed that because of the nature of the evolutionary process, the “primitive,” darker-skinned people would never reach the apex of creation occupied by whites. Even if they did improve their social, economic, political, and artistic condition, these people would never be able to “catch up” to the whites, who would continue to forge ahead with their more sophisticated technologies and ever greater intellectual and scientific achievements.⁷

      One significant manifestation of their purported inferiority was the mental ability of darker-skinned peoples. Herbert Spencer (1896), who claimed that primitive man’s mental processes were reflexive responses to natural stimuli, concluded that only in whites had highly developed thought processes capable of abstraction evolved. E. B. Tylor (1871), a major Victorian evolutionist who did make useful contributions to anthropological theories, especially in the field of religion, insisted that unlike the modern European adult who had a large and sophisticated brain, the primitive was like a child with a less developed brain and lesser mental capacities.

      Contemporary physical anthropology supported the correlative notion that development of cranial capacity corresponded with the progressive stages of human development. W J McGee, of the Bureau of American Ethnology and first president of the American Anthropological Association, firmly believed that brain sizes corresponded closely with culture grade, and that as a group evolved, the average brain size of its members became larger since more advanced stages of development demanded more complex neural activities (McGee 1897, 1899). Consistent with these notions is McGee’s assertion that “the savage stands strikingly close to sub-human species in every aspect of mental as well as bodily habits and bodily structure” (McGee 1901:13).⁸

      Sometimes the evolutionists used the supposed inferiority of nonwhites as scientific justification for a form of segregation. Daniel Brinton, eminent University of Pennsylvania professor of anthropology and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was particularly concerned about the disastrous consequences of racial mixtures. In his book Races and Peoples (1890), Brinton took a hard line against marriages between members of different races, arguing