A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
constitutions (pp. 284–87). He then insisted that racial purity must be maintained and interracial marriages discouraged.
Franz Boas, a German Jew from a politically liberal family, found the tenets of social evolutionism abhorrent.9 He rejected the concept that race and culture could be integrated into a single evolutionary sequence that followed strict rules, just as he rejected the racism that the evolutionist theories justified and validated. His antievolutionism and antiracism began early in his career when, on his first field trip in 1883 among the Canadian Inuit, he recognized how racial prejudice blinded whites from correctly assessing the intrinsic values of other races. In a letter sent from the field, he wrote: “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages,’ and find the more I see of their customs that we have no right to look down on them” (translated in Cole 1983:33).
Then, in 1894, on the basis of further experiences with the Kwakiutl, Boas became more outspoken in his beliefs about the sophistication of primitive mentality, and attacked Spencer’s generalizations on primitive mentality. In an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boas argued against traditional racial assumptions which linked racial differences to hierarchies of race and culture. He insisted that historical factors contributed to the development of all cultures, that standards for evaluating achievements of different peoples are relative, and that mental differences that appear to be racial in origin can be explained on the basis of different traditions (Boas 1894; see also Stocking 1968:215 ff.).10
NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONIST ART HISTORY
If cultures evolved from lower ones to higher ones, so, the argument went, did art styles. At the end of the nineteenth century, many of those who wrote on primitive art assumed that all art styles underwent some sort of evolutionary process not unlike the biological and cultural processes undergone by their creators.11 Artworks of primitive peoples represented examples of early phases of that process, in contrast to the advanced type of art made by civilized peoples. The implication, of course, was that the art of civilized peoples was superior in all ways to that of the “savages.”12 Although these evolutionists could reach no consensus on what kind of art was associated with which period, many agreed that art evolved in a unilinear progression. For some this progression was purely formal, while others associated the evolution of formal elements with a group’s progress through cultural stages.13
One of the earliest and most outspoken proponents of the “improvement” of art through evolutionary processes was the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1857), who wrote that the evolution of art fit into a cosmic process of evolution of mind, society, and civilization. Like plants, animals, and socioeconomic structures, art evolved from simplicity to complexity, and from homogeneity to heterogeneity. In Spencer’s vastly oversimplified scheme, the earliest art was an integration of architecture, painting, and sculpture in service of a theocratic government. During the course of evolution, these art forms became distinct, just as their subject matters gradually differentiated the sacred and the secular.
Most European art historians accepted the general notion of evolution in art, but, failing to agree on how that evolution proceeded, adhered to one of two evolutionist schools, technical/materialism or realist/degenerationism. For the most part, these analysts focused on two-dimensional art rather than sculpture, presumably because they believed it was in decoration that the origins of art could be found (Goldwater 1986:21). Gottfried Semper’s highly influential Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten (1861–63) claimed that art originated as imitation of techniques of architecture. Thus, the oldest forms are abstract and geometric; artists gradually assigned meaning to those designs that developed over time into identifiable images. In contrast, Alfred Haddon (1895) was of the opinion that the earliest artworks were realistic; these gradually “degenerated” into geometric designs. Henry Balfour (1893), Hjalmar Stolpe (1892), Karl von den Steinen (1894), and others believed that the earliest type of art was naturalistic, followed by increasing stylization of form.14 An interesting version of this realist/degenerationist school was found in the writings of Ernst Grosse (1897), a German ethnologist and sociologist who argued that groups at the same socioeconomic level of development produced similar art styles. According to Grosse, the simplest hunters and gatherers, whose livelihoods depended on great skill in observation and manual dexterity, produced relatively realistic art, whereas the later agriculturalists and herdsmen, who did not need such acute senses and skills, lost the ability to create realistic art.
In the United States, Frederic Ward Putnam (1886) was one of the few members of the realist/degenerationist school. In contrast, William H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology supported the technical/materialist theory of art history, arguing that technique and materials were sources of decorative forms, and that the earliest art was a geometric imitation of techniques like basketry (Holmes 1888, 1890, 1903). Holmes theorized further that such geometric art gave way to non-ideographic art, which in turn gave way to delineative art, in an evolutionist sequence governed by strict laws. Every art style in existence either had gone through this sequence to its end or (like the art of primitive peoples) had stopped at some earlier stage. A partial explanation for this retarded artistic development could have been that the primitive artist, living a limited and difficult existence at the mercy of an uncontrollable environment, was rarely capable of creativity, aesthetic pleasure, or imaginative exercises (see Thoresen 1977:109–11; Hinsley 1981:103–5). John Wesley Powell, also of the Bureau of American Ethnology, described a rigid developmental sequence of art history connecting stages of style development to Lewis Henry Morgan’s phases of social development: in the savage stage the artist uses outlining, in the barbaric stage he invents relief, in the kingly stage he develops perspective, and in civilized culture he advances to the chiaroscuro technique (Powell 1899:732).
The strength of the bias for unilineal evolutionism sometimes prevented scholars from understanding certain data that contradicted these explanations. An interesting example of this is the article published in the 1880–1881 Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by Henry Henshaw (1883), “Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley.” In this analysis of archaeological animal carvings, Henshaw noted that some contemporaneous pieces were conventionalized and others were naturalistic—something that, in theory, should not happen if these stylistic modes followed an evolutionary development. Nonetheless, Henshaw held that “at least as far as the North American Indians are concerned, … the road to conventionalism has always led through imitation” (1883:165–66). Despite evidence that two distinct and supposedly chronologically separate styles coexisted, on the strength of the evolutionist paradigm, Henshaw continued to support the notion that one preceded the other. It was Boas who used the numerous examples of similar styles coexisting to disprove the evolutionary theories of the development of primitive art.
During the first several decades of the twentieth century, other approaches to primitive art were subject to Boas’s scrutiny. One of these concerned what Boas believed to be a far too one-sided evaluation of the expressive nature of art. As early as 1894, Ernst Grosse wrote that the fundamental purpose of art was to express ideas. Others who privileged the expressive or communicative nature of art included Yrjö Hirn (1900), Max Verworn (1920), and Richard Thurnwald (1926). For Wilhelm Wundt (1919), art stood in the center of a continuum between myth and language. For Boas, a scholar unwilling to accept any simple explanations of phenomena, particularly those that could not be proved, to ascribe to the origin of art its communicative aspects ignored the equally significant formal or nonexpressive qualities. Equally unacceptable to Boas was the theory put forth by Ernst Vatter (1926), who promoted the idea of an anonymous primitive artist completely lacking in individualism and creativity. To deny primitive artists their personal identity was equivalent to denying them humanity; while these artists functioned within cultural systems that influenced the kind of art they produced, they were by no means slavish copyists of predetermined forms.
FRANZ BOAS ON PRIMITIVE ART
Born and educated in Germany, Franz Boas was familiar with both European and American art historical and anthropological literature. In order to contradict the evolutionist ideas held by many of his contemporaries as absolute truths, Boas emphasized the variety of history; the profound influence of diffusion; the formal, symbolic, and stylistic variations