energy and output seem not to have been attached to a single dominating insight, but to have been austerely empirical. Any general statement could only be enunciated when data gave statistical proof. He resisted Hitler propaganda on the racial question with all the power of his mature authority; but the world does not associate the name of Boas with “racial equality,” as it does Darwin’s with “evolution,” Marx’s with “communism,” and Freud’s with “the unconscious.” Even by the end of his long working life, the proofs were not in. “He made no one great summating discovery,” says Kroeber (p. 24). Up to the end he was sifting the materials.
Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia, on 9 July 1858, to Meier Boas, a prosperous businessman, and his wife Sophie, a founder of the first Froebel Kindergarten in Minden and one of a circle of intellectuals “of the Mosaic confession” (as Boas once phrased it). Perhaps the most significant event in his life occurred in the fallow years after his doctorate, when he was waiting for some position. The event is of a personal nature. His aunt’s husband, Dr. Abraham Jacobi of New York City, invited Franz for a holiday in the Hartz mountains. Marie Krackowizer was of the party, one of two daughters accompanied by their mother, the widow of an Austrian doctor who had emigrated to the United States after the troubles of 1848. If Boas was to marry Marie, as he immediately knew he must, he had to have a career, and in the United States to boot. We can see Boas’s early ambition as half scientific thrust and half the securing of a lady’s hand in marriage. His letter-diaries make it quite clear where he would have preferred to be rather than on the S.S. Boskowitz up and down the Northwest Coast. Field work was not an enjoyable way of life, but merely a means of providing the raw materials for linguistic and statistical analysis, which could be conducted in the comfort of his own study at home. This not only explains the rather limited amount of time he spent in the field and the welcome he gave to informants who, when properly trained, could mail to New York quite usable information, but also illuminates Boas’s general moral stance: his life in New York, his editing, his teaching, and his marriage, this was so successful and satisfying that other ways of life, it seems, could only be looked down upon. Crime, casual sexuality, roisterous play, religious anxiety or enthusiasm, pastimes, or any form of unemployment, these were things he did not know much about, didn’t want to know much about. Perhaps one reason why the principle of equality was never powerfully enough enunciated is that he could not really believe that another mode of life might be as good as the one he was fortunate enough to possess.
Franz Boas with Marie Krackowizer during his visit to New York in 1884. Photo kindly made available by Ronald P. Rohner. See his The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969), “Illustrations.” Reproduced courtesy of Franziska Boas, who supplied the correct date for the photo in a personal communication, 1 June 1980.
Indianische Sagen
It is rather dismaying to the general reader that the first major publication of myths and legends of the Northwest Coast was printed in German in 1895 and has remained untranslated.2 Indianische Sagen von derNord-Pacifische Kiiste Amerikas is a collection of the stories published during 1888-1895 in the two German periodicals hospitable to Boas’s reports, the gatherings from his first four trips to British Columbia, 1886, 1888, 1889, and 1890. The itineraries for these field trips have been conveniently tabulated and summarized in Ronald P. Rohner’s “Franz Boas: Ethnographer on the Northwest Coast” ed. June Helm Pioneers of American Anthropology (1966) pp. 151-247. What is also dismaying is how hurriedly these stories were collected. Outside of his base in Victoria, Boas never spent more than two weeks at any one place, often only a day or two. He worked under severe financial restrictions and faced many obstacles, the chief of which, initially, was his own inexperience. He had been a year with Eskimos in Baffinland (1883-84), and his observations there went far beyond his formal function of geographer, as The Central Eskimo (1888) attests. But the only Indians he had seen before 1886 were the Bella Coola “exhibited” at the Berlin Museum the previous year. Boas had taken the opportunity to do “field” research with this group, and had published on their language and culture.3 As it happened, a couple of these very Bella Coola contacts were in Victoria when he arrived on 18 September 1886, and facilitated his movements among the resident and visiting Indians. Speed was essential; he had budgeted for only three months to do a general reconnaissance of all the coastal tribes. “I am as well known here in Victoria as a mongrel dog,” he wrote of this period. “I look up all kinds of people without modesty or hesitation.”4 We can share his sense of depravity at trying to obtain clean texts in the congested Indian slums, and it is refreshing to read that, after sixteen days of hustling, he has embarked on a boat going north. He spends 6-17 October 1886 in Nawitti at the furthest tip of Vancouver Island. After 18-23 October at Alert Bay, he is back in Victoria for 26 October to 2 November; then off again to Cowichan (4-10 November); Comox (12 November to 2 December); Nanaimo (4-9 December); and ends up with just two days in Vancouver. It is, all in all, a great success. He has vocabularies enough to complete a linguistic map of the B.C. coast; he has packed off enough museum specimens to pay for the trip; and his manuscript of myths and legends “has reached page 326” (Rohner, p. 73). The other three trips which furnished the stories of Indianische Sagen were at a similar pace. The British Association for the Advancement of Science instructed him, through Horatio Hale, not to attempt a thorough study of any one tribe but to compile a general synopsis, i.e. to continue the kind of rushing around he had proved he could do. He was also asked to measure heads and collect skeletal remains, two disagreeable tasks which sapped his energies. It is a wonder that texts of permanent value could be obtained with so much scurrying. Perhaps Boas thought that few had, and left the collection untranslated, except for the following items which he placed in American journals:
(1) “On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia” Journal of American Folklore 1 (1888) 49-64, which describes the potlatch Boas attended at Nawitti in 1886 and thus provides useful context (the materials appear in Indian-ische Sagen not so accommodated);
(2) “Notes on the Snanaimuq” American Anthropologist 2 (October 1899) 321-328 contains two tales from the Nanaimo section of Indianische Sagen, presented within the context of a description of tribal customs;
(3) “Salishan Texts” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 34 (January 1895) 31-48—Bella Coola texts with interlinear translation (the Indianische Sagen versions are longer, more sprawling, and may possibly be the same stories obtained through the medium of Chinook jargon);
(4) “Myths and Legends of the Catloltq [Comox] of Vancouver Island” American Antiquarian 10 (1888) 201-211, 366-373.
These are the selections from his earliest field work in myth that Boas offered his English-speaking public. Are they good stories? The question seems almost impertinent. Boas certainly would not claim that they were. Of the Bella Coola sampling, for instance, he states: “the texts are fragmentary and indifferent versions of myths” ("Salishan Texts" p. 31). In his letters home he makes it clear that he is really interested in the language: “The stories themselves are not worth much” (Rohner p. 50). When he says of the Comox stories, “in some ways the myths of the Comox are very interesting, and I am glad I have found so many of them” (Rohner p. 67), it is their pivotal position in the spread of motifs north to south along the coast which makes them interesting to him. The stories themselves are not especially interesting. And after a week at the Nawitti potlatch, Boas can write: “At present I am quite confused by the amount of nonsense to which I must listen” (Rohner p.38). The tidbits that appear in “On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl” are quite appetizing, but future readers of Indianische Sagen should be warned that they will not be spared page after page of what Boas himself was very puzzled by.
Boas in 1894
The 1894 season was surely Boas’s best. It was his sixth,
