Boas points out the dissimilarity between coastal art and that of the Interior Salish, which has much closer affinities with Plains Indian art.
After an interesting excursion into the topic of literature, music, and dance, Boas concludes Primitive Art with a summary of its major points.38 He reiterates his premise that art arises from both technical endeavors and from expressive needs, but actually does favor the former. Since certain elements—symmetry, rhythm, and emphasis on form—are practically universal, they can be assumed to be most ancient, most fundamental. But other than those antique foundations, it is simply not possible to assume any kind of universal causation of artistic development; the pattern of artistic expression, the type of geometric motifs, the treatment of the decorative field, and the degree of realism in any art style cannot be attributed to strict, unilinear processes. Moreover, even within the art of a single culture, uniform style is not always the rule. Those who excel in technical activities become the community’s artists, whether they are men or women; in those situations where both men and women produce different things, two distinct art styles can emerge, as is the case on the Northwest Coast. Once again, however, Boas points to the fertility of female activities as inspirations for art styles: “It is … more frequent that the style of the dominant industry may be imposed upon work made by other processes. Weaving in coarse material seemed to be a most fertile source of patterns that art imitated in paintings, carvings, and pottery” (p. 355).
Boas asserts that “the pattern of artistic expression that emerges from a long, cumulative process determined by a multiplicity of causes fashions the form of the art work” (p. 354), thus one cannot conclude anything on a grand and abstract scale. His detailed analysis of actual case studies of particular art styles, his focus on the creative process, and his privileging of history all support his rejection of unprovable theories. In Primitive Art, Boas systematically rejects such theories by demonstrating cases in which they do not apply, and proposes a variety of different explanations for the invention and dissemination of artistic images including both cultural conservatism and creativity. In his Northwest Coast chapter, Boas offers an alternative approach to the study of art, by first identifying the principles of representation and then suggesting a historical reconstruction of the art style, drawing on the art of neighboring peoples. This last point is worth stressing. Many twentieth-century scholars of Native art believed that without support from written documents, it was impossible to reconstruct a history without access to “permanent” artworks made of stone or metal. Since so much of primitive art is made of wood and natural materials that decompose over time, many art historians felt bound to an ahistoric analysis of nineteenth-century objects. By using Boas’s historical approach, art historians could include greater time depth in their studies.39
Characterizing Boas’s contributions to art historical scholarship is no easy task, as he premised his studies on the tremendous complexity of the artistic process that makes simple explanations impossible. In his efforts to avoid imposing predetermined unicausal factors in the creation of art styles while consciously purging Native art history of a racist bias, Boas produced a rich body of literature which, as the concluding chapter of this book will demonstrate, profoundly influenced much twentieth-century work on Native art.
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF BOAS’S ART HISTORY
Boas was not a scholar who merely challenged a point of view with which he disagreed. Although his social activism is best known from the period after he left the American Museum and settled into the Anthropology Department at Columbia University, Boas seems early in his life to have had strong social sentiments. Thus one can argue that his treatment of primitive art, in addition to being an interesting analysis of that subject and an attack on what Boas felt to be a wrong-headed theory, was a challenge to a mode of thought which at the end of the nineteenth century had destructive social consequences.40
To understand the broader ramifications of Boas’s theories on art it is necessary to review the social implications of the evolutionist’s theories. There was a tendency then, as there is today, to believe that science is objective, rational, and unconnected to social considerations. In fact, science has never been value-free. At the turn of the century, the writings of Brinton, McGee, and others provided “scientific” justification for the increasingly racist attitudes of the native-born American white population.41 For example, they supported, with “facts,” attitudes which held that Native Americans and other people of color were, simply, genetically inferior to whites. Although the Indian stood somewhat higher in the evolutionary ladder than blacks, many whites believed that his wild natural instincts would get the better of him and he would soon vanish from the earth, unable to evolve further and live in civilization. Although at this time there were some who thought well of the Indians, the general white assessment of their character was not favorable.
Dislike and distrust of Indians was mild compared with the increasingly virulent attitudes toward and outrageous treatment of American blacks. Here, too, evolutionist theories justified such treatment. Since these freed slaves and their descendants, like their Native American counterparts, were seen to occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder, it was not necessary to treat them in a civilized manner. Racist attitudes often greeted the new European immigrants as well (Gossett 1972:292–93). During the 1890s, Jews and southern Europeans entered the United States in great numbers, encountering here hostility on the part of native-born citizens who feared that alien “races” were weakening American blood (Higham 1963:94, 110). Late nineteenth-century white supremacy received a major boost during the Spanish-American War when this country finally established an empire over “colored” people. This was the climate in which Franz Boas worked out his ideas on art—as well as many of his thoughts on culture.
The prevailing American racialist thinking became increasingly blatant as science and racism allied themselves ever more tightly during the first decades of the twentieth century. The president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1932, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a distinguished paleontologist, was a firm believer in the connection between race and social standing, and became an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, the pseudoscience based on the assumption that the human race could be improved through selective breeding.
Osborn’s close friend was Madison Grant, who bemoaned the negative influence on white Anglo-Saxon society of immigrants, especially the Jews. Advancing his own reading of Mendelian genetics, Grant asserted that “the cross between the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (quoted in Higham 1963:156). Grant, president of the New York Zoological Society, in 1906 caged a Pigmy black in the primate house, presumably as an illustration of a Negro-ape on the evolutionary scale (Horowitz 1975:450). Then, in 1916, Grant published the immensely popular The Passing of the Great Race, which described this country’s dismal fate: becoming overrun by immigrants of inferior eastern and central European races. Grant praised the tremendous virtues of “Nordic blood,” and feared its assimilation by intermixture with blood of inferior races: “It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterized the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us race reverting to the more ancient, generalized, and lower type” (Grant 1916:17). To prevent such racial suicide, Grand proposed several remedies, including passage of expanded laws against miscegenation, sterilization of persons with “deficiencies,” encouragement of greater reproduction of the fit, and “a complete change in our political structure … superseding our present reliance on the influence of education by a readjustment based on racial values” (Grant 1916:60).
Osborn, Grant, and others reflected the growing racism which was to become truly destructive after World War I. During the late teens and twenties, the Ku Klux Klan became powerful in both the South and the North, anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism ran rampant, universities imposed quotas limiting the number of Jewish students, psychologists developed intelligence testing which “proved” the mental inferiority of nonwhites, and Congress passed several bills restricting immigration in order to curb the masses of darker-skinned
