Throughout all this, Franz Boas kept challenging the scientific basis of racist theories and presenting new information to resist such ideas. Thus, the 1927 publication of Primitive Art was not merely an intellectual exercise meant to argue against esoteric evolutionistic art history. It also embodied an antiracist statement. By the 1920s, Boas’s ideas had been disseminated in a university context, and thus were generally accepted by the profession of anthropology (in part because so many university anthropologists had been trained by Boas).42 Yet the racist attitudes that anthropologists had managed largely to eliminate from their profession still prevailed among the American public. Primitive Art actually came out during some of the darkest years in the history of American race prejudice.43 All the manifestations in American society of racialist thinking and policy that had early been reinforced by science were still prevalent, even if anthropology itself no longer supported them.
By bringing attention to the similarities among the different peoples of the world, Primitive Art provided data on western and nonwestern perspective techniques to support assertions of racial equality. Boas noted that a symbolic reading of an abstract motif is not limited to primitive societies, for even in our own civilization, form and color can possess a significance unrelated to the actual shape and hue. As examples, he used national flags, the Nazi swastika, and the Star of David as images that can produce extremely deep emotions by virtue of their symbolic significance rather than their subject matter (pp. 100–102). Then, after describing how members of the same ethnic group can interpret the same motif differently, Boas pointed out that to a Canadian the maple leaf can communicate patriotic feeling quite different from the response of a person who reads that leaf as symbolic of the autumn season. The crescent can symbolize to some a beautiful summer night, to others the Turkish nation; or it can simply be perceived as an elegant form (pp. 105–6). Moreover, primitive cultures are not the only ones with conservative tastes; Boas identified those manifestations of conservatism in our own culture such as localized food preferences, and male versus female attire (pp. 148–50). With such allusions to cross-cultural traits, Boas saw art as a means of forming connections among peoples rather than increasing their distance.
Boas used the preface and conclusion of Primitive Art to attack the core doctrine of evolutionism and the theory of ethnic inequality deducible from it. In his preface he began with the two premises that underpin his book: the identical mental processes of all humans, and the historical causation of all cultural phenomena.44 He then asserted that “the mental processes of man are the same everywhere, regardless of race and culture, and regardless of the apparent absurdity of beliefs and customs. Some theorists assume a mental equipment of primitive man distinct from that of civilized man. I have never seen a person in primitive life to whom this theory would apply” (p. 1). On the next page, Boas alludes to his own experiences with non-western cultures:
Anyone who has lived with primitive tribes, who has shared their joys and sorrows, their privations and their luxuries, who sees them not solely as subjects of study to be examined like a cell under the microscope, but feeling and thinking human beings, will agree that there is no such thing as a “primitive mind,” a “magical” or “prelogical” way of thinking, but that each individual in “primitive” society is a man, a woman, a child of the same kind, of the same way of thinking, feeling and acting as man, woman, or child in our own society (p. 2).
At the end of his book, Boas extended that judgment to the highest manifestation of the human spirit. Drawing from his arguments for the complexity of the mind of primitive man as well as for the multidimensional psychological nature of the creative and aesthetic process, he asserted that primitive man has as much capability for aesthetic appreciation as civilized man. The only difference is the relative lack of a fixed style and greater artistic opportunities in western art: “I believe we may safely say that in the narrow field of art that is characteristic of each people the enjoyment of beauty is quite the same as among ourselves.… It is the quality [i.e., the broader scope] of the experience, not a difference in mental makeup that determines the difference between modern and primitive art production and art appreciation” (p. 356). With these words on art, Boas aligned himself with those intellectuals and scholars—many of them anthropologists like himself—increasingly drawn to ideas of social equality and the universality of our humanity. His ideas, along with those of other liberal and leftist intellectuals, would become more widely accepted as the spirit of the New Deal took hold of the United States in the 1930s.45
Franz Boas’s research on the history of art—and I stress the word history here—began as part of his multiple-pronged attack on evolutionism. A fundamental assumption of evolutionism was that single answers to questions could be found, that a kind of universal law governed the understanding of nature and culture. Recently, such grand universalizing discourses have been discredited as significant manifestations of elitism and social, racial, and ethnic hierarchies. Particularly troublesome is the fact that these texts, written by omniscient experts who remain outside and above their product, create a timeless discourse that purports to represent authenticity and truth.46 Although he did not use the jargon in vogue today, Boas would have agreed with the critique of evolutionism as a metanarrative that disempowers Native people.
In keeping with the efforts of many modern scholars to question the validity of cherished truths, some writers have scrutinized the concept of “culture.” Culture—meaning that which is learned within a particular community or society—was Boas’s alternative to evolutionary theories to which so many late nineteenth-century anthropologists adhered. Finding unacceptable the racial foundations of evolutionism, Boas explained differences between western and nonwestern peoples as manifestations of different, yet equal, cultures, thus using anthropology to promote the concept of human equality. Moreover, for Boas, one of the most compelling deficiencies of evolutionism from a methodological perspective was its tendency to create laws prior to actually analyzing the data those laws purportedly explained; he objected strenuously to using formulae to interpret a priori ethnographic material. Boas, for both scientific and ethical reasons, rejected the imposition in anthropological research of what we in the late twentieth century would label an evolutionist grand narrative.
As is sometimes the case in the history of ideas, a liberating theory in one moment can have elements that at a later moment prove to be less liberating. Valuable as a challenge to the racism of nineteenth-century evolutionism, culture today is one of the grand universalizing definitions of humanity that some scholars have been dismantling. James Clifford was one of the first in recent years to draw attention to the fact that the concept of a unified culture is anachronistic in a multi-cultural world (1988:95).47 Clifford points in particular to collecting artifacts as one manifestation of the search for “wholeness, continuity and essence” (1988:233).48 The supposedly coherent, unified, static, and essentially ahistoric features that have characterized discourses on Native cultures distinguish them from the diversified, dynamic, and historical features of Euro-American societies.49
It must be stressed that the current criticisms of “culture” are far more applicable to the theories of the British structural/functionalists than to Boasian historical particularism. For Richard G. Fox (1991:100–104), an adequate assessment of Boas requires understanding his concepts both of culture and of culture history; elements of the latter concept provide some responses to contemporary criticisms of the former.50 Culture history postulates that cultures are assemblages of traits, some of which were invented locally, others obtained by diffusion from elsewhere. Being the products of history, cultures are not necessarily integrated totalities; indeed, it would be erroneous to assume a priori that any cultural elements within a group are necessarily related without careful scrutiny of the data. Boasian culture history, in keeping with Boas’s critique of evolutionism, eschewed the imposition of any theoretical framework on any body of data, and appears to be quite far removed from any kind of grand universalizing discourse.
Indeed, Boas’s concept of culture, especially as it relates to art history, can result in liberation rather than disempowerment. One significant feature of this
