that ultimately allow room for multiple voices. In an ironic twist to the postmodernist attacks on the grand narrative of culture, some have criticized Boas for the apparent randomness of the information given in his publications, which prevents the reader from obtaining a unified picture of any one culture.51 Arnold Krupat (1990, 1992) reads Boas from the perspective of the late nineteenth-century turning away in philosophy and science from absolute certainty to relativity and suggests that Boas also appears to have had, at some level, “a commitment to sustaining contradiction” (Krupat 1992:90). While Krupat expresses uncertainty as to whether Boas worked in this fashion to forestall a premature synthesis or to prevent any synthesis, he does point out that in the 1932 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published later as the first essay on “culture” in Race, Language and Culture (1940), Boas explicitly asserts that laws governing culture cannot be found. And, while Boas most often was interested in the coherent and orderly phenomena of culture, he did on occasion display a fascination with chaos, “an old-fashioned variant of postmodern free play” (Krupat 1990:144).52
Although Krupat, appropriately, warns against reading Boas as a precursor to postmodernism, some current intellectual trends illuminate features of Boas’s art history that might in the past have been bypassed. Reading and rereading the essays reprinted in this book as well as Primitive Art (1927) makes it very clear that we are not dealing with a grand narrative; indeed, a major motivation in Boas’s art history is to reject the false premises of evolutionism and to promote the complexities of historical and psychological processes. Boas warned against too rigid an interpretation of art as solely the product of culture that ignores the influence of history:
It has often been observed that cultural traits are exceedingly tenacious and that features of hoary antiquity survive until the present day. This has led to the impression that primitive culture is almost stable and has remained what it is for many centuries. This does not correspond to the facts. Wherever we have detailed information we see forms of objects and customs in constant flux, sometimes stable for a period, then undergoing rapid changes. Through this process elements that at one time belonged together as cultural units are torn apart. Some survive, others die, and so far as objective traits are concerned, the cultural form may become a kaleidoscopic picture of miscellaneous traits that, however, are remodelled according to the changing spiritual background that pervades the culture and transforms the mosaic into an organic whole (Boas 1927:6–7).
Although Boas ends this quote with a reference to the totality of a culture, he does give it history. At a moment in time, the elements that constitute culture might fit together nicely, but historical changes can disrupt that fit. And, in what could be considered an almost contradictory refinement to his representation of the “organic whole,” later in Primitive Art, Boas both warns against “treating tribes too much as standardized units,” pointing to the individualism inherent in both primitive and western societies (1927:84–85), and stresses that under no circumstances are “primitive forms … absolutely stable” (1927:150). With these words, Boas set the stage for subsequent scholars who would address the histories of continuity and change in Native American art.
A Brief Summary of Boas’s Art History
A. Formal considerations
1. Certain universals do exist: symmetry, rhythmic repetition, emphasis on form.
2. Technique plays a major role in the development of an art style.
3. Relative naturalism or stylization of art results from a variety of factors both technical and cultural.
B. Iconographic considerations
1. Meaning in art is culturally determined.
2. Groups assign meaning to images from outside groups appropriate to their culture.
3. Meaning is sometimes universal within a group, sometimes individual.
C. Historical considerations
1. Designs originate among one group and diffuse elsewhere.
2. Groups borrow images appropriate to their needs.
3. To reconstruct art history, the distribution of style and meaning—which are independent of one another—must be analyzed.
D. Psychological considerations
1. Pleasure in the act of technical virtuosity is an important element in the creation of art.
2. Conservatism and cultural conventions impose restrictions over artistic creativity and innovation.
3. Within cultural restrictions, creativity and originality are evident among all artists.
1. Also see Haberland 1988 for an interesting discussion of the Bella Coola in Germany in 1885–86.
2. On the anthropology and career of Franz Boas, see especially Cole 1985, Rohner 1969, Stocking 1968 and 1974, Jacknis 1984 and 1985, Lesser 1981, and Krupat 1990.
3. I use the term “primitive art” here to cover the material Boas dealt with in his book.
4. For an intriguing study of the British evolutionists, see Stocking 1987.
5. Ernst Grosse even argued that art played a role in social survival: “… art is no idle play, but an indispensable social function, one of the most efficient weapons in the struggle for existence” (1897:312).
6. The biological model informed the work of some of the most important early cultural evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward B. Tylor. (See Haller 1971, Stocking 1987, and Kuper 1991 for more on this.)
7. Lewis Henry Morgan (1877), for example, believed that despite each advance primitive peoples might make, the more advanced groups would forever be outdistancing them. W J McGee (1903 speech, quoted in Haller 1971:107) described how the lower races could not “keep up” with the more advanced, and thus were “the mental and moral beggars of the community who may not be trusted on horseback but only in the rear seat of the wagon.” And Edward B. Tylor (1881:74) stated, “History points [up] the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers between such tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the Old World nations who overmatch and subdue them.”
8. The inferiority of the nonwhite races supported by social evolutionism provided a useful justification for imperialism. See Manganaro 1990:28; Stocking 1991:4.
9. For more on Franz Boas and politics, see Stocking 1979.
10. See Suttles and Jonaitis (1990:74–77) for a summary of Boas’s contributions to Northwest Coast anthropology.
11. See Goldwater (1986:15–50) for an excellent summary of early attitudes to primitive art.
12. The relative value of “primitive art” as compared to the art of more developed cultures is still, surprisingly, not universally accepted. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, Douglas Fraser would describe his colleagues’ disdain for this type of art. Even today, members of an art history department at a major university have questioned the “maturity” of Native American art history.
13. Just as evolution continues to serve a useful purpose in anthropological theory (see pp. 4–5), it also remains a viable concept for some art historical analyses. See especially Munro 1963 for a sophisticated
