However, Boas (1908b:321) notes that in 1905, von den Steinen had begun to emphasize technical considerations in art. Moreover, Stolpe and von den Steinen had differing opinions about the nature of these progressions from naturalism to stylization. See Goldwater (1986:22–30) for a discussion of the theoretical nuances of these and other early students of primitive art.
15. Thoresen (1977) correctly points out the significance of the writings of other turn-of-the-century anthropologists, especially Kroeber (1900a, 1901) and Wissler (1904), as manifestations of this shift away from evolutionism. Although both Kroeber and Wissler studied with and were enormously influenced by Boas, each apparently provided him with interesting material and ideas in return. See also Jacknis 1992 for a useful and subtle discussion of this.
16. See Jacknis 1992 for a similar discussion of the development of Boas’s art theory.
17. See Jacknis 1984 for more on Boas’s use of photographs in the field.
18. Virtually all this material reappeared in his monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897b:366–91).
19. In this essay I use Boas’s names for the Kwakiutl and Nootka which were in use at the time he wrote. Today these people prefer being called Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth, respectively.
20. The actual origin of totem poles is obscure, although they definitely date to precontact times. Early descriptions of interior posts were frequent in the writings of the first explorers and traders in the region, but the only records of large exterior freestanding poles were from the Haida village of Dadans on the Queen Charlottes and the Tlingit village at Yakutat Bay. None was described among any other group. Within a short period of time, however, poles became common among other coastal groups, probably because of both the availability of metal tools and the intertribal contacts that resulted from the fur trade (Cole and Darling 1990:132).
21. The “winter dances” referred to here are the Red Cedar Bark or Tseka ceremonies of the Kwakiutl, which took place over several weeks at the end of the nineteenth century and included masquerades, dancing, and feasting. See Holm 1990a, Suttles 1991.
22. Note that Boas later modifies his position on the centrality of the Kwakiutl in Northwest Coast art history and credits the northern groups with much artistic innovation. See below, pp. 27–28.
23. Boas repeated these points in his 1899 “Summary of the Work of the Committee in British Columbia,” written for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. See Stocking 1974:102–5 for Boas’s brief summary about Northwest Coast art.
24. The guidebook to the hall (Boas 1900a) briefly mentions several of Boas’s principal points about Northwest Coast style.
25. It is perhaps relevant that Putnam, Boas’s mentor and supporter, was on staff at the American Museum of Natural History and instrumental in Boas’s being hired there in 1895 (see Jonaitis 1988a: 135).
26. Although Edmund Carpenter (1975:16) asserts that it was George Emmons who informed Boas about the identification of Northwest Coast animal images, Frederica de Laguna (1991:200) comments that while Boas and Emmons may have discussed this topic, Emmons’s manuscript on Tlingit art (1991:200–209) is evidently influenced by Boas.
27. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902, was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and organized by Boas (see Jonaitis 1988a: 154–213). The aim of this expedition was to study the ethnological relations between the peoples of the Northwest Coast of America and northeastern Siberia (Boas 1898a). The American Museum of Natural History subsidized a monograph series, the Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, which included several volumes on art. Those publications are part of a larger Museum monograph series, American Museum of Natural History Memoirs. The same volume, therefore, has two different volume numbers, that for the Jesup Publications and that for the Memoirs; this has created some confusion.
28. In this essay, Boas described the Salish as being a “receptive race, quick to adopt foreign modes of thought” (1900b:390), perhaps due to “a low stage of development of their early culture, or to social conditions unfavorable to the continued growth of their own culture” (1900b:387). The first explanation sounds rather evolutionist, whereas the second is far more in keeping with his concept of cultural receptivity. See Suttles 1987 for more on the question of the position of the Salish in the Northwest Coast; and Suttles 1990 for recent studies on the Salish.
29. Boas chose this piece, as well as his Alaskan needlecase essay (1908b) and “Representative Art of Primitive Peoples” (1916), to include in Race, Language and Culture (1940); this would suggest that he too felt that these three essays represented his most significant statements on art historical issues.
30. Boas did not deal with the Nootka (or the Salish for that matter) very thoroughly in his art historical writings. In the concluding essay to this volume, I suggest some possible reasons for this that fit into his theoretical interests (see below, p. 314). Another reason, however, less closely tied to his scholarship, could be practical. While conducting research on the Nootka whalers’ washing shrine, Richard Inglis and I (see Jonaitis and Inglis 1992) found a 1902 letter that Boas had sent to Hunt in which he said that the Kwakiutl collections were complete and now it was time to start working on the Nootka. Presumably Boas realized that to accomplish his goals to reconstruct Northwest Coast art history, he needed more abundant materials from the west coast of Vancouver Island than the American Museum of Natural History had. Perhaps because Hunt spent a very long time purchasing the whalers’ shrine (Cole 1985; Jonaitis 1988a:182–83), he had little time to collect anything else from the area. Unfortunately, Boas left the American Museum in 1905 and thus could not realize his goals of acquiring more Nootka materials that would have enriched the collections upon which he based his scholarship.
31. Fox (1991:100–101) discusses this article in the context of Boasian culture history.
32. Wissler briefly studied with Boas. See Freed and Freed 1983.
33. See Boas’s “Decorative Art of the North American Indians” (1903). This point is in keeping with semiotic theory of Saussure (1964), who points to the arbitrary connections between the signifier and the signified in linguistics.
34. In his essay on Sioux decorative art, Clark Wissler made the following not dissimilar point, “The assumption that the law of growth in decorative art is from the representative to the conventional reduces the problem to one of analysis. It is conceivable, however, that the same result could be reached in the reverse order; viz., by synthesis” (1904:232).
35. Harvard University Press issued an American edition of the Oslo work in 1928; in 1955, Dover reprinted the book.
36. Swanton’s monograph on the Haida (1905:147–54) quotes Boas at length on notes taken in 1897 from Charles Edenshaw regarding a set of gambling sticks. In Primitive Art, Boas gives only a short paragraph to this material (1927:212), although he does reproduce the gambling sticks (figs. 200, 201).
37. It was Bill Holm (1965) who first named these stylistic elements. See below, pp. 309–11.
38. By including these other arts in his book, Boas foreshadows the later interest of African art historians such as Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson in performance art. I am indebted to Janet Berlo for this observation.
39. I have included a brief summary of Boas’s principal ideas about art at the end of this essay.
40. In his book on anthropology and social theory, Robert Ulin (1984:2) states how Boas’s opposition to “unilineal evolutionism within anthropological
