relationship between anthropology and colonialism.” She urges in particular revitalizing the “classics” of ethnography by careful scrutiny of the texts in this kind of historical and contextualizing fashion. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991:39) suggests that anthropologists reassess the value of past ethnographic research and writing, “with a fair tally of the knowledge anthropologists have produced in the past, sometimes in spite of themselves.” In this book, I attempt to respond to these challenges. In the first essay, I review the development of Boas’s art history ideas and position them in their historical moment; in the concluding article, I demonstrate the profound impact Boas has had on twentieth-century studies of Northwest Coast art.
8. Berlo then edited a collection of papers from these two sessions, which became the book The Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting, published by the University of Washington Press in 1992.
9. For some of the recent works on postmodernist theory, see Alexander and Seidman 1990, Jencks 1991 and 1992, Kroker 1992, MacCannell 1992, West 1989, Harvey 1989, and especially Jameson 1991. For some discussions of postmodernism and Native cultures, see Todd 1992 and Townsend-Gault 1992.
In an essay in the amusingly titled book Zeitgeist in Babel, Charles Jencks (1991:19–20) tabulates a series of concepts that embody the differences between modernism and postmodernism. Thus, in contrast to the holistic nature of modernist writings, postmodernist ones are piecemeal; the straightforward is contrasted to the hybrid, simplicity to complexity, purist to eclectic, and harmonious integration to collage and collision. In a radio interview with Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, moderator Geoffrey Hawthorn reflects upon the situation: “… these are confusing times, in which older universal traditions and certainties seemed, even though recently to be quite solid and reliable, no longer to offer the same security.… We can never connect, we can certainly never know that we connect with the things that there are in the world.… All we can know is what we say about the world—our talk, our sentences, our discourse, our texts” (Spivak 1990:17). Ames (1992:14) suggests a more moderate position: “The two extremes are to be avoided: the imperialist assumption that the scholar … has a natural or automatic right to intrude upon the histories and cultures of others ‘in the interests of science and knowledge’; and the nihilistic postmodernist claim that all knowledge is relative, all voices are equal.”
A Wealth of Thought
Franz Boas on Native American Art
Introduction: The Development of Franz Boas’s Theories on Primitive Art
ALDONA JONAITIS
In 1885 the young Franz Boas assisted Adolph Bastian in preparing an exceptional array of British Columbian art, recently collected by Adrian Jacobsen, for the new North American exhibit at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin (Cole 1985:58–67). Soon after, when a troupe of Bella Coolas visited Berlin in January 1886, Boas had the opportunity to meet several Northwest Coast Indians and see them dancing in masquerade, wearing Chilkat blankets, and creating rhythmic music with carved rattles (Cole 1982).1 In an article published in the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas wrote about the elegant art of the Bella Coolas: “Here we behold with amazement a wonderful technique in the use of carver’s knife and paintbrush and a finely developed artistic sense.… Wonderously beautiful are some of the carved house posts which are erected by this tribe and which represent the family tree; no less notable are the beautifully carved stone implements, axes, hammers, bowls and the like. The repeated motif of all decorations on these objects, as also on the clothing, is a stylized eye” (translated in Cole 1982:119, 122).
Later that year, Boas made the long trip to the North Pacific region to gain first-hand experience among these Indians whose art fascinated him so, and began a lifelong attachment to the natives of British Columbia.2 Boas treated art as an element of culture in his monographs on the Kwakiutl, “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians” (1897b) and “The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island” (1909). The 1897 monograph is particularly important in this context, as it offers extensive detailed information on the ceremonial context of much Kwakiutl art.
In addition to including art in these rather comprehensive studies, Boas wrote several essays that addressed issues of style and symbolism. His earliest art historical articles dealt solely with art of the Northwest Coast Indians, while his later ones included art of other Native American peoples. His culminating art historical statement, Primitive Art (1927), added examples from Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and Siberia. Boas’s art historical literature has profound historical value since it embodies a major change in primitive art theory from the evolutionism that dominated the nineteenth century to a twentieth-century form of relativism, usually referred to as historical particularism.3 As such, Boas’s art history is of a piece with his social anthropology; as George Marcus and Michael Fischer state in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: “Boas used ethnography to debate residual issues derived from the framework of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and to challenge racist views of human behavior, then ascendant” (1986:130). Boas’s art history was part of his broader scientific agenda that included not simply discrediting evolutionism but offering alternate explanations if possible. In terms of art, Boas was ultimately to stress the roles that culture, history, and the artist’s psychology and creative processes play in the development of an art style.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONIST ANTHROPOLOGY
To understand fully the significance of Boas’s art historical analyses, it is necessary to summarize the prevailing evolutionist anthropological theories he challenged.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, social evolutionism had thoroughly permeated the study of anthropology, and the notion of “survival of the fittest” appeared in diverse texts, serving to explain many cultural phenomena, including art.5 Briefly, the several versions of the theory agreed that humankind had evolved from lower primates in a series of phases which progressed from simple to more complex forms, culminating in the Caucasian race, the highest and to that point the most perfect product—the “fittest”—of the sequence. A corollary proposition held that as culture followed biology, the most primitive societies were the simplest, while the more highly evolved western cultures were the most sophisticated and complex.6
In their cultural studies, evolutionist anthropologists applied what is called the “comparative method,” which equated prehistoric groups with living primitive societies. In its most simplified version, this history of human development suggested an analogy between the growth of an individual human and the development of society, with primitive society being equivalent to a child, and civilized culture being like an adult. As they progressed toward civilized perfection, following a course strictly governed by universal rules, all ethnic groups passed through the same stages. As a result, even groups geographically distant from one another shared similar manifestations in areas as diverse as social structure, technology, and art style. At the heart of this theory was the concept of independent invention, which hypothesized that all peoples at the same level of cultural development tend to invent the same artifacts and ways of living (Stocking 1968:112 ff.).
It is important to point out that not all nineteenth-century anthropology was based on totally erroneous theories, and that some evolutionist concepts remain in the corpus of anthropological thinking. For example, the practice of interpreting archaeological evidence by making analogies with ethnographic groups is still being done, under the ethnoarchaeological approach. Moreover, social evolutionism as an interpretive tool is still being used, particularly by Marxist anthropologists. The two fundamental differences between what was promoted by the nineteenth-century anthropologists and what is now understood by contemporary cultural evolutionists are that (1) no one seriously argues that all groups pass through the same series of stages, and (2) no one claims that any group is culturally superior to any other on the basis of its evolutionary position.
During
