Influence in the Academy

CHAPTER VII: POST 1897 AFTERLIVES

Boas’s Influence on Anthropological and
Art Historical Scholarship

Franz Boas, Primitive Art. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1927 (reprinted, New York: Dover, 1955).

Franz Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1928
(reprinted, New York: Dover, 1986).

Franz Boas’s work had far-reaching implications for the study of society and material culture, both within the discipline of anthropology and beyond it. Boas championed the importance of cultural context for understanding material culture, in contrast to the prevailing comparative evolutionary approach that emphasized formal resemblances between materials from different cultures and time periods. In 1887, Boas famously debated Otis Mason, curator at the U.S. National Museum in Washington D.C., arguing that the decontextualization of objects in evolutionary museum displays was unscientific.1 These ideas were formalized and substantiated with ethnographic data in his 1897 monograph, and then made manifest in his curation of the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, which opened in 1899. Here, he organized objects according to geography and culture, allowing the visitor to understand individual pieces within their cultural context as well as the historical relations between neighboring communities.2 This principle represented a turning point in the development of ethnological museum displays and was quickly and widely adopted across the world.

Boas’s contextualization of art within its larger cultural structures and local histories deeply influenced the intellectual development of anthropology. His analyses of the diffusion of style and meaning—seen, for instance, in his early research on Cannibal masks and Coppers, and culminating in his 1927 volume, Primitive Art—complicated art-historical debates of the early twentieth century that had focused on tracing a linear development of artistic production (i.e. determining whether art evolved from abstraction toward naturalistic representation or the other way around).3 For example, Boas argued that abstraction and realism were concurrent conventional styles on the Northwest Coast, and he highlighted the role of artistic creativity within local traditions.

These ideas were quickly taken up by a new generation of scholars. Occupied with iconography and taking diffusionism to an extreme, Carl Hentze presented the hypothesis of ancient migration from China to the Northwest Coast as explaining trans-Pacific stylistic similarities.4 On the other hand, Leonhard Adam, following Boas more closely, analyzed Northwest Coast art through a historical lens, comparing the material culture of neighboring communities before considering foreign influences.5 He held that, even if cultures separate in time and space showed similarities in styles, this did not necessarily indicate a moment of contact but rather a “similar mentality to the psychological background of corresponding artistic ideas.”6

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Surrealist artists were heavily influenced by Indigenous arts and many followed Boas’s egalitarian approach. However, they tended to romanticize the idea of the “primitive” as a means to liberate human imagination from the confines imposed by modernity and rationalism. Artists like Andre Breton and Wolfgang Paalen read Boas but largely ignored his ethnographic evidence, instead resorting to mythical, psychological explanations of aesthetics that appealed to them.7 Structuralists allied with Surrealism, like Claude Lévi-Strauss, returned to Boas’s detailed ethnography and attention to diffusion, though applied them to more theoretical anthropological concerns. Lévi-Strauss, aiming to uncover the subconscious, mental structures of societies through stylistic and formal analysis of their material culture, relied less on primary ethnographic observation and more on purportedly universal laws of human thought. Grounding his analysis in myths relating to specific types of masks along the Northwest Coast, he argued for the inversion of forms and meanings as cultural elements move between communities.8

In the mid-1960s, art historians such as Bill Holm began to critique Boas’s fixation on iconography while disregarding aesthetic qualities such as “composition, design organization, or form.”9 For their part, anthropologists working on the Northwest Coast took Boas to task for ignoring clan and tribal variation in his account of the conventionalization of crest motifs.10 Recently, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have critiqued Boas for perpetuating views of a static, a-historical Native. Even though Boas studied the adaptability of Native communities and their arts through intercultural contact, he disregarded how this was expressed in responses to colonial experience. Since the 1980s, scholars have increasingly focused on “hybrid” objects showing both Indigenous and Western influences—which Boas consciously omitted from his research and exhibition practice—as demonstrating the resilience, adaptability, and creativity of the Native artist. Aldona Jonaitis, for example, reminds us that, even though Boas himself excluded such “impure” objects from his studies, their integration into the Northwest Coast canon is a logical consequence of his fundamental arguments.11

By Leonie Treier

PAGES IN THIS CHAPTER

  1. Boas, “Museums of Ethnology and their Classification,” 589.
  2. Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits,” 75-111.
  3. Morphy and Perkins, “Foundations and Framing the Discipline,” 35; Jonaitis, A Wealth of Thought, 3-37.
  4. Hentze, Objets Rituels, Croyances et Dieux de la Chine Antique et de l’Amérique; Jonaitis, A Wealth of Thought, 317ff.
  5. Adam, Nordwest-Amerikanische Indianerkunst.
  6. Adam, “North-West American Indian Art and its Early Chinese Parallels,” 11.
  7. Jonaitis, A Wealth of Thought, 321; Mauzé, “Surrealists and the New York Avant-Garde, 1920-60,” 270-303.
  8. Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Mask.
  9. Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art, 8; see also Bunn-Marcuse, “Form First, Function Follows.”
  10. Halpin, “A Critique of the Boasian Paradigm for Northwest Coast Art;” see also Miller, “Anthropology of Art.”
  11. Jonaitis, A Wealth of Thought, 331.
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