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Franz boas ethnography2/14/2024 I close with a discussion of how Hunt’s extensive post-publication notes on the 1897 book provide the foundation for my collaborative Critical Edition project to reactivate its ceremonial art according to Kwakwaka’wakw cultural ontologies and genealogical connections.Īaron Glass is an Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center. I discuss the early emergence of his interest in Northwest Coast art his extensive though inconsistent treatment of museum collections in the 1897 book and Indigenous conceptions of the artwork. This paper situates the 1897 book in terms of Boas's development of a mature anthropology of art. The book, which illustrates over 200 museum objects, appeared at a crucial moment of Boas’s career as he became a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. Boas’s 1897 monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, written with his Indigenous consultant George Hunt, featured his most extended treatment of Kwakwaka’wakw art, although it was framed in terms of typological classification rather than aesthetics or the Indigenous genealogical basis for heritable rights. At the end of his career Boas guided a network of former student anthropologists, who spread across the country to university departments, museums, and government agencies, imprinting his social science more broadly in the world of learned knowledge.įranz Boas is a magisterial biography of Franz Boas and his influence in shaping not only anthropology but also the sciences, humanities, social science, visual and performing arts, and America’s public sphere during a period of great global upheaval and democratic and social struggle.Over the course of his long career, Franz Boas’s writings on Indigenous art comprised one of his major contributions to anthropological theory and museum practice. He assisted German and European émigré intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the United States and was instrumental in organizing the denunciation of Nazi racial science and American eugenics. entry into World War I, reveals his struggle against the forces of nativism, racial hatred, ethnic chauvinism, scientific racism, and uncritical nationalism.īoas was instrumental in the American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, training students and influencing colleagues such as Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Langston Hughes, and others involved in combating racism and the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. Boas’s emergence as a prominent public intellectual, particularly his opposition to U.S. Zumwalt takes the reader through the most vital period in the development of Americanist anthropology and Boas’s rise to dominance in the subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice is the second volume in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s two-part biography of the renowned anthropologist and public intellectual. Franz Boas defined the concept of cultural relativism and reoriented the humanities and social sciences away from race science toward an antiracist and anticolonialist understanding of human biology and culture.
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