During 1883–84 Boas undertook his first fieldwork, a study of the Inuit of Baffin Island. His objective was to compare the physical environment, which he mapped and measured objectively, with the knowledge of it held by its inhabitants. Boas discovered that something—*culture—intervened, and that Inuit activities and knowledge were more than a product of environmental conditions. Although he travelled some 3,000 miles during his fieldwork year, Boas approached participant observation as he hunted with his hosts, acquired a deepening knowledge of their language and interpersonal etiquette, interviewed informants and observed performances of folktaletelling (Sanjek 1990:193–5). His ethnography The Central Eskimo (1888) was published by the Bureau of American Ethnology, then the principal organization for anthropological research in the United States. In addition, Boas published popular accounts of his fieldwork in German and English (see Stocking 1974:44–55).
In Berlin during 1885 Boas was captivated by the museum collections of Northwest Coast art he was assigned to catalogue; he also interviewed some Bella Coola Indians then in Europe with an American Wild West troupe. In 1886 he made his first three-month fieldtrip to Vancouver Island. Typical of much of his subsequent survey work, he travelled from settlement to settlement to transcribe *texts in Indian languages (with interlinear English translation by the informant or an interpreter), collect art and crafts, take †anthropometric measurements of living Indian subjects, and acquire Indian skeletal remains (Sanjek 1990:195–203).
In all, Boas made twelve fieldtrips to this Alaska-Canada-Washington-Oregon coastal culture area, amounting to a total of twenty-nine months. Most of this work occurred between 1886 and 1900, during summers (when many Indians were working in White-owned salmon canneries). Of his handful of local collaborators, the most important was George Hunt, a man of Scottish and Tlingit parentage who was raised in a Kwakiutl village and was fluent in Kwakwala. Boas met Hunt in 1888 and trained him to record Indian language texts according to Boas’s transcription methods when both men were employed at the 1893–94 Chicago World’s Fair. Several of the volumes of texts Boas produced were coauthored with Hunt, and their work together continued in person and by correspondence to 1931.
Two dozen books and monographs and many articles resulted from Boas’s Northwest Coast work. Half of these 10,000 pages concern the Kwakiutl, and half other groups. Overall, 60 per cent of this corpus consists of texts, most of them in both the Indian language and English translation. But in view of the preceding 100 years of White contact, and the trade, disease, warfare and economic transformation that followed, the texts record primarily cultural reminiscences, and were not transcribed during ritual performances or around ongoing cultural practices. They salvage a culture that flourished around 1850.
Boas had two principal goals in his Northwest Coast work, both of which he regarded as accomplished by 1900. The first was to determine variations and relationships in the languages, physical characteristics and social customs of the Indian groups; the second was ‘a presentation of the culture as it appears to the Indian himself, for which the Kwakiutl were his focal group. In mapping out linguistic, physical and cultural divisions, Boas discovered that physical types crosscut language groups, and cultural similarities and differences were distributed without regard to linguistic or biological affinities. Moreover, the cultural traits he studied—folk tales, *myths, ceremonies, *art styles, crafts, *kinship patterns—flowed and ebbed between groups. Overall they demarcated a Northwest Coast culture area of general similarities, but they also revealed past histories of cultural exchange and interpenetration for each of the †culture area’s tribal groups.
The paradox was that the trait distributions Boas mapped out, and which supported hypotheses about historical interaction, were independent of the trait integration that was notable among individual groups. Each tribe’s mix of separable but intersecting cultural vectors (of folktale types, art motifs, etc.) formed a psychological unity ‘to the Indian himself. It was ‘the genius of the people’, as Boas put it, that remoulded, shaped and integrated diverse cultural elements into a meaningful whole. For some this might go farther than for others; the Bella Coola, for example, he judged as having ‘remodelled and assimilated’ borrowed religious elements into the most ‘well-defined’ and ‘co-ordinated’ belief system of all the Northwest Coast groups (Stocking 1974:148–55).
Work on this elusive patterning and integration among the Kwakiutl occupied Boas for much of his career. His first 428- page publication, The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897), included his general description of the tribe, many texts, and nearly 200 pages on the Winter Ceremonial (including fieldnotes from his one sustained period of participant observation during the autumn of 1894). Eight more volumes, mainly unanalysed texts, appeared between 1905 and 1935. (Boas’s texts have provided rich material for the *structuralism of *Lévi-Strauss, on whom Boas was an important early influence.) Finally, also in 1935, his capstone study Kwakiutl Culture as Reflected in Mythology was published.
This book is organized with a topical outline similar to many conventional ethnographies. Its ‘data’ however consists solely of things, activities, and beliefs mentioned in Kwakiutl myths. ‘In this way a picture of their way of thinking and feeling will appear that renders their ideas as free from the bias of the European observer as is possible’ (Boas 1935:v). Here at last the Kwakiutl natural, supernatural and human world was portrayed by Boas ‘as it appears to the Indian himself. This book was neglected in its day, however, as the newer style of *ethnography of *Bronislaw Malinowski and his students, and of Boas’s own student †Margaret Mead, had displaced interest in text-based studies. Had Kwakiutl Culture as Reflected in Mythology been published when Boas’s influence was at its apogee two decades earlier, perhaps this pot at the end of the Boasian rainbow would have received wider professional scrutiny. Since 1935 it has been rarely noted and clearly little-read; two major critics of Boas, †Leslié White and †Marvin Harris, do not even cite it.
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