![]() Two dozen books and monographs and many articles resulted from Boas’s Northwest Coast work. Several of the volumes of texts Boas produced were coauthored with Hunt, and their work together continued in person and by correspondence to 1931. 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 1893-4 Chicago World’s Fair. 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. Most of this work occurred between 18, during summers (when many Indians were working in White-owned salmon canneries). In all, Boas made twelve fieldtrips to this Alaska-Canada-Washington-Oregon coastal culture area, amounting to a total of twenty-nine months. 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 1886 he made his first three-month fieldtrip to Vancouver Island. 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 addition, Boas published popular accounts of his fieldwork in German and English (see Stocking 1974: 44-55). 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. 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 folk-tale telling (Sanjek 1990: 193-5). Boas discovered that something - culture - intervened, and that Inuit activities and knowledge were more than a product of environmental conditions. His objective was to compare the physical environment, which he mapped and measured objectively, with the knowledge of it held by its inhabitants. ![]() Boas as ethnographerĭuring 1883-4 Boas undertook his first field-work, a study of the Inuit of Baffin Island. Still, American and world anthropology remain firmly attached to frameworks that Boas established, and many of the ideas he wrestled with continue to haunt the discipline (Wolf 1994), if often in non-Boasian incarnations. Boas’s theoretical contributions are underappreciated in contemporary anthropology, in part because so much of his legacy is taken for granted. His major ethnographic research among the Inuit and Native Americans of the Northwest Coast was complemented by his work in language and linguistics and biological anthropology, his influence as teacher, and his professional and social activism (Kroeber et al. Born in Germany in 1858, Franz Boas was the dominant figure in American anthropology from the late 1890s through the 1920s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |