In
summer 2014, the BGC received an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant
of $307,000. The funds are supporting the preparation for publication of an
annotated print edition of The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of
the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) by anthropologist Franz Boas. Project Director
Aaron Glass explains the project.
What is the project and why is it important?
My
international and intercultural collaborative team plans to reprint and
annotate Boas’s seminal 1897 monograph, a synthesis of his first decade of
research on the Northwest Coast and one of the first holistic ethnographies
based on field work. The text brought together data on Kwakwaka’wakw social
structure with art and material culture, detailed narratives in the Kwak’wala
language, photographs taken in situ in British Columbia and at the 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair, transcribed songs, eyewitness description of ceremonial
performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s indigenous collaborator
George Hunt. Framed with scholarly essays and contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw
perspectives, the new edition will reunite the original text with widely
distributed archival and museum collections that shed new light on the book and
its wide-ranging legacy. This long-hidden material provides surprising
revelations about the fieldwork behind Boas’s foundational volume, the central
nature of Hunt’s co-authorship, and the degree to which it provided a blueprint
for a subsequent four decades of ethnographic research. The critical edition
will represent a major new resource for both scholars and non-specialist
readers, while returning cultural patrimony to its indigenous inheritors.
How did you get interested in this?
I
have been working closely with the Kwakwaka’wakw people for over twenty years.
In the course of previous research—for my dissertation and for a collaborative
project to produce a digital database to document a large Kwakwaka’wakw
collection in Berlin—I came across a wealth of museum records and archival
material pertaining to the production and influence of the 1897 book. A number
of colleagues who specialize in the anthropology of Northwest Coast Native
peoples shared similar discoveries with me and so we decided to work together
with one another and with the Kwakwaka’wakw to pool our resources and
knowledge.
Who are your collaborators?
My
primary project partner is Dr. Judith Berman. She is a linguistic
anthropologist at the University of Victoria who specializes in Northwest Coast
ethnopoetics and the Boas/Hunt corpus of textual materials. Our research team
also includes Dr. Ira Jacknis, a visual anthropologist at U.C. Berkeley who is
working on the book’s photography; Dr. Rainer Hatoum, an independent scholar in
Berlin who is tracking down extant cylinder recordings of music and translating
Boas’s idiosyncratic shorthand system; and Barbara Taranto, an independent
digital media specialist who is designing the project’s technical architecture.
We are also working closely with two Kwakwaka’wakw artists and community
researchers, Andy Everson and Corrine Hunt, as well as project liaisons on 4 Kwakwaka’wakw
reserves in British Columbia. Major institutional partners include the American
Museum of Natural History, American Philosophical Society, Archive of
Traditional Music, The Field Museum, National Anthropological Archive, National
Museum of Natural History, and U’mista Cultural Centre.
What is unique about the work?
Aside
from revealing the hidden history of Boas’s famous monograph and providing
public access to widely distributed archives, our NEH-supported critical print
edition will also serve as the foundation for a planned open-access digital
edition that will harness interactive multimedia to re-assemble the rich and
diverse archival sources. Currently, work in the digital humanities is being
driven by scholars in History and English working primarily with manuscript
collections related to famous authors, politicians, or scientists. This will be
an unprecedented effort within Anthropology and the social sciences, promising
new ways of using digital media to link together disparate archives, museums,
textual repositories, and contemporary Native communities in order to produce a
critical historiography of the book as well as to recuperate long dormant
ethnographic records.
How does it relate to the mission of the BGC?
Franz
Boas is the foundational figure in North American anthropology; he pioneered
the modern notion of cultural relativism, attacked racist theories of social
evolution, and revolutionized the ethnographic museum. The 1897 monograph was
the most comprehensive statement of his Kwakwaka’wakw research during his
lifetime, and was directly influential on generations of scholars and museum
curators. In it, Boas tied material culture into the fabric of social and ceremonial
life, arguing strongly that we can only understand any particular object from
within the total cultural and specific historical context in which it is or was
embedded. Our project will not only expand the insights of his original
ethnography by drawing on his and Hunt’s unpublished materials, it will
contribute to a larger appreciation of Boas’s role in creating a template for
contemporary, interdisciplinary, material culture studies as it is practiced at
the BGC.
