This project aims to reprint and annotate Boas’s seminal 1897
monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the
Kwakiutl Indians, in both print and on a public multimedia website. Framed
with scholarly essays and contemporary Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw perspectives,
the new editions will re-unite 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
co-authorship in it, and the degree to which it provided a blueprint for a
subsequent four decades of ethnographic research. The project will also sharpen
our awareness of the ways that historical contexts shape the creation and
illustration of ethnographic knowledge. The critical editions will thus provide
a major new resource for both scholars and non-specialist readers, while
returning cultural patrimony to its indigenous inheritors.
Boas’s 1897 monograph was the first systematic
attempt, based on fieldwork and participant observation, to document all
aspects of a Native American ceremonial with text, photographs, museum
collections, and sound recordings. Produced collaboratively with his indigenous
collector and translator, George Hunt, the book represented a synthesis of
Boas’s first decade of research in British Columbia. It was hugely influential
on contemporary and subsequent scholars in anthropology and museums as well as
art history, literary studies, religion, musicology, ethnohistory, sociology
and Native American studies. Yet many of the primary materials contributing to
the volume, as well as later revisions and additions to it by both Boas and
Hunt, remain dispersed. Reuniting, annotating, and making publicly accessible
these scattered materials will help fulfill the coauthors’ long-deferred vision
for their own work while creating an innovative resource for scholars across
the humanities to re-evaluate the core research by an originator of the modern
concept of “culture.”
The use of experimental typography for print
editions, as well as interactive digital technologies to add annotations,
interpretation, and multimedia archival content, has been largely confined to
literary and historical texts. This project is unique in the scholarship of
Native North America and anthropology as a whole, especially given the sharing
of the interpretive role with indigenous partners, as befits the collaborative
nature of the original text. While the print edition will deliver new scholarly
resources in the form of critical essays, annotations, and appendices, the
digital edition will additionally provide a model for the integration of
disparate digital archives, and will develop new software to process a
substantial amount of material in Kwak’wala, creating significant open source
tools for preserving this endangered language. Collectively, the critical
editions will reveal, for the first time, exactly how Boas and Hunt marshaled
ethnographic data and representational media to both record Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw culture in particular, and to construct our very understanding of culture
itself.
