Project Abstract
In 1897, anthropologist Franz Boas published his major monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, 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, eye-witness description of ceremonial performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s indigenous collaborator George Hunt. Yet the report remained incomplete and fractured, and archival materials relevant to its origins and afterlives are scattered all over the world. This material includes original field notes by Boas and Hunt, museum collections records, original photographic negatives, and wax cylinder recordings of music. The goal of this collaborative project is to produce an annotated, critical digital edition that will reunite the archival material with the original text and with the indigenous families whose cultural heritage is represented. This will be an unprecedented effort within anthropology and the humanities, 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.Click here for a Detailed Project Description.
Project Team
Coordinators/Editors
Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center)Judith Berman (University of Victoria)
Additional Core Research Team
Andy Everson (Artist and Community Researcher, Comox, BC)Rainer Hatoum (Research Associate, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany)
Corrine Hunt (Artist and BGC/U’mista Exhibit Designer, Vancouver, BC)
Ira Jacknis (in memoriam, 1952–2021; formerly Hearst Museum, University of California Berkeley)
Barbara Taranto (Independent Technical Architect, New York/Tel Aviv)
Kwakwaka’wakw Editorial Committee
Child, Tom [Kwakiutl Band] (Victoria, BC)Cranmer, William [U’mista Cultural Centre] (Alert Bay, BC)
Hanuse, Janet [Gwa’sa̱la-’Nakwaxda’x̱w Bands] (Tsulquate, BC)
Hemphill, Colleen [Gwa’sa̱la-’Nakwaxda’x̱w Bands] (Tsulquate, BC)
Johnston, Juanita [U’mista Cultural Centre] (Alert Bay, BC)
Speck, Wedlidi [’Namgis Band] (Courtenay, BC)
Wasden, William Jr. [’Namgis Band] (Port Hardy, BC)
Advisory Board
Darcy Cullen (UBC Press)Stan Hunt (Hunt family representative, Alert Bay, BC)
Dean Irvine (Dalhousie University)
Peter Jacobs (University of Victoria)
Kimon Keramidas (New York University)
Barbara Mathé (American Museum of Natural History)
Gina Rappaport (National Anthropological Archives)
Adam Werle (University of Victoria)
Project Prototype
View an interactive prototype of the final digital edition website. This is a working mock-up based on known research materials, provisional annotations, and planned functionality at this stage (prior to the extensive Native community consultations that will be a main component of the project). Only some features of the final digital edition are dynamically represented here (interactive functions are indicated by a *), but it provides a model for the further development of the research project and the design of the final product. (NOTE: This prototype is optimized for viewing in Google Chrome)
Prototype Media Credits
Texts and Figs. 5.5, 5.6 and 5.9; courtesy of the American Philosophical Society, Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguistics (497.3 B63c: W1a.3 and 58).
Figs 5.1 and 5.4: Transformation Mask (IVA 1243) and its catalogue card; courtesy of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin/U’mista Cultural Centre.
Fig. 5.3: Painting of transformation mask with Boas field notes (Z/43k); courtesy of the Anthropology Division, American Museum of Natural History.
Fig. 5.7: Transformation Mask (A17140); courtesy of the UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada. Photo by Kyla Bailey.
Fig. 5.8: Transformation Mask; courtesy of Chief Edwin Newman. Photo by Karen Duffek.
Pl. 15.1: Photograph by John H. Grabill from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (93-1-10/100266.1.35), courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Music clip: Wax cylinder track 4377.94 (AFC 14741:B23) of a Hamat’sa song performed by “Malete” (Malidi) or George Hunt, recorded by Benjamin Ives Gillman at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, and the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
Video clip: Franz Boas film footage shot in Ft. Rupert, 1930; courtesy of the Burke Museum.
Exhibition
The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology
Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY (February 13 - July 7, 2019)
U’mista Cultural Centre, Alert Bay, BC (July 20 - October 26, 2019)
This exhibition explores the hidden histories and complex legacies of one of the most influential books in the field of anthropology, Franz Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897). Focusing on Boas’s work with his Indigenous co-author George Hunt among the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw people of British Columbia, the exhibit—with designs by artist Corrine Hunt—features ceremonial objects as well as rare archival photographs, manuscripts, and drawings that shed new light on the book and advance understanding of the ongoing cultural traditions it documents.
Bard Graduate Center Gallery Listing (with associated public events and exhibit press)
The Story Box Exhibition Website
Project Film
Opening The
Story Box: Reflections on George Hunt and Franz Boas.
A film by Marina Dodis
and Aaron Glass, 2019 (14 min.)
Learn more about George Hunt, his collaboration
with anthropologist Franz Boas, and what their 1897 book means to the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw people today.
Publications
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography.” Culture Vol. 6(1):18. 2012.
Judith Berman and Aaron Glass “About the Back Cover.” Manoa Vol. 25(1), 2013. Special Issue: “Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World.
Rainer Hatoum “‘I Wrote All My Notes in Shorthand’: A First Glance into the Treasure Chest of Franz Boas’s Shorthand Field Notes.” In Local Knowledge, Global Stage, ed. Frederic Gleach and Regna Darnell, 221–272. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2016.
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman and Rainer Hatoum. “Reassembling The Social Organization: Collaboration and Digital Media in (Re)making Boas’s 1897 Book.” Museum Worlds 5: 108-32. 2017.
Aaron Glass “Drawing on Museums: Early Visual Fieldnotes by Franz Boas and the Indigenous Recuperation of the Archive.” American Anthropologist 120(1): 1-17, 2018.
Judith Berman and Aaron Glass “About the Back Cover.” Manoa Vol. 25(1), 2013. Special Issue: “Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World.
Rainer Hatoum “‘I Wrote All My Notes in Shorthand’: A First Glance into the Treasure Chest of Franz Boas’s Shorthand Field Notes.” In Local Knowledge, Global Stage, ed. Frederic Gleach and Regna Darnell, 221–272. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2016.
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman and Rainer Hatoum. “Reassembling The Social Organization: Collaboration and Digital Media in (Re)making Boas’s 1897 Book.” Museum Worlds 5: 108-32. 2017.
Aaron Glass “Drawing on Museums: Early Visual Fieldnotes by Franz Boas and the Indigenous Recuperation of the Archive.” American Anthropologist 120(1): 1-17, 2018.
Conference Presentations
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “The Distributed Text: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Transcending Shifts and Frictions in the Museum ‘Apparatus,’” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA: Nov. 14-18, 2012).
Aaron Glass “The Distributed Text: A Critical Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: Jan. 18-21, 2012)
Judith Berman and Aaron Glass “Recuperating the Boasian Archive: A Collaborative Effort to Reunite Objects, Records, and Indigenous Knowledge.” (Presented at the invited session “Unsettling Records: Images and Objects,” Canadian Anthropology Society-La Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie Conference, Victoria, BC: May 8-11, 2013).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “”Reassembling The Social Organization: Collaborative Ethnography and Digital Media in the Making and Remaking of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Refamiliarizing The Estranged: Digital Representation of Indigenous Peoples Through Sharing, Collaboration, and Negotiation,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO: Nov. 18-22, 2015).
Rainer Hatoum, Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “”Reassembling The Social Organization: Museums, Collaboration, and Digital Media in the Making and Remaking of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Re-visioning Material Anthropological Legacies for Cosmos-optimal Futures,”European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, Milan, Italy:July 20-23, 2016).
Aaron Glass “Reassembling The Social Organization: Anthropological Typology meets Indigenous Ontology in the Franz Boas Critical (Digital) Edition.” (Presented at the symposium “The Politics of Classification,” Department of Information Studies, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA: May 5, 2017).
Aaron Glass “Reassembling The Social Organization: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Northwest Coast Native Art History Now,” Native American Art Studies Association Biennial Meeting, Tulsa, OK: Oct. 25-29, 2017).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “What is a Mask? Materiality, Instantiation, and Title.” (Presented at the session “Perspectives on ephemerality and preservation: From language to digital media, communities to institutions,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC: Nov. 29-Dec. 3, 2017).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “Reassembling The Social Organization: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Connecting Collections: Collectors of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous American Art in the Americas and Europe,” Society of American Archaeologists Annual Meeting, Washington, DC: April 11-15, 2018).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “Reassembling The Social Organization: Museum Collections, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Recuperation of the Franz Boas/George Hunt Archive. (Presented in the session “Breaking the Silence: Heritage Objects and Cultural Memory,” Annual Meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, UK: June 1-3, 2018).
Aaron Glass “Reuniting Objects, Records, and Indigenous Knowledge in Digital Platforms.” (International Conference of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums, Prior Lake, MN: Oct. 8-11, 2018). Watch online.
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, Ira Jacknis, Rainer Hatoum, Andy Everson, and Corrine Hunt “Field/Fair/Museum: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology.” (A symposium held at Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY: Feb. 15, 2019). Watch online.
Judith Berman “George Hunt at X̱wa̠mdasbi’: Constructing Kwakwa̠ka̠’wakw Biographies in the 19th Century.” (Presented at the session “Dialogical Anthropology: British Columbia in the Boasian Era, 1880s-1940s,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Vancouver, BC: June 3, 2019).
Ira Jacknis “British Columbia in Miniature: Model Dioramas in American Anthropology Museums, 1895-1925.” (Presented at the session “Dialogical Anthropology: British Columbia in the Boasian Era, 1880s-1940s,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Vancouver, BC: June 3, 2019).
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, Ira Jacknis, Rainer Hatoum, and Andy Everson “Re-assembling The Social Organization: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Changing Climates of Collaborative Ethnography in British Columbia.” (Executive Session presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC: Nov. 20-24, 2019).
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, and Dean Irvine “Reorganizing The Social Organization: Collaborative Editing, Museum Collections, Indigenous Knowledges, and the Franz Boas/George Hunt Archives.” (Presented at “Building Community Online,” Canadian Society of Digital Humanities, online conference, June 1-4, 2020).
Aaron Glass “Reflections on The Story Box: Remediating Franz Boas for Multiple Publics.” (Presented at “People: A Global Dialogue on Museums and their Publics.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY [via Zoom]: May 18-20, 2021).
Aaron Glass “Remediating the Archive/Collection for Multiple Publics.” (Presented in “Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology and Museums.” Summer Institute for Museum Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History [via Zoom]: Oct. 7, 2021).
Aaron Glass “Remediating the Archive: On Ethnographic Collections, Indigenous Ontologies, and the Problem of Metadata.” (Presented in “The Museum as Archive: Using the Past in the Present and Future.” Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand [via Zoom]: Dec. 16-17, 2021).
Aaron Glass “What is a Mask? Indigenous Ontologies of Carving and Kinship.” (Presented in “Surrogates: Embodied Histories of Sculpture in the Short Twentieth Century.” Department of the History of Art, Yale University: Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 2022).
Judith Berman “The Seeing and Unseeing of George Hunt.” (Presented at the (Re)Visualizing Art, Museums, and Ethnography on the Northwest Coast: Papers in Honor of Ira Jacknis, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, 9-13 Nov 2022.)
Judith Berman “The Seeing and Unseeing of George Hunt.” (Presented at the Generations, Partnerships, and Anthropological Interpretation in British Columbia, BC Studies Conference, University of Fraser Valley [via Zoom], 6-8 May 2021.)
Aaron Glass “The Distributed Text: A Critical Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: Jan. 18-21, 2012)
Judith Berman and Aaron Glass “Recuperating the Boasian Archive: A Collaborative Effort to Reunite Objects, Records, and Indigenous Knowledge.” (Presented at the invited session “Unsettling Records: Images and Objects,” Canadian Anthropology Society-La Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie Conference, Victoria, BC: May 8-11, 2013).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “”Reassembling The Social Organization: Collaborative Ethnography and Digital Media in the Making and Remaking of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Refamiliarizing The Estranged: Digital Representation of Indigenous Peoples Through Sharing, Collaboration, and Negotiation,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO: Nov. 18-22, 2015).
Rainer Hatoum, Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “”Reassembling The Social Organization: Museums, Collaboration, and Digital Media in the Making and Remaking of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Re-visioning Material Anthropological Legacies for Cosmos-optimal Futures,”European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, Milan, Italy:July 20-23, 2016).
Aaron Glass “Reassembling The Social Organization: Anthropological Typology meets Indigenous Ontology in the Franz Boas Critical (Digital) Edition.” (Presented at the symposium “The Politics of Classification,” Department of Information Studies, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA: May 5, 2017).
Aaron Glass “Reassembling The Social Organization: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Northwest Coast Native Art History Now,” Native American Art Studies Association Biennial Meeting, Tulsa, OK: Oct. 25-29, 2017).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “What is a Mask? Materiality, Instantiation, and Title.” (Presented at the session “Perspectives on ephemerality and preservation: From language to digital media, communities to institutions,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC: Nov. 29-Dec. 3, 2017).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “Reassembling The Social Organization: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph.” (Presented at the session “Connecting Collections: Collectors of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous American Art in the Americas and Europe,” Society of American Archaeologists Annual Meeting, Washington, DC: April 11-15, 2018).
Aaron Glass and Judith Berman “Reassembling The Social Organization: Museum Collections, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Recuperation of the Franz Boas/George Hunt Archive. (Presented in the session “Breaking the Silence: Heritage Objects and Cultural Memory,” Annual Meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, UK: June 1-3, 2018).
Aaron Glass “Reuniting Objects, Records, and Indigenous Knowledge in Digital Platforms.” (International Conference of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums, Prior Lake, MN: Oct. 8-11, 2018). Watch online.
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, Ira Jacknis, Rainer Hatoum, Andy Everson, and Corrine Hunt “Field/Fair/Museum: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology.” (A symposium held at Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY: Feb. 15, 2019). Watch online.
Judith Berman “George Hunt at X̱wa̠mdasbi’: Constructing Kwakwa̠ka̠’wakw Biographies in the 19th Century.” (Presented at the session “Dialogical Anthropology: British Columbia in the Boasian Era, 1880s-1940s,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Vancouver, BC: June 3, 2019).
Ira Jacknis “British Columbia in Miniature: Model Dioramas in American Anthropology Museums, 1895-1925.” (Presented at the session “Dialogical Anthropology: British Columbia in the Boasian Era, 1880s-1940s,” Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Vancouver, BC: June 3, 2019).
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, Ira Jacknis, Rainer Hatoum, and Andy Everson “Re-assembling The Social Organization: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Changing Climates of Collaborative Ethnography in British Columbia.” (Executive Session presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC: Nov. 20-24, 2019).
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, and Dean Irvine “Reorganizing The Social Organization: Collaborative Editing, Museum Collections, Indigenous Knowledges, and the Franz Boas/George Hunt Archives.” (Presented at “Building Community Online,” Canadian Society of Digital Humanities, online conference, June 1-4, 2020).
Aaron Glass “Reflections on The Story Box: Remediating Franz Boas for Multiple Publics.” (Presented at “People: A Global Dialogue on Museums and their Publics.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY [via Zoom]: May 18-20, 2021).
Aaron Glass “Remediating the Archive/Collection for Multiple Publics.” (Presented in “Putting Theory and Things Together: Conversations about Anthropology and Museums.” Summer Institute for Museum Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History [via Zoom]: Oct. 7, 2021).
Aaron Glass “Remediating the Archive: On Ethnographic Collections, Indigenous Ontologies, and the Problem of Metadata.” (Presented in “The Museum as Archive: Using the Past in the Present and Future.” Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand [via Zoom]: Dec. 16-17, 2021).
Aaron Glass “What is a Mask? Indigenous Ontologies of Carving and Kinship.” (Presented in “Surrogates: Embodied Histories of Sculpture in the Short Twentieth Century.” Department of the History of Art, Yale University: Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 2022).
Judith Berman “The Seeing and Unseeing of George Hunt.” (Presented at the (Re)Visualizing Art, Museums, and Ethnography on the Northwest Coast: Papers in Honor of Ira Jacknis, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, 9-13 Nov 2022.)
Judith Berman “The Seeing and Unseeing of George Hunt.” (Presented at the Generations, Partnerships, and Anthropological Interpretation in British Columbia, BC Studies Conference, University of Fraser Valley [via Zoom], 6-8 May 2021.)
History of Grants
2022 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant
2020 ACLS Digital Extension Grant
2018 NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant
2018 NEH Collections Reference and Resources Grant
2014 NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant
2012 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
Aaron Glass was selected for a three-month residency as a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles under its “Art and Anthropology” program for 2016-17, which he used to research the role of the 1897 volume in the development of Boas’s theories of art.
Rainer Hatoum received a 2013 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to conduct research on the Franz Boas Papers at the APS; and a 2015 DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) research position at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt a.M, to work on deciphering Boas’s obscure and idiosyncratic shorthand system.
The project received a grant from the School for Advanced Research to hold a team meeting on its Santa Fe campus in the 2016-2017 academic year.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
2020 ACLS Digital Extension Grant
2018 NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant
2018 NEH Collections Reference and Resources Grant
2014 NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant
2012 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
Aaron Glass was selected for a three-month residency as a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles under its “Art and Anthropology” program for 2016-17, which he used to research the role of the 1897 volume in the development of Boas’s theories of art.
Rainer Hatoum received a 2013 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to conduct research on the Franz Boas Papers at the APS; and a 2015 DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) research position at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt a.M, to work on deciphering Boas’s obscure and idiosyncratic shorthand system.
The project received a grant from the School for Advanced Research to hold a team meeting on its Santa Fe campus in the 2016-2017 academic year.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Cooperating Institutions
American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
American Museum of Natural History
American Philosophical Society
Archive of Traditional Music, University of Indiana at Bloomington
Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv
Columbia University Libraries
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin
The Field Museum
National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
U’mista Cultural Centre
University of British Columbia Press
American Museum of Natural History
American Philosophical Society
Archive of Traditional Music, University of Indiana at Bloomington
Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv
Columbia University Libraries
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin
The Field Museum
National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
U’mista Cultural Centre
University of British Columbia Press
