At Barnard, Zora discovered the “spyglass of anthropology” taught by the revered Frantz Boas. Today Boas is recognized as the father of “American Anthropology” with its four-field approach. While he might not have garnered as much fame in 1926, he certainly mapped out the structure of Columbia’s anthropology department specializing in American Indians from the multiple viewpoints of cultural, biological, archaeology and linguistic anthropological perspectives, and training some of the discipline’s most illustrious anthropologists of the 20^th Century. This “holistic” approach to doing anthropology, as well as Boas’ emphasis on intensive fieldwork, would shape the future of American anthropology and influence generations of leaders in the field.

According to McGee and Warms in Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History, “Boas pioneered the concept of cultural relativism in anthropology.” This meant trying to understand cultures from their own (insider/emic) perspective. From beginning Boas was a maverick who challenged conventional understandings about race and society. In his research on immigrant children, he emphasized the the fact, according to a Wikipedia entry, “…that biological race was not immutable, and that human conduct and behavior resulted from nurture, rather than nature.”

While at Barnard, Zora took courses from Boas and Melville Herskovits, a former student of Boas. The most noted contribution  of Boas  to the development of American anthropology was his emphasis upon intensive field work, cultural relativism and “historical particularism” (named so by the late Marvin Harris).   Boas believed that the key to understanding how cultures developed was to view them through their own particular historical past.

One of Boas’ student Melville Herskovits was writing about “Negro Africanisms” in the 1920s, and even published in Alain Locke’s The New Negro in 1925. His most definitive work of the 20^th Century on the American Negro, The Myth of the Negro Past, was published in 1941. In these writings, Herskovits moved away from dominant interpretations of Negro culture as poor mimicry of white (European) culture. Instead, he argued that contemporary Negro culture was an example of cultural adaptation and syncretism (the blending of different cultural traits) resulting in what he termed “American Negroisms.” These were the intellectual perspectives Hurston would encounter when she enrolled as a student at Barnard.

To the outside, she appeared as youthful as her white Barnard classmates, but truthfully at the age of 34 Hurston had already accumulated a wealth of lived and writing experiences to draw upon. What attracted Hurston to anthropology was the objective perspective it afforded her—a new way of viewing the culture with which she was so familiar.

Years later, after becoming the first Black woman to graduate from Barnard and with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology, Hurston would describe her attraction to the field in the seminal folklore collection, Mules and Men (1936). She wrote that anthropology gave her a unique lens with which to view her culture that she described as a “tight chemise.” She wrote: “…I couldn’t see it [culture] for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had the spyglass of Anthropology to look through at that.”

Anthropology introduced Zora to the perspective scientific objectivity. She would fuse this with her own detailed insider’s knowledge of her own culture and people to forge a unique “native” anthropological perspective. Upon graduation from Barnard, Zora was sent into the field by Boas supported by a Carter G. Woodson grant. It would be the beginning of her fieldwork experiences—some successful and others not so successful. The challenge in writing about Zora’s approach to ethnography, the method of first-hand detailed data collection championed by Boas and his students, is that few examples of her field notes survived. The closest illustrations of how she collected data and her analysis of the same can be found in letters to Langston Hughes primarily.

Various anthropologists (Mikell and McClaurin) and writers (Dutton, Hemingway, Kilson, Hoffman-Jeep, etc.), including Hurston’s niece Lucy, have contributed to our insights of Zora Neale Hurston the anthropologist largely through reconstruction of what can be gleaned from her autobiography—itself a reconstruction of sorts—her ethnographies, her literary works, and primary documents.

Anthropology clearly left a definitive mark on Zora , but she also elevated ethnography to a new level and contributed methodological approaches as a “native” anthropologist from which we are still learning—a debt that the discipline of anthropology has yet to acknowledge properly.

In my last post on Bauman and Briggs Voices of Modernity I explored their argument that Boas’s notion of culture makes it seem like a prison house from which only the trained anthropologist is capable of escaping. In doing so, however, I only really presented half of their argument. The book has two interrelated themes: One is a Foucauldian genealogy of the concepts of science, culture, race, language, and nation (as seen through the rise of folklore studies). The other is a Latourian exploration of the construction of folklore as a science. This is done by exploring how oral traditions were turned into texts, and thus evidence of traditional culture (however that was defined). Aubrey, Blair, the Grimm brothers, and Schoolcraft were each faced with hybrid oral texts whose own modernity (as contemporary documents) belied their perceived scientific value as authentic remnants of ancient cultures. For this reason the texts underwent tremendous alterations, if not outright fabrication, by these scholars in order to make them suitable for their own purposes. The book traces how these processes of entextualization were shaped by each scholar’s concepts of science, culture, race, language, and nation.

So where does Boas fit into all of this?

One of the legacies of earlier folkloric traditions was a view of contemporary oral traditions as little more than the decayed remnants of a once great culture. Although Boas was able, partially as a result of his linguistically inspired view of culture, to criticize evolutionary perspectives that placed contemporary indigenous people in the past, he still seems to have shared some of these views.

Boas was particularly interested in what he considered to be traditional speech. This quest for the archaic and authentic related to form as well as content; Boas summarized his agenda as an attempt “to rescue the vanishing forms of speech”

This rescuing entailed some of the same reconstruction that earlier folklorists were guilty of. In some cases, such as Blair, this entailed the wholesale fabrication of supposedly traditional folktales. In others, such as the Brothers Grimm and Schoolcraft, it entailed heavy editing and embelleshment (although they each did this in different ways and for different reasons – discussed in depth in the book). Boas, however, was even more concerned than his predecessors about establishing the scientific credentials of his work. But his vision of fieldwork as science usefully served to hide some of his entextualization practices from public scrutiny.

Fieldwork became a complex set of practices that had to be mastered through professional training; like owning an air pump, controlling access to this pedagogical process enabled Boas and those he trained to regulate the obligatory passage points that provided access to cultural knowledge. The analogy begins to break down, however, in that the air pump was designed to produce public knowledge, to open scientific work to scrutiny by groups of observers. Fieldwork placed the locus of observation far away from the center. Since people’s perceptions of their own cultural patterns are shaped by secondary explanations, Boas does not deem “natives” to be credible witnesses.

Here is where the questions of anthropological authority discussed last week become important, for while Boas is famous for having worked closely with indigenous scholars, even going so far as to give them credit for published work, the actual manner in which the texts were constructed still reveals some of the same discomfort with the hybridity of these texts that was shown by his predecessors. To understand this argument we need to know something about one of the scholars most closely associated with Boas, George Hunt:

George Hunt was the son of a high-ranking Tlingit woman and an Englishman who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Hunt was raised in Fort Rupert, a stockaded outpost and Hudson Bay Company station that brought together not only Kwakwaka’wakw but also English, Scots, Irish, French-Canadian, Métis, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida… Hunt was perceived as a “foreign Indian” by the Kwakwaka’wakw, and he never considered himself to be Kwakwaka’wakw; he often re-ferred to his wife’s relatives as “these Kwaguls.” At the same time, Hunt’s noble descent brought him high status, particularly after he married a high-ranking Kwakwaka’wakw woman. Hunt’s rank afforded him exposure to forms of knowledge and discourse owned by elite lineages, and it granted him a strong social position by virtue of the high-ranking lines’ dominance of trade and indigenous–white relations.

So how did their collaboration work?

Hunt did not take down material by dictation, but rather listened to the rendition and then went home and reconstructed – and thus re-entextualized – the discourse; after he had written the text in its entirety in Kwakw’ala, he added English interlineations. As he rephrased the materials in the written version, Hunt wrote in what Berman (1996) refers to as “an authentic Kwakwaka’wakw speech style formerly used in the myth recitations,” even when his consultants are likely to have used less archaic styles. Hunt attempted to locate and document speech styles that he deemed to be particularly traditional and authentic; regarding some of his texts on cooking, Hunt wrote Boas: “These will show you the oldest way of speaking.”

One of the implications of this is that Hunt, as the “native informant” allowed Boas to sub-contract and legitimate the work of re-entextualization, effectively brushing the dirty work associated with creating these texts under the carpet. So while Bauman and Briggs want to give “credit where credit is due” and praise Boas for sharing authorship with Hunt on the title page (see the image at the start of this post), they have reservations about how Hunt’s authorship was framed.

The voice that Boas sought to authorize, however, was not that of George Hunt qua individual, not in terms of the particular features of his complex, hybrid social position. Rather, Boas downplayed Hunt’s background, including his multiracial ancestry in characterizing Hunt as speaking “Kwakiutl as his native language.”

Boas needed Hunt to give scientific authority to his texts, but in order to construct that authority he had to downplay the true hybridity of Hunt’s background.

Foregrounding the cultural and historical complexity of the texts and the circumstances surrounding their production would have challenged the way that Boas was constructing their authority – as a voice that could speak for “Kwakiutl customs” in their entirety… By giving the impression that members of Kwakwaka’wakw communities spoke no English, Boas greatly increased the monologicality and monoglossia of the texts and removed another sort of important evidence with respect to their rootedness in colonial contexts.

So, while Boas deserves credit for granting Hunt co-authorship, we can still question the manner in which he did it and even his motivations. None of this is to play a game of “gotcha” with Boas, but to get us to think critically about our own practices of entextualization and our own contemporary mechanisms of granting ourselves anthropolgical authority.

The question is not that Boas was wrong about culture. It is rather that he told anthropologists that they are the only ones who are right.

This quote is from the conclusion to the penultimate chapter of Bauman and Briggs’ award-winning book Voices of Modernity. The book employs a Foucauldian genealogical approach to trace the development of folklore studies from its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment, through its development under German Romanticism, ending up with Boas and the birth of anthropology. In doing so the book focuses on a number of interrelated ideas about culture, language, and modernity as well as methodological issues in the creation of texts from oral traditions. When they awarded the book with the Edward Sapir Book Prize the Society for Linguistic Anthropology wrote:

Bauman and Briggs argue that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, they suggest new strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.

While these themes run throughout their book, they sometimes seem to have only historical importance. After all, scholars like Herder or the Grimm brothers are associated with the rise of nationalism and so there doesn’t seem much that is “unwitting” in their reproduction of these ideologies. It is only in the penultimate chapter on Boas, a scholar known for his critiques of racism and nationalism, that the relevance of these earlier scholars (and the importance of the genealogical method) really becomes clear to the reader. In this genealogy Boas is “ego,” but before this chapter he has been absent from the story.

To understand their critique of Boas it is necessary to first understand Boas’s theory of culture and this is best approached (they argue) by understanding his theory of language. Boas in many ways presaged contemporary Chomskyan linguistics. He made charts showing the articulation of vowel sounds, and was one of the first to anticipate the distinction between phonemic and phonetic analysis (from which the terms “emic” and “etic” come from). Just as it is hard to learn to distinguish the phonemes in a foreign language once one is already an adult, Boas came to think of culture as a set of practices into which people are socialized early in life, able to deploy at will but largely unaware of the underlying rules.

This view of language, grounded in his “universal, objective phonetic grid” and internalized as a set of subconscious practices was an important step in moving Boas away from Herderian evolutionary approaches which saw contemporary language as a degenerative form of a once-pure folkloric forms.

Folklore enabled Boas to attack evolutionism by rejecting degenerative bias of traditional philological approaches and countering E. B. Tylor’s view that each folk element is a survival from a previous social form, one that was rational in its origins but became increasingly irrational. For Boas, folklore was deeply embedded in culture, and it was irrational all the way down.

In his view of language and culture as irrational (non-rational might be a better way of putting it) Boas nonetheless held on to another evolutionary theory, one “inherited from Aubrey and Locke” in which “tradition limits progress towards enlightenment and rationality”

He accordingly constructed culture as a force that limits individual freedom through the pervasive influence of “the fetters of tradition.”¹

Racism, nationalism, colonialism, etc. were, for Boas, not so much political-economic phenomenon as they were the result of culture and tradition. This created a contradiction for Boas, for while culture defined the object of anthropological study, it was also an obstacle to the cosmopolitan form of knowledge anthropologists hoped to produce.

Anthropologists must indict a phenomenon that only they can represent authoritatively, and they stake their claim to authority on the broader public and political stage by promising to help rationalize the very cultural (traditional, unconscious) patterns of which they are supposed to be the visionaries and spokespersons. Fully realizing Boas’s utopian vision of cultural enlightenment would eventually put anthropologists out of a job…

For Boas, only anthropologists could cultivate “a ‘purely analytic’ approach to the study of particular languages and cultures” which enabled them “to circumvent the natural tendency to project one’s own categories onto others.” Bauman and Briggs find this view particularly troublesome. Not only do they see it as promoting forms of inequality in which anthropologists and other experts know best what is in other people’s best interests, but they also see it as legitimating certain forms of neo-racism.

Boas’s theoretical move thus dehistoricizes and depoliticizes imperialism by reducing it to general effects of a universal process of reifying unconscious categories when applied to cross-linguistic and cultural encounters. Balibar (1991) argues that this sort of reasoning provides neo-racists with a cultural logic that naturalizes racism. Although he seems to suggest that this trope constitutes a neo-racist distortion of anthropological constructions, we would argue that it follows from Boas’s own culture theory.

This is not to say that Boas was a racist. Too often (especially on the internet) there is a tendency to oversimplify any argument which discusses the links between racism and certain representational or theoretical practices, boiling it down to “X was a racist.” This would be especially unfortunate in the case of Boas whom the authors acknowledge as a champion of anti-racism. As they conclude:

Boas’s attempt to fashion anthropology as a cosmopolitan discipline deserves broader appreciation. The difficulty is that the fundamental modernist move of claiming consciousness and rationality for oneself and one’s followers and denying it to others was embedded deeply within the concept of culture that lay at the heart of this project.

I would like to think that contemporary anthropological theories of culture, especially those grounded in practice theory avoid many of these problems, but I think that this view of culture is still widespread outside of anthropology. The proponents of the New Atheism movment and their ilk strike me as especially prominent examples of this modernist move, especially when they talk about Islam. It seems strange to me to associate Boas with Islamophobia, and I think he would be more careful not to pick out any particular culture for derision, but in the way he dehistoricized and depoliticized these issues, he would perhaps have had a difficult time articulating a coherent critique.

As Rex recently pointed out, Durkheim’s elder and rival Gabriel Tarde is experiencing a “reinvention” or “revival” at the hands of Bruno Latour and assorted posthumanist authors. They’re studiously reworking Tarde’s ambitious argument that invention, imitation, and opposition are the elementary forms of social life (human, animal, and other). Of these three elements, Tarde most thoroughly explored imitation. A now-established trope among neo-Tardians is that Durkheim’s success in securing sociology’s autonomy as a discipline relegated Tarde’s “microsociology” (as Gilles Deleuze called it) to the margins of the human sciences. Contributors to the edited volume, The Social after Gabriel Tarde, assert that anthropologists haven’t worked through Tarde’s ideas. The editor, Matei Candea, states, “Until recently…Tarde was almost entirely absent from anthropology, with the notable exception of the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” It might come as a surprise, then, that in 1964 Margaret Mead could write, “Since Tarde’s original publication, the idea of imitation has been worked to the bone.” What on Earth could Mead have meant? Wasn’t Tarde forgotten?

The short answer is no.

Many early U.S. anthropologists, and particularly students of Franz Boas, read, discussed, and were impacted by Tarde. It’s true that Tarde had less influence in England, though George Stocking does quote Bronislaw Malinowski describing Tarde as “the starting point of the most important investigations in Social Psychology.” Boas was even more committed to some of Tarde’s ideas. Before the publication of Elsie Clews Parsons’ translation, he referenced Lois de l’imitation in his 1894 address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and his 1899 report on fieldwork in British Columbia (both reprinted in Stocking’s A Franz Boas Reader). In his discussion of Boas’s place in anthropology, Alfred Kroeber noted that his mentor “was definitely influenced by Tarde’s Lois de l’imitation.” Robert Lowie put it even more forcefully in his 1937 History of Ethnological Theory: “[Lois de l’imitation] profoundly impressed Boas and, through him, dozens of anthropologists in the United States.” How many dozens were there in 1937?

Through Boas and Parsons, Tarde’s concept of imitation pervasively shaped early anthropological work. Admittedly, neither scholar frequently references Tarde. But Boas, particularly, invokes him in key passages. He likens the invention and dissemination of northwest coast traditions born out of ritual fasting and hallucination to phenomena discussed by Tarde and by Swiss ethnologist and linguist Otto Stoll. And in the AAAS address, later revised and included in The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas argues that all humans, regardless of their society’s complexity, are influenced by zeitgeists produced by imitative acts:

Unconscious and conscious imitation are factors influencing civilized society, not less than primitive society, as has been shown by G. Tarde, who has proved that primitive man and civilized man as well, imitates not such actions only as are useful, and for the imitation of which logical causes may be given, but also others for the adoption or preservation of which no logical reasons can be assigned.

Tarde’s concept of imitation fit cleanly into Boas’s understanding of social groups as contingent accretions of cultural elements acquired through innovation and diffusion. Tarde also resisted moral judgments based on social evolutionist frameworks. Ultimately, it’s difficult to say how much Boas’s subtle and supple historicist theorization of cultural processes owes to Tarde. But it probably owes quite a lot.

Like Tarde, Boas and the early “Boasians” shared skepticism toward the Comtean emphasis on general sociological laws that guided Durkheim. But they were not a unified bunch. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they didn’t all accept Tarde’s ideas with equal fervor. In fact, in The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians, Leslie Spier (whom Stocking classifies as a “strict” Boasian) notes, “[Tarde’s thesis] that imitation…proceeds by the acquisition of the ideas, wants, and sentiments before the means of objectifying and satisfying them are duplicated…is at variance with the facts in the case of the sun dance.”

Spier’s account shows how his “strict” Boasianism was a commitment to empirical work questioning the grand sociological and psychological syntheses of the nineteenth century, including that of Tarde. In the same vein, Parsons opened her 1919 address as the retiring president of the American Folk-Lore Society (after several years of collaboration with Boas) by noting how the paucity of ethnological data available to Tarde limited his ability to explain why imitation succeeds or fails.

In his introduction to a collection of Tarde’s essays, sociologist Terry Clark suggests that Tarde’s influence faded because it “could provide stimulation both for partisans of cultural diffusion and those of independent invention in the debate that so divided anthropologists between the wars.” More broadly, U.S. anthropology’s (temporary?) turn away from Boasian principles after World War II left Tarde’s ideas in the unsteady hands of sociologists and economists concerned with the diffusion of innovations.

So, decades before posthumanism, Tarde had, indeed, been worked to the bone. Though Latour and Boas read Tarde in some tellingly different ways, Boasian concerns with innovation, diffusion, and personality have risen again in research on science, networks, and affect. Perhaps Tarde’s theory of imitation wasn’t so much forgotten as normalized or (to borrow a term from Latour) blackboxed. I imagine that, sooner or later, we’ll “forget” Tarde once more. I hope that when we “remember” him the next time, we’ll remember Boas and company alongside.