
































Engaging with the Expansive and Eclectic Work and Legacy of Franz Boas 

Review by Joseph Weiss

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism

by Regna Darnell, Joshua Smith, Michelle Hamilton, and Robert L. A. Hancock (eds)

University of Nebraska Press, 2015

Early in her preface to this first volume of the Franz Boas Papers, Regna Darnell suggests that Franz

Boas is an “elephant in the middle of the room” for contemporary anthropology, in relation to which

“all practicing anthropologists have struggled to position themselves.” “Indisputably the founder and

dominant figure,” Darnell writes, in the emergence of anthropology as a “professionalized academic

discipline  in  North  America,”  Boas  has  been  “eulogized  and  reviled,  claimed  as  an  ancestor  and

repudiated  as  having  led  anthropology  astray”  (Darnell:  xi).  Franz  Boas  as  Public  Intellectual  –

Theory, Ethnography, Activism is intended in one sense as response in and of itself to this ambivalent

and conflicted legacy. At the same time, it inaugurates a broader reassessment of Boas’ corpus as the

introductory volume of the Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition, “an ambitious project to digitize

and critically edit the Franz Boas papers” housed at the American Philosophical Society (Hamilton:

345). It is in this introductory spirit that we can perhaps best understand Darnell’s repeated emphasis on

Boas’ defiance  of  “simple  definition”  and  the  ways  in  which  the  volume  as  whole  repeatedly

emphasizes  the diversity  of  his  own engagements  within  the academy,  with the  First  Nations  and

Native  American  communities  in  which  he  conducted  the  vast  majority  of  his  most  well-known

research,  and  with  publics  in  the  United  States,  Canada,  and  Germany.  Boas  as  a  scholar,  as  a

fieldworker,  as  an  activist  and as  a  public  intellectual  cannot  be  encompassed within  any “single

perspective,” and Franz Boas as Public Intellectual seems meant both to demonstrate the wide variety

of ways in which Boas’ legacy can be approached and to act as an invitation for a broadly diverse set of

engagements with the Boas papers as they continue to be published (Darnell: xi-xii).



Considered in this light, the volume is a tremendous success, bringing together the contributions of

anthropologists,  historians,  journalists,  museum specialists,  literary  theorists,  and  linguists,  among

others, and focusing on a myriad of different dimensions of Boas’ career and ongoing impact within the

academy and outside of it.  Though so integral to the mission statement of the larger  Boas Papers

project, the very diverse character of this volume also makes it a challenging text to engage with on its

own terms. The text deliberately resists presenting any single, unifying position on Boas or offering

general overviews of his career or basic theoretical positions outside of the specific foci of individual

chapters. This volume, in other words, is not for the uninitiated, and those without some familiarity

with Boas’ major writings or the substantive details of his ethnographic work in Canada may find

themselves  unable to  gain purchase  on the often  highly compelling interventions  made within the

book’s individual chapters. Though an introduction to the Boas Papers project, it is clearly not meant

as a broader introduction to Boas’ scholarship, and potential readers who are not already well-versed in

“Boasiana” will benefit from consulting Boas’ own  Race, Language and Culture (Boas 1982a), the

Franz Boas Reader edited by the late George Stocking (Boas 1982b), and perhaps some of Darnell or

Stocking’s  own writings  about  Boas  (e.g.  Darnell  1998;  Stocking 1996) before engaging with the

present volume.

Though it risks a certain measure of inaccessibility, the eclectic and non-didactic approach that this

volume takes  enables  its  authors  to  explore  a  number  of  different  areas  of  Boas’ scholarship  and

scholarly legacy that merit contemporary reassessment. The volume is organized into four parts, the

first three of which target separate (if interrelated) dimensions of the Boasian project. The first part,

“Theory and Interdisciplinary Scope,” is the most conceptually coherent section of the volume, with its

chapters all conforming to two broad objectives: first,  to rehabilitate Boas’ reputation as a theorist

contra the charge that  his  work was merely descriptive or  atheoretical  (e.g.  Darnell:  xvii,  3);  and

second,  to  demonstrate  that  Boas  was  a  “master  bricoleur,”  drawing  on  whatever  scientific  and

analytical tools he had “at hand” in order to advance his own intellectual and political pursuits (Darnell:

xviii). Most of the section’s chapters pursue this second objective, exploring Boas’ intersections with

evolutionary  science  and  American  pragmatism  (Lewis),  literary  theory  (Bracken,  Chamberlin),

linguistics and philology (Silverstein), and ethnomusicology (O’Neill). The first objective is left mostly

in the hands of Lewis and, especially, Darnell, whose chapter advances a critical reassessment of Boas’

manifesto The Mind of Primitive Man (Boas 1911). The fact, in particular, that “relational or abstract

thought as a universal human capacity has come to be recognized as common sense in public as well as



anthropological  discourses”  has  made  it  far  too  easy  to  ignore  or  dismiss  that  this  was  ever  a

“theoretical  position  in  need  of  articulation  and  defense”  (Darnell:  3).  Darnell’s  chapter  aims  to

reassess this position, demonstrating that Boas’ “cultural relativism,” as it is commonly glossed, was a

well-elaborated theoretical position that wove together Boas’ ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological

and biological research in order to articulate a “robust stand-point based epistemology that underwrote

later  culture  and  personality,  ethnoscience,  social  interactionalist,  and  interpretivist  approaches

constructed  on Boasian  foundations”  (Darnell:  5).  This  epistemology cannot  be  disentangled  from

Boas’ sustained  critiques  of  scientific  racism  and  unilineal  evolution.  Rather,  Darnell  repeatedly

reminds us that Boas viewed culture and biology as co-constituted, and that he positioned anatomical

study  alongside  the  study  of  language  and  material  and  immaterial  cultural  elements  as  equally

necessary in understanding human diversity (pp. 6-7).

Boas’ dual  emphasis  on  the  physical  and  the  epistemological  had  profound  consequences  on  his

fieldwork practices, which form the broad topic of Part 2, “Ethnography.” Unlike the six chapters of

Part 1, Part 2 contains only two chapters, focusing respectively on Boas’ relationships with his long-

term Tlingit-Kwakw k ’wakw collaborator and “informant” George Hunt (Wilner) and Nlaka’pamuxaa aa

ethnographer James Tait (Laforet). Wilner’s chapter contains the most direct engagement with Boas’

own fieldwork practices, drawing on Boas and Hunt’s correspondences to trace how Boas and Hunt’s

Kwakw k ’wakw ethnographies where shaped and the conditions under which they were produced.aa aa

The Boas that emerges in this account is complex, at once a staunch ally of Hunt and his defender

against Canadian attempts to prosecute Hunt for violating the ban on “Indian dancing and potlatching”

and a self-serving scholar with a ravenous appetite for indigenous artifacts and physical remains who

repeatedly pushed Hunt to violate his own community’s protocols to acquire new material (Wilner:169-

172). Wilner also highlights the extent to which Boas’ Kwakw k ’wakw research and writing was co-aa aa

authored with Hunt, a fact which Boas sometimes did and sometimes did not acknowledge. In this

sense Wilner’s chapter alongside Laforet’s exploration of Boas and Tait demonstrates the fallacy of the

“lone ethnographer” even at American Anthropology’s professional genesis. Ethnographic work is and

always has been co-authored, the product of multiple voices and multiple standpoints, and this section

of the volume demonstrates that Boas was well aware of this fact and made some effort, at least, to

acknowledge it even as he also took advantage of his collaborators.

Part 2 is disappointing in its brevity, however. Dedicating only two chapters to something as significant

as “ethnography” for Boas and the Boasian legacy in Canada – particularly absent any writing focused



on his earlier work on Baffin Island – feels partial. This may in part be an organizational issue. Given

the diversity of contributors to the collection and the complex political and colonial histories of the

northwest coast, it may be that relatively few contributors were positioned to discuss Boas’ fieldwork

beyond his relationships with two admittedly central interlocutors. But the section and the volume as a

whole would be considerably strengthened by more chapters and more approaches to something as

vastly significant as “fieldwork” for Boas and his descendants. It seems somewhat odd in this regard

that Bracken’s deconstructive analysis of Boas’ early fieldwork in Alert Bay is found in Part 1 of the

volume when its concerns seem just as much ethnographic as theoretical. This said, the relative paucity

of material in Part 2 is at least somewhat addressed in Part 3, “Activism,” which begins with two

chapters that directly address the significance of Boas’ ethnography in historical and contemporary

Aboriginal legal and political struggles on the northwest coast (Dinwoodie; Hancock).

The chapters that follow range more widely over Boas’ various engagements with U.S. Indian policy

(Smith), Germany during the rise of Nazism (Langenkämper), and the United States during the world

wars  (Liss).  While  these  chapters  lack  Part  1’s  organizing  focus,  they  effectively  demonstrate  the

significance of consistent public engagement for Boas, offering ample evidence of his efforts to speak

to  a  non-academic  public  and to  directly  intervene  in  American  and German policy  in  ways  that

resonated with his scientific concerns and convictions. It is this section that works most directly to

demonstrate that Boas was a “public intellectual.” Boas clearly understood his work – and the work of

anthropology  more  generally  –  as  being  of  central  significance  to  the  general  public,  correcting

prejudices about racial inferiority and evolutionary perspectives of culture. And he positioned himself

as an expert able to advise on these issues at  the highest political  level, writing letters to multiple

American presidents and an open letter to Reichs President von Hindenburg decrying the suppression

“in the most brutal fashion” of “free expression of opinion” and “even the most modest opposition, i.e.

half the population” in Germany in the early 1930s (Boas, quoted in Langenkämper:283).

The fourth and final section of this volume, “Part 4: The Archival Project,” is something of a post-

script to the direct engagements with Boas that make up the first three Parts of the volume. Instead, the

two chapters of Part 4 outline the archival project represented by The Franz Boas Papers Documentary

Edition,  detailing  the  acquisition  of  the  American  Philosophical  Society’s  Boas  collection  and the

conditions under which the volume to come are being produced. Particularly significant,  given the

volume’s own earlier engagements with the extractive dimensions of Boas’ own ethnographic practices,

is  the  fact  that  the  Boas papers  are  being  digitized  in  consultation  with  an  “Indigenous  Advisory



Council” who have the final veto as to “which documents are presented and who has access to them”

The recognition that “Boas’s fieldwork, like that of many other anthropologists in the past, included

matters  now considered  culturally  sensitive,  under  Indigenous  intellectual  property  copyright,  and

potentially inappropriate to share with non-Native communities or among different groups of a Native

community” is vital for archives that contain material collected (and appropriated) from indigenous

communities, and the collaborative nature of the Boas Papers project appears laudable in its attempts to

avoid reiterating colonial forms of epistemological and representational violence (Hamilton:356).

References Cited

Boas, Franz

1911 The Mind of Primitive Man: A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Lowell Institute, Boston,

Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910-1911. London: Macmillan.

1982a Race, Language, and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1982b  A  Franz  Boas  Reader:  The  Shaping  of  American  Anthropology,  1883-1911.  George  W

Stocking, ed. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Darnell, Regna, Michelle Hamilton, Robert L.A. Hancock and Joshua Smith, eds.

2015 The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1. Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography,

Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Darnell, Regna

1998 And along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology. Philadelphia:

John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Stocking, George W.

1996  Volksgeist  as  Method  and  Ethic:  Essays  on  Boasian  Ethnography  and  the  German

Anthropological Tradition, vol. 8, History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Joseph Weiss recently received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. His research

focuses broadly on indigenous political possibility in the context of settler colonialism. His dissertation

explored how the residents of a Haida First Nations community on Canada’s northwest coast challenge



colonial control over time through imagining and attempting to construct social and political futures

for themselves and their settler neighbours. Current projects include an ethnohistorical study of the

relationships between the Haida community and military personnel and an ongoing examination of the

ways in which natural history museums represent indigenous peoples.

© 2016 Joseph Weiss


