Introduction

Introduction Few Western thinkers have engaged with Indigenous people more closely or reaped greater rewards from that engagement than Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology. In the early twentieth century, as the world’s self- declared advanced nations competed to colonize the globe and exploit its natural resources, Boas drew upon what he had learned among Native peoples to present an alternative approach to modernity. Questioning the assumption that the West could claim the prerogative to rule “the rest” by right of natural endowment, Boas critiqued the idea of race, the master concept of colo- nialism. He shaped the modern notion of culture as an interactive process to which each of the world’s peoples has contributed its portion of knowledge. And he framed the idea of grammar as a universal characteristic of human cognition, the borderless ability to structure linguistic meaning. These interre- lated concepts interrogated the standards by which the world measured prog- ress, ultimately projecting visions of a shared global community.1 Today Boas is beginning to undergo a reevaluation.2 This is partly because of his unmistakable importance to contemporary discussions of race, inequality, empire, and migration—conversations emergent from the peoples he worked with and the places he worked in, which coalesce around the vulnerability of the ix x Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner biosphere and the problem of human survival. Unlike Karl Marx, Max Weber, or Sigmund Freud, who similarly drew upon the intellectual heritage of the European Enlightenment to construct the social sciences, Boas opened modern inquiry to a multitude of viewpoints, diversifying the subject of scientifi c obser- vation and who would conduct it.3 As he institutionalized his methods across a nascent discipline, helping to establish America’s fi rst university departments of anthropology, Boas trained a diverse group of women and men—including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Melville Herskovits, Ella Deloria, and Edward Sapir—many of whom, like Boas, faced ethnic, religious, or sexual discrimination. These scholars contributed to a global reconfi guration of the politics of culture. The Boasian tradition, which began among Indigenous peoples from Baffi n Island to imperial Siberia, increasingly produced insights about the diversity of human experience while steadily building status for its practitioners. Indeed, inheritors of one or another strand of this tradition came to be regarded as the founding fi gures of national schools of their own, including Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, Manuel Gamio in Mexico, Marius Barbeau in Canada, and Claude Lévi- Strauss in France, who always cherished his close contact with “the last of those intellectual giants produced by the nineteenth century, the likes of whom will probably never be seen again.”4 Yet, in comparison to Boas’s wide reception, little attention has been paid to the vast network of Indigenous collaborators upon whom he relied. This anthology considers their infl uence, revealing the underrecognized centrality of Native peoples and other peoples treated as subjects of scientifi c study in the making of the Boasian tradition. Through their interactive relationships estab- lished with Boas and other anthropologists, Indigenous peoples transmitted insights that have extended beyond national communities, germinating devel- opments from history to linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, and social theory. To take just one of many possible examples, after the Second World War Kwakwa̠ ka̠ ’wakw concepts of reciprocity, fi rst expressed to Boas decades earlier in British Columbia, contributed to a new rhetoric of decolonization and anticapitalist critique. Ranging from the work of Marcel Mauss to that of Guy Debord, ideas about gift economies and communal redistribution became centrally lodged in Continental philosophical debates about the meanings of value and language as well as expression. These ideas became so ubiquitous that Parisian activists in the events of 1968 looked to a journal named Potlatch, a nod to Northwest Coast Native cultural and ceremonial practices. The idea of the gift was only one of many ways in which Indigenous peoples helped to redirect the currents of Western metaphysics, drawing upon their own cultural values and their experiences under colonial rule.5 Introduction xi A little more than a century has passed since 1911, when Franz Boas intro- duced his modernist ideas in a burst of landmark publications: The Mind of Primitive Man, “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” and the Handbook of American Indian Languages. Each of these works dis - proved the dominant ideology of his time through careful reconsideration of then- operative assumptions about human difference and the supposed inferi- ority of Indigenous, immigrant, and racialized peoples.6 The centerpiece of this trifecta was The Mind of Primitive Man, a book of essays drawn in large part from Boas’s study of Native societies. The book takes the form of a thought experiment that attempts to disassemble the confi ning features of Western thought and read the diversity beyond it. While the very colonizing outlook that the book attempts to critique stands today in its title, its contents helped to inaugurate a century of cultural inquiry. More than any of Boas’s works, this title encapsulates the opportunities as well as the limitations inher- ent in the transcultural study of diversity, identity, and belonging. To commemorate the centennial of Boas’s watershed publication, a group of scholars representing many of the disciplines and several of the communities impacted by Boasian research met in New Haven to discuss this complex legacy.7 The discussion was spirited and at times diffi cult. Eventually a common under- standing emerged, one that views Boas as a formulator, in both theory and practice, of what might be termed global cultural studies. Even when anthropologists think they are studying the local, they are engaged in a global practice. Moreover, the Indigenous peoples who form the subject of classic anthropology turn out, on second look, to be agents of their own forms of globalization.8 Boas cast a sharp light on globalization, considering it not as a mere economic or political system but as a total social and cultural phenomenon that interconnects plants and animals as well as humans. As Europe’s empires networked the earth and humankind realized the industrial power to radically alter it, Boas studied the intermixture of cultures and peoples in an age of media connectivity preceding the rupture of the First World War. He also put in place, in the form of academic anthropology, a new network that disseminated ideas across borders. Owing to his role as a global connector, Boas can provide an unusually acute lens for a historical investigation of the social networks that shaped him. These networks are often studied within their respective silos—as European history, anthropology, Native American studies, African American studies, and so on. We wanted to get to the interactions between these subjects. After the confer- ence, we assembled a group of scholars to deepen the investigation. Drawing upon a range of methodologies from history, anthropology, ethnic studies, philosophy, political theory, and linguistics, we made use of Boas’s knowledge xii Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner network to examine the diversity of discourses in which he participated. This approach decenters Boas and recenters those, such as the Kwakwa̠ ka̠ ’wakw, who similarly helped to build global cultural studies but whose contributions have remained erased and elided. The result is a collective experiment in the global history of knowledge that attempts to trace the circulation of some key modern concepts. This anthology reveals the vast intellectual and cultural infl uence of Indigenous and colonized communities upon the modern world. Our focus is the world of Boas: the assemblage of individuals and communities who infl uenced the production and dissemination of modern concepts of diversity, identity, and belonging. We call this network of communities, cutting across binaries of race and boundaries of empire, the Boasian Circle. Previous defi nitions of this circle emphasize Boas’s students; we spotlight Indigenous intellectuals, African American and pan- African scholars, German and Jewish scientists, and Latino writers and thinkers, all of whom contributed to the making of global cultural studies.9 Represented by these individuals, and foremost in Boasian research, are three kinds of communities—Natives, descendants of slaves, and immigrants—whose experiences of state violence, dislocation, and diaspora contributed to the politics of modernity across the Western hemisphere and beyond. The Boasian Circle recorded and disseminated the knowledge of these largely non- Anglophone communities, yet no historical account has grappled with their collective impact. It is time to peel away the racial and colonial assumptions that have obscured our view of these seminal thinkers, disclosing a network of knowledge that globalized the world of thought. The diversity of communities linked by Boasian anthropology testifi es to the non- Western origins of some signifi cant modern knowledge. As the fourteen essays herein suggest, the classically defi ned attributes of Boasian anthropology— from its rejection of the evolutionism and racial typologies inherited from the nineteenth century to its methodological imperatives

Load more