Historical Methods and Northeast Asian Coastal Cultures a the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and Historical Schools

Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Historical Methods and Northeast Asian Coastal Cultures a The Jesup North Pacific Expedition and Historical Schools “Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science,” proclaimed Edward Sapir in 1916 (Sapir 1994: 33), echoing the sentiments of his colleagues and disciples such as Franz Boas, Al- fred Kroeber, Clark Wissler, Melville Herskovits and others, now collectively grouped into the American Historical School of anthropology, or Historicism. Similar voices were frequently heard from this school of thought; however, they were seldom materialized except for a handful of hesitant attempts to ar- rive at a diachronic cultural reconstruction. The founder of this school, Franz Boas, was perhaps the most cautious of all the members. Although he also shared the idea of anthropology being basically a diachronic discipline, he not only made little effort to devise a method of reconstruction of the cultural and ethnic history of non-literate peoples (such as the Northwest Coast Indians whose ethnographic research he was absorbed in), but he also strictly cen- sured any attempt of such a reconstruction by his colleagues, admonishing them for abandoning hard data obtained through their field research and em- barking on a path of unproven hypotheses, inferences and speculations. One year after Sapir made the above-quoted comment, another member of Boas’ group, Robert Lowie, denied the possibility of combining cultural anthropology with history because “primitive people have no history” (Hudson C. 1973: 112), that is, non-literate ethnic groups are by nature conservative and re- sist any change in their political organization, social structure, religious beliefs, mythology, and other aspects of culture, since change would mean an undesir- able disruption of their cultural status quo. Since the 1920s and especially since the entrenchment of functionalists in Great Britain, calls for synchronic studies of societies and cultures became heard with increasing frequency. Broni- slaw Malinowski and other functionalists mocked diachronic approaches as “antiquarian speculations.” The trend of cultural and social anthropology dis- tancing itself from studying diachronic processes and embracing zero-time perspectives and anchoring their analyses in “ethnographic presents” gradual- ly gained much influence and seemed to become irreversible. As a result, the overwhelming majority of present-day cultural anthropologists all over the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300439_002 2 Chapter 1 world have chosen the strictly synchronic approach to the study of culture. It has turned out that the diachronic to synchronic shift was not a temporary trend but a sustained course of anthropological research. What caused this dramatic metamorphosis of a historical discipline to an ahistorical or even an- tihistorical one? Several causes have contributed in varying degrees and at various points of time to the change: 1. Reaction to the late 19th and early 20th century speculative approaches such as unilineal evolutionism (mankind’s progress from savagery to civilization in the imagination of L.H. Morgan, E.B. Tylor, J.J. Bachofen, H. Spencer, H.J.S. Maine, etc.) and diffusionism (long- distance migrations of peoples carrying culture traits hypothesized by W. Schmidt, F. Graebner, F. Ratzel, L. Frobenius, W. Koppers, G.E. Smith, W.J. Perry, etc.); 2. Reaction to the lack of clear results in American Historicism; 3. Reac- tion to the excesses of non-academic dilettantes (lost tribes, sunken conti- nents); 4. Reaction to criticism by functionalists and their disciples (lack of holistic understanding, no social and cultural interpretations); 5. Reaction to criticisms by archaeologists (no hard data, armchair speculations); and 6. Lack of reliable methodology of diachronic reconstruction within ethnology (cultural anthropology) alone. Added to the criticisms was the insistence that the only valid data are those obtained in fieldwork and the only approach to culture is holism, both of which rendered historical reconstruction of culture dif- ficult. Juxtaposed with historical linguistics, which continued to thrive in spite of anti-historical attacks by structuralists, Chomskyists and others, historical anthropology was hit particularly hard and has not fully recovered yet. Although Boas’ historical school did not produce as many results in practi- cal diachronic studies as one would expect from its insistence on anthropology as a historical discipline, it succeeded in establishing a methodological frame- work that is still fundamentally valid and serves as the primary guideline for historical reconstructions. Boas and his followers were sharply critical of the two preceding historical schools in anthropology, evolutionism and diffusionism, arguing that it is impossible to reconstruct the history of preliterate peoples by using only comparative ethnological data. They argued that although comparing culture traits among related peoples within defined regions could produce relative chronologies to a certain extent, the results of such ethnological analyses must be cross-checked with data drawn from archaeology, historical/comparative linguistics, biological/physical anthropology, oral tradition studies/folkloristics, post-contact history and other relevant disciplines in order to define cultural sequences and establish chronologies as precisely as possible. Boas’ insistence on inclusion of all or most of these fields within anthro pology, which was originally designed for culture-historical reconstructions (in addition to an urgent salvage effort in an era of vanishing peoples and .

Load more