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Introduction: The Development of Franz Boas’s Theories on Primitive Art

ALDONA JONAITIS

In 1885 the young Franz Boas assisted Adolph Bastian in preparing an exceptional array of British Columbian art, recently collected by Adrian Jacobsen, for the new North American exhibit at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin (Cole 1985:58–67). Soon after, when a troupe of Bella Coolas visited Berlin in January 1886, Boas had the opportunity to meet several Northwest Coast Indians and see them dancing in masquerade, wearing Chilkat blankets, and creating rhythmic music with carved rattles (Cole 1982).¹ In an article published in the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas wrote about the elegant art of the Bella Coolas: “Here we behold with amazement a wonderful technique in the use of carver’s knife and paintbrush and a finely developed artistic sense.… Wonderously beautiful are some of the carved house posts which are erected by this tribe and which represent the family tree; no less notable are the beautifully carved stone implements, axes, hammers, bowls and the like. The repeated motif of all decorations on these objects, as also on the clothing, is a stylized eye” (translated in Cole 1982:119, 122).

Later that year, Boas made the long trip to the North Pacific region to gain first-hand experience among these Indians whose art fascinated him so, and began a lifelong attachment to the natives of British Columbia.² Boas treated art as an element of culture in his monographs on the Kwakiutl, “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians” (1897b) and “The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island” (1909). The 1897 monograph is particularly important in this context, as it offers extensive detailed information on the ceremonial context of much Kwakiutl art.

In addition to including art in these rather comprehensive studies, Boas wrote several essays that addressed issues of style and symbolism. His earliest art historical articles dealt solely with art of the Northwest Coast Indians, while his later ones included art of other Native American peoples. His culminating art historical statement, Primitive Art (1927), added examples from Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and Siberia. Boas’s art historical literature has profound historical value since it embodies a major change in primitive art theory from the evolutionism that dominated the nineteenth century to a twentieth-century form of relativism, usually referred to as historical particularism.³ As such, Boas’s art history is of a piece with his social anthropology; as George Marcus and Michael Fischer state in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: “Boas used ethnography to debate residual issues derived from the framework of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and to challenge racist views of human behavior, then ascendant” (1986:130). Boas’s art history was part of his broader scientific agenda that included not simply discrediting evolutionism but offering alternate explanations if possible. In terms of art, Boas was ultimately to stress the roles that culture, history, and the artist’s psychology and creative processes play in the development of an art style.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONIST ANTHROPOLOGY

To understand fully the significance of Boas’s art historical analyses, it is necessary to summarize the prevailing evolutionist anthropological theories he challenged.⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century, social evolutionism had thoroughly permeated the study of anthropology, and the notion of “survival of the fittest” appeared in diverse texts, serving to explain many cultural phenomena, including art.⁵ Briefly, the several versions of the theory agreed that humankind had evolved from lower primates in a series of phases which progressed from simple to more complex forms, culminating in the Caucasian race, the highest and to that point the most perfect product—the “fittest”—of the sequence. A corollary proposition held that as culture followed biology, the most primitive societies were the simplest, while the more highly evolved western cultures were the most sophisticated and complex.⁶

In their cultural studies, evolutionist anthropologists applied what is called the “comparative method,” which equated prehistoric groups with living primitive societies. In its most simplified version, this history of human development suggested an analogy between the growth of an individual human and the development of society, with primitive society being equivalent to a child, and civilized culture being like an adult. As they progressed toward civilized perfection, following a course strictly governed by universal rules, all ethnic groups passed through the same stages. As a result, even groups geographically distant from one another shared similar manifestations in areas as diverse as social structure, technology, and art style. At the heart of this theory was the concept of independent invention, which hypothesized that all peoples at the same level of cultural development tend to invent the same artifacts and ways of living (Stocking 1968:112 ff.).

It is important to point out that not all nineteenth-century anthropology was based on totally erroneous theories, and that some evolutionist concepts remain in the corpus of anthropological thinking. For example, the practice of interpreting archaeological evidence by making analogies with ethnographic groups is still being done, under the ethnoarchaeological approach. Moreover, social evolutionism as an interpretive tool is still being used, particularly by Marxist anthropologists. The two fundamental differences between what was promoted by the nineteenth-century anthropologists and what is now understood by contemporary cultural evolutionists are that (1) no one seriously argues that all groups pass through the same series of stages, and (2) no one claims that any group is culturally superior to any other on the basis of its evolutionary position.

During the period we are discussing, however, anthropological evolutionism carried with it a predisposition to racialist explanation. Indeed, as Marvin Harris (1968:130) states, “no major figure in the social sciences between 1860 and 1890 escaped the influence of evolutionary racism.” Either implicitly or explicitly, this theory suggested that one group, the whites, had evolved the farthest and thus was mentally, biologically, and morally superior to all others. Some anthropologists of this era believed that because of the nature of the evolutionary process, the “primitive,” darker-skinned people would never reach the apex of creation occupied by whites. Even if they did improve their social, economic, political, and artistic condition, these people would never be able to “catch up” to the whites, who would continue to forge ahead with their more sophisticated technologies and ever greater intellectual and scientific achievements.⁷

One significant manifestation of their purported inferiority was the mental ability of darker-skinned peoples. Herbert Spencer (1896), who claimed that primitive man’s mental processes were reflexive responses to natural stimuli, concluded that only in whites had highly developed thought processes capable of abstraction evolved. E. B. Tylor (1871), a major Victorian evolutionist who did make useful contributions to anthropological theories, especially in the field of religion, insisted that unlike the modern European adult who had a large and sophisticated brain, the primitive was like a child with a less developed brain and lesser mental capacities.

Contemporary physical anthropology supported the correlative notion that development of cranial capacity corresponded with the progressive stages of human development. W J McGee, of the Bureau of American Ethnology and first president of the American Anthropological Association, firmly believed that brain sizes corresponded closely with culture grade, and that as a group evolved, the average brain size of its members became larger since more advanced stages of development demanded more complex neural activities (McGee 1897, 1899). Consistent with these notions is McGee’s assertion that “the savage stands strikingly close to sub-human species in every aspect of mental as well as bodily habits and bodily structure” (McGee 1901:13).⁸

Sometimes the evolutionists used the supposed inferiority of nonwhites as scientific justification for a form of segregation. Daniel Brinton, eminent University of Pennsylvania professor of anthropology and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was particularly concerned about the disastrous consequences of racial mixtures. In his book Races and Peoples (1890), Brinton took a hard line against marriages between members of different races, arguing that racial mixtures led to sterility, short lives, and feeble constitutions (pp. 284–87). He then insisted that racial purity must be maintained and interracial marriages discouraged.

Franz Boas, a German Jew from a politically liberal family, found the tenets of social evolutionism abhorrent.⁹ He rejected the concept that race and culture could be integrated into a single evolutionary sequence that followed strict rules, just as he rejected the racism that the evolutionist theories justified and validated. His antievolutionism and antiracism began early in his career when, on his first field trip in 1883 among the Canadian Inuit, he recognized how racial prejudice blinded whites from correctly assessing the intrinsic values of other races. In a letter sent from the field, he wrote: “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over that of the ‘savages,’ and find the more I see of their customs that we have no right to look down on them” (translated in Cole 1983:33).

Then, in 1894, on the basis of further experiences with the Kwakiutl, Boas became more outspoken in his beliefs about the sophistication of primitive mentality, and attacked Spencer’s generalizations on primitive mentality. In an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boas argued against traditional racial assumptions which linked racial differences to hierarchies of race and culture. He insisted that historical factors contributed to the development of all cultures, that standards for evaluating achievements of different peoples are relative, and that mental differences that appear to be racial in origin can be explained on the basis of different traditions (Boas 1894; see also Stocking 1968:215 ff.).¹⁰

NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONIST ART HISTORY

If cultures evolved from lower ones to higher ones, so, the argument went, did art styles. At the end of the nineteenth century, many of those who wrote on primitive art assumed that all art styles underwent some sort of evolutionary process not unlike the biological and cultural processes undergone by their creators.¹¹ Artworks of primitive peoples represented examples of early phases of that process, in contrast to the advanced type of art made by civilized peoples. The implication, of course, was that the art of civilized peoples was superior in all ways to that of the “savages.”¹² Although these evolutionists could reach no consensus on what kind of art was associated with which period, many agreed that art evolved in a unilinear progression. For some this progression was purely formal, while others associated the evolution of formal elements with a group’s progress through cultural stages.¹³

One of the earliest and most outspoken proponents of the “improvement” of art through evolutionary processes was the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1857), who wrote that the evolution of art fit into a cosmic process of evolution of mind, society, and civilization. Like plants, animals, and socioeconomic structures, art evolved from simplicity to complexity, and from homogeneity to heterogeneity. In Spencer’s vastly oversimplified scheme, the earliest art was an integration of architecture, painting, and sculpture in service of a theocratic government. During the course of evolution, these art forms became distinct, just as their subject matters gradually differentiated the sacred and the secular.

Most European art historians accepted the general notion of evolution in art, but, failing to agree on how that evolution proceeded, adhered to one of two evolutionist schools, technical/materialism or realist/degenerationism. For the most part, these analysts focused on two-dimensional art rather than sculpture, presumably because they believed it was in decoration that the origins of art could be found (Goldwater 1986:21). Gottfried Semper’s highly influential Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten (1861–63) claimed that art originated as imitation of techniques of architecture. Thus, the oldest forms are abstract and geometric; artists gradually assigned meaning to those designs that developed over time into identifiable images. In contrast, Alfred Haddon (1895) was of the opinion that the earliest artworks were realistic; these gradually “degenerated” into geometric designs. Henry Balfour (1893), Hjalmar Stolpe (1892), Karl von den Steinen (1894), and others believed that the earliest type of art was naturalistic, followed by increasing stylization of form.¹⁴ An interesting version of this realist/degenerationist school was found in the writings of Ernst Grosse (1897), a German ethnologist and sociologist who argued that groups at the same socioeconomic level of development produced similar art styles. According to Grosse, the simplest hunters and gatherers, whose livelihoods depended on great skill in observation and manual dexterity, produced relatively realistic art, whereas the later agriculturalists and herdsmen, who did not need such acute senses and skills, lost the ability to create realistic art.

In the United States, Frederic Ward Putnam (1886) was one of the few members of the realist/degenerationist school. In contrast, William H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology supported the technical/materialist theory of art history, arguing that technique and materials were sources of decorative forms, and that the earliest art was a geometric imitation of techniques like basketry (Holmes 1888, 1890, 1903). Holmes theorized further that such geometric art gave way to non-ideographic art, which in turn gave way to delineative art, in an evolutionist sequence governed by strict laws. Every art style in existence either had gone through this sequence to its end or (like the art of primitive peoples) had stopped at some earlier stage. A partial explanation for this retarded artistic development could have been that the primitive artist, living a limited and difficult existence at the mercy of an uncontrollable environment, was rarely capable of creativity, aesthetic pleasure, or imaginative exercises (see Thoresen 1977:109–11; Hinsley 1981:103–5). John Wesley Powell, also of the Bureau of American Ethnology, described a rigid developmental sequence of art history connecting stages of style development to Lewis Henry Morgan’s phases of social development: in the savage stage the artist uses outlining, in the barbaric stage he invents relief, in the kingly stage he develops perspective, and in civilized culture he advances to the chiaroscuro technique (Powell 1899:732).

The strength of the bias for unilineal evolutionism sometimes prevented scholars from understanding certain data that contradicted these explanations. An interesting example of this is the article published in the 1880–1881 Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by Henry Henshaw (1883), “Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley.” In this analysis of archaeological animal carvings, Henshaw noted that some contemporaneous pieces were conventionalized and others were naturalistic—something that, in theory, should not happen if these stylistic modes followed an evolutionary development. Nonetheless, Henshaw held that “at least as far as the North American Indians are concerned, … the road to conventionalism has always led through imitation” (1883:165–66). Despite evidence that two distinct and supposedly chronologically separate styles coexisted, on the strength of the evolutionist paradigm, Henshaw continued to support the notion that one preceded the other. It was Boas who used the numerous examples of similar styles coexisting to disprove the evolutionary theories of the development of primitive art.

During the first several decades of the twentieth century, other approaches to primitive art were subject to Boas’s scrutiny. One of these concerned what Boas believed to be a far too one-sided evaluation of the expressive nature of art. As early as 1894, Ernst Grosse wrote that the fundamental purpose of art was to express ideas. Others who privileged the expressive or communicative nature of art included Yrjö Hirn (1900), Max Verworn (1920), and Richard Thurnwald (1926). For Wilhelm Wundt (1919), art stood in the center of a continuum between myth and language. For Boas, a scholar unwilling to accept any simple explanations of phenomena, particularly those that could not be proved, to ascribe to the origin of art its communicative aspects ignored the equally significant formal or nonexpressive qualities. Equally unacceptable to Boas was the theory put forth by Ernst Vatter (1926), who promoted the idea of an anonymous primitive artist completely lacking in individualism and creativity. To deny primitive artists their personal identity was equivalent to denying them humanity; while these artists functioned within cultural systems that influenced the kind of art they produced, they were by no means slavish copyists of predetermined forms.

FRANZ BOAS ON PRIMITIVE ART

Born and educated in Germany, Franz Boas was familiar with both European and American art historical and anthropological literature. In order to contradict the evolutionist ideas held by many of his contemporaries as absolute truths, Boas emphasized the variety of history; the profound influence of diffusion; the formal, symbolic, and stylistic variations found in various groups, and sometimes within the same group; and ultimately the role of imagination and creativity on the part of the artist.¹⁵ Where the evolutionists claimed a rigid sequence of art forms, Boas described specific cases in which those sequences did not apply. Where any writer imposed a simplifying or universalizing theory, Boas demonstrated how the complexity of the artistic process, exemplified by data he and his colleagues had obtained, disproved that theory. In reading through Boas’s works on art, it becomes clear that he intentionally and systematically disputed these evolutionist concepts, and each discussion of form, style, and meaning was meant to disprove a previously accepted idea about art. As he did this, he continually suggested different ways to interpret art and understand the artistic process. His motivation to dispute evolutionism resulted in numerous new approaches to art history.

The articles included in this volume, written over several decades starting in the late 1880s, reveal Boas’s intellectual development as an art historian. Initially tentative in his opposition to art historical evolutionism, Boas became increasingly assertive as he matured intellectually. The subjects of his first analyses of art were the paintings and carvings of the Northwest Coast Indians. His earliest writings, done between 1888 and 1895, are largely descriptive, as this was the period during which he was familiarizing himself with Northwest Coast art. As his knowledge of this exceptional regional style deepened, it became clear to him that Northwest Coast art presented interesting artistic problems that could not be solved by then prevalent theories, so between 1896 and 1900, Boas systematically analyzed Northwest Coast art to demonstrate the inadequacies of evolutionist interpretations. His writings on art become very confident after 1900, as, with new information provided by colleagues and students, he went beyond the Northwest Coast to include other Native American artworks in his analyses and in his direct attacks on the evolutionists. It was at this point that he began to investigate the influence of psychology on art. Boas ultimately consolidated these endeavors in his book-length study Primitive Art, published in 1927.¹⁶

The Earliest Writings, 1888–95 Most of Boas’s earliest writings on art were descriptions of the artistic elements of Northwest Coast Indian culture, many based on his fieldwork during which he showed consultants photographs and drawings of artworks in museum collections and asked them to interpret their iconography and explain their use (Boas 1890a:7, 12).¹⁷ For example, one of the products of his 1886 trip to northern Vancouver Island was “The Houses of the Kwakiutl Indians, British Columbia” (1888b), in which he described the structure, design, and interior decoration of Kwakiutl architecture and explained the connections between carvings found in these houses and family legends.¹⁸ In the 1890 and 1891 reports to meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Boas described Salish house posts, Nootka carving and painting, and Kwakiutl and Bella Coola masquerades (1890b, 1891a). In these descriptive writings, he approached artworks as components of a larger cultural picture.¹⁹

During this period, Boas was beginning to speculate on the history of artistic forms, hypothesizing on the origins of a type of art among one of the Northwest Coast groups and then reconstructing its diffusion to other groups. In a report to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1889, Boas commented that “certain designs originated among the Kwakiutl, but reached their highest stage of development among the Haidas” (Boas 1889:116).²⁰ In “The Development of Culture in Northwest America” (1888a), Boas continued along this path, suggesting that the Kwakiutl invented not only winter dances but also the totem pole:²¹

I am inclined to believe that another custom of the North West Americans besides their dances originated among the Kwakiutl. I mean the use of heraldic columns. This view may seem unjustified, considering the fact that such columns are made nowhere with greater care than in the northern regions, among the Tsimshian and Haida, and farther north and south they are less frequent and less elaborately carved. The Haida, however, frequently took up foreign ideas with great energy, and developed them independently.… It appears that the tribe has a remarkable faculty of adaptation (1888a: 195).

He goes on to explain that it is only among the Kwakiutl that mythological tales refer frequently to totem poles, thus apparently justifying his assertion that the Kwakiutl originated the art form.²² Then, observing some similarities between Eskimo and Tlingit masks, both of which have small carved faces attached to the larger face of the mask itself, he proposed “that a mutual influence existed here” (1888a: 196). In “The Use of Masks and Head-ornaments on the Northwest Coast of America” (1890a), Boas reiterated his theory of the innovativeness of the Kwakiutl, whom he credited with inventing the masks worn during winter ceremonies. He also commented that groups borrow ideas and copy artistic forms which “strike their fancy”; examples of this are the Tsimshian raven rattle among the Kwakiutl, the Chilkat blanket among groups as far south as Comox, and the Tsimshian ermine headdress among people as distant as Victoria (Boas 1890a:8). Boas was to become increasingly interested in reconstructing the origin and distribution among ethnic groups of artistic styles and motifs. This would later become a particularly useful means of discrediting evolutionist art history.

Boas on Northwest Coast Art Style, 1896–1900 In 1896, as he intensified his studies of style and symbolism, Boas began to tackle the complexities of the artistic process. In his two-page “Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast,” published in Science (1896), Boas challenged the notion that all Northwest Coast art was totemic by identifying certain objects whose animal form did not derive from social meaning. Although a large proportion of Northwest Coast animal images depict crests associated with family histories, Boas noted that some animal representations on hunting implements and food bowls related to certain natural attributes of the animals themselves. Granting that totemism was a significant incentive in the development of Northwest Coast art, he suggests that once the use of conventionalized animal imagery to decorate objects had been established, artists began applying similar designs to objects unrelated to totemism. Thus a halibut club assumed the shape of the sea lion or killer whale because these are successful fishers, while the grease dish represented a blubber-rich seal. Disputing restrictive and limiting unicausal theories, Boas asserted that his analysis of animal imagery in Northwest Coast art was “one of the numerous ethnological phenomena which, although apparently simple, cannot be explained psychologically from a single cause but are due to several factors” (1896:102–3).²³

In 1897, Boas wrote his most elaborate and important work on art thus far, “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast,” published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.²⁴ This was to become his first systematic argument against an evolutionary explanation of the development of conventionalized imagery. In his introductory comments, Boas seemed to accept as true in some instances the realist/degenerationist theory of Frederic Ward Putnam:²⁵

It has been shown that the motives of the decorative art of many peoples developed largely from representations of animals. In course of time, forms that were originally realistic became more and more sketchy, and more and more distorted. Details, even large portions, of the subject so represented, were omitted, until finally the design attained a purely geometric character (1897a: 123).

Boas then pointed out that this did not occur in one region, the Northwest Coast:

The decorative art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast agrees with this oft-observed phenomenon in that its subjects are almost exclusively animals. It differs from other arts in that the process of conventionalizing has not led to the development of geometric designs, but that the parts of the animal body may still be recognized as such (1897a: 123).

The Northwest Coast artist adhered to an iconographic canon that determined certain identifying characteristics of animals, such as the beaver’s large incisors and crosshatched tail, the killer whale’s large dorsal fin, and the eagle’s large, downward-curving beak.²⁶ According to Boas, the artistic requirement that any animal image had to include all identifying elements of the animal led to highly conventionalized depictions when that animal decorated certain surfaces. On a three-dimensional sculpture, the artist could represent his subject, with all its characteristic features, in a fully naturalistic fashion (and the Northwest Coast artist was capable of very naturalistic representations); this became more problematic when he was presented with a two-dimensional surface. Sometimes that artist needed to abstract and distort the animal-subject in order to make it fit on the surface being decorated. Often, when a three-dimensional animal was depicted on a two-dimensional surface, the artist resorted to what is termed “split representation,” in which the animal’s body is split down the middle, flattened out, and shown in both profiles connected at the center. Sometimes, it was not possible for the artist to portray every feature of the entire animal, so he resorted to representing its characteristic motifs, in which case the rendering became truly symbolic. Here on the Northwest Coast, therefore, the relative realism or abstraction of an image depended on the shape of the surface upon which the artist depicted different animals and their culturally dictated identifying characteristics.

Boas once again discussed this relationship between animal imagery and the shape of the surface on which it appeared in his “Facial Paintings of the Indians of Northern British Columbia,” published in 1898 as part of volume 1 of the Jesup Expedition Publications.²⁷ Repeating the introductory comments of his 1897 monograph, Boas began his text by accepting the realist/degenerationist theory that among “most primitive people we find a tendency to the development of geometric designs.” He then asserted that this did not occur in Northwest Coast art (1898b: 13). To test his theory that in this region the form of the object being decorated with all the necessary animal symbols influenced the relative naturalism of the representation, Boas analyzed the painting applied to the most complex possible surface, the human face. After describing a wide range of Northwest Coast facial paintings, Boas concluded that geometric designs in these paintings did not necessarily evolve from naturalistic ones but were artistic responses to the problems posed by the shape of the face.

To investigate this question, Boas collected face paintings from Charles Edenshaw, “one of the most famous artists” of the Haida, and arranged them in a sequence from the most realistic to the most abstract. As it turned out, the fullest and most realistic representations appeared on the faces of the highest-ranking people, while those of lower rank had more conventionalized face paintings. In some cases, the facial features became part of the design, while in others, they were ignored, with the face serving as a flat surface. While sometimes the depicted animal was readily identified, it could be so abstract that identification was virtually impossible without an explanation by the informant. In this study, Boas noted the appearance of what he claims to be unique in the Northwest Coast: animal symbols in the form of pure geometric designs. Some of these abstract motifs, moreover, could represent different animals, requiring identification by the owner of the image. Boas would periodically return to the point that at times iconographic identification could be obscure; this supported his recurrent theme that uncomplicated answers to questions of meaning simply did not exist.

In his concluding comments, Boas (1898b:24) asserts that “the collection is of theoretical interest mainly because it shows that the difficulty of adapting the subject of decoration to the decorative field has been a most powerful element in substituting geometrical forms for less conventional designs, and in showing a series of important transitional forms.” It should be pointed out that this case is less convincing than that presented the year before in “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast.” The variety of imagery on these facial paintings suggests less that the artist was trying to solve formal problems (as he seems to have been doing in the split representation) and more that he could choose from a range of styles depending upon factors that at least in some cases had to do with the rank of the individual being painted (as he himself noted early in the essay). Although he would repeat the idea that a primitive artist at times freely chose from a range of artistic possibilities when socially dictated conventions did not completely restrict his choice, Boas did not return in later publications to this topic of facial paintings.

In addition to questioning the relationship between naturalistic and stylized images, Boas studied the relationship between art style and linguistic families. In British Columbia, the Coast Salish have a distinctly different art style from their linguistic relatives, the Salish-speaking Thompson people of the interior of the province. During the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Boas had a British Columbia resident, James Teit, collect examples of Thompson Indian art. The pieces Teit collected resembled Plains Indian art far more than they did Northwest Coast art. In his contribution to Teit’s monograph in the Jesup series on the Thompson Indians, Boas (1900b) compared Coast and Interior Salish art, pointing to the absence of plastic art among the latter, so different from the highly three-dimensional art of the Northwest Coast. Unlike the Northwest Coast artists, Thompson painters decorated their implements with designs not prompted by the shape of the surface. The iconography of the two types of artworks created by linguistically related peoples differed as well. Unlike the universally understood imagery of most Northwest Coast representations (although, of course, not all, as he demonstrated in the facial painting article), Thompson decorative designs, often abstract and ambiguous, could be interpreted differently and sometimes apparently arbitrarily by different people. Designs on implements, which related to their use, differed from those on ceremonial pieces, which depicted owners’ dreams. These comparisons implicitly demonstrated the inadequacy of any theory positing a direct connection between language and art style. In his “Conclusion” to the Thompson monograph, Boas attempted to reconstruct the history of Salish speakers, some of whom he suggested had migrated to the Northwest Coast where they borrowed certain art forms from their neighbors, others of whom lived on the plateau and were influenced by Plains Indians.²⁸

Boas on Native American Art, from 1901 By the first decade of the twentieth century, Boas had at his disposal more materials with which he could dispute grand universalizing theories. These included Northwest Coast materials acquired during the Jesup Expedition by Teit, Livingston Farrand (1900), and John Swanton (1905); Siberian pieces collected during that same fieldwork by Berthold Laufer (1902), Waldemar Jochelson (1908, 1926), and Waldemar Bogoras (1904) in Siberia; northern Mexican art by Carl Lumholtz (1904); and Plains and California art described by Boas’s students, including A. L. Kroeber (1900a, 1901), Clark Wissler (1904), and Roland B. Dixon (1902). Confident in his grasp of the Northwest Coast, Boas could now expand beyond that culture area in his efforts to dismantle the false grand narrative of evolutionism. He also turned greater attention to the creative process, and to the psychological and cultural factors that influenced art production. His articles published between 1901 and 1916 thus represent his mature statements on art history as well as his final contributions to that discipline prior to the publication of Primitive Art in 1927.

In 1903, Boas expanded his study of primitive art beyond the Northwest Coast in “The Decorative Art of the North American Indians,” published in Popular Science Monthly.²⁹ In this essay that analyzes the significance of a culture in determining meaning in art, Boas proposed history as a substitute for evolutionism. He begins by dismissing the realist/degenerationism of Haddon (1895) and then appears to accept the theory of Semper (1861–63), Cushing (1886), and Holmes (1888, 1890) that the origin of decorative forms can probably be found in technique. In particular, he favors the work of Schurtz (1900) and Hamlin (1898) who note that once a design is created, the group using it on its art “read in” meaning appropriate to their culture. In this case Boas tacitly positions himself in opposition to the number of scholars like Grosse (1897) and Hirn (1900) for whom the expressive and communicative aspects of art are primary. He qualifies this by adding that this origin has little relevance to the meaning ascribed to the image by the people who use it for decorative purposes.

Then, directing his words to those who preferred evolutionist to historical explanations, Boas asserted that if one group’s art style really arose in isolation from another group’s, as a result of either a technical/materialist or a realist/degenerationist process, the art of each group would be different. On the Plains, where art produced by many different ethnic groups is remarkably uniform, this was clearly not the case. According to Boas, history, not evolution, explained the presence of certain images in art. As an example of the diffusion of a motif, Boas charted the appearance of a rather complex geometric design found both on ancient Pueblo art and among many different Plains people. This motif, Boas proposed, originated on Pueblo pottery and spread northwards. Interestingly, what the image meant to various Plains groups differed considerably. Stressing the significance of culture in these historical processes, Boas explained that when new motifs enter into the artistic vocabulary of a people, they ascribe meaning to them appropriate to their values and world view.

In this same article, Boas notes the coexistence of realistic and geometric imagery on the Plains, where relatively realistic designs often decorated sacred, ceremonial objects while more geometric images appeared on secular pieces used every day. He ascribed to this the culturally determined differences in the purpose of the art: “In ceremonial objects the ideas represented are more important than the decorative effect, and it is intelligible that the resistance to conventionalism may be strong” (although he acknowledged that in other cases, the need for secrecy may result in obscure representations) (1903:485).

In addition to becoming both more assertive and more universal in his objections to evolutionist art history, Boas became more sensitive to the subtleties and complexities of the artistic process.

We conclude from all this that the explanation of designs is secondary almost throughout and due to a late association of ideas and forms, and that as a rule a gradual transition from realistic motives to geometric forms did not take place. The two groups of phenomena—interpretation and style—appear to be independent.… the history of the artistic development of a people, and the style that they have developed at any given time, predetermine the method by which they express their ideas in decorative art; and … the type of ideas that a people is accustomed to express by means of decorative art predetermines the explanation that will be given to a new design.… The idea which a design expresses at the present time is not necessarily a clew to its history. It seems probable that idea and style exist independently, and influence each other constantly (1903:497).

Whereas a style can result from historical factors in which imagery and design diffuse into a group from the outside, the meaning the accepting culture ascribes to the new style must resonate with the concepts that constitute that group’s culture. Thus, a people’s culture, which influences everything they do or say, affects their art as well. In this essay, Boas noted the occurrence of an artistic phenomenon both in the primitive and civilized worlds, a theme to which he returned several times in subsequent essays. He gave the following example. As is the case in the Plains where conventionalized and stylized images appear simultaneously, in modern architecture, domestic stained glass tends to be geometric, while in churches it is usually representational; wallpaper in the home tends to be abstract, whereas wallpaper in public settings has more symbolic representations.

After this 1903 article, Boas continued analyzing Native American art, posing questions on style, symbolism, and history, trying to test prevalent art historical theories. In a guide booklet to the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibitions of primitive art (1904), Boas took the opportunity to communicate his ideas on art and culture to the public by leading the visitor through displays of Northwest Coast, Plains, Eastern Woodlands, California, and Mexican Indians. Here he repeated his point that certain groups borrowed motifs from others and, in the process, ascribed different, culturally specific meanings to the same artistic image.

In 1907 Boas made substantial contributions to George T. Emmons’s Chilkat blanket monograph in the Jesup series. Most bibliographies list “The Chilkat Blanket,” volume three of the Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, as being written by George T. Emmons; some but not all give the complete title of the volume, “The Chilkat Blanket; with Notes on the Blanket Designs by Franz Boas.” In this monograph, Emmons wrote twenty-one pages, mostly on techniques and usage of these textiles (Emmons 1907:329–50), while Boas analyzed their imagery in his forty-nine-page “Notes on the Blanket Designs” (Boas 1907:351–400). Boas used these highly abstract textiles to compare and contrast imagery and meaning, once again concluding that form and meaning are not always connected, and that culturally imposed rules limit the freedom with which an artist can represent a particular image. Although in 1897 Boas had carefully listed the identifying features of Northwest Coast imagery, here he pointed out that sometimes the nature of the abstraction characteristic of Chilkat blankets obscures those features so thoroughly that even the Natives themselves disagree on what they represent.

The basic composition of most Chilkat blankets is tripartite, with the central field being the largest. That central field contains the principal representation of the animal or animals depicted, while the two symmetrical flanking fields illustrate the sides and back of the central animal (split down the middle), its den, or smaller animals. Boas compared this composition to that on boxes and dancing aprons. One interesting phenomenon Boas noted is that Emmons and Swanton interpreted the same blanket in very different ways; this, he suggests, is because “no fixed time of conventionalization exists” (1907:386–87) within the parameters of this particular kind of art. Because the weaver must depict the subject matter in a consistent fashion determined by the culturally imposed formal rules of Chilkat blanket manufacture, regardless of the animal intended to be represented, images sometimes become extremely abstract. Not only are the principal subjects of these blankets sometimes difficult to identify definitely, some of the decorative elements on them are obscure. The various abstract motifs found on these textiles fluctuate in meaning; the so-called red-winged flicker motif, for example—which never depicts any part of a bird—sometimes represents bones and limbs, and sometimes is simply a formal, meaningless element in a design. Boas also makes a brief excursion into the history of the Chilkat blanket, noting two older blankets unlike the others under discussion. These (numbers 35 and 36a) could have been the original type that the Chilkat Tlingit altered when they acquired this kind of textile from the Tsimshian. He then briefly mentioned a few modern blankets but dismissed them with the comment that in them, “the old conventionalism is breaking down entirely” (1907:391). This is an example of Boas’s bias that history worth recording and analyzing occurred before the influences of white culture brought about a disassembling of Native culture.

In 1908, Boas published a brief survey of “Clubs Made of Bone of Whale” from Washington and British Columbia (1908a), turning his attention to the art of the Nootka.³⁰ In that same year he published what is arguably his most important art historical article, “Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A Study in the History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in the U.S. National Museum” (Boas: 1908b).³¹ This essay on Eskimo art is an elegant refutation of both the realist/degenerationists and the technical/materialists, as well as a major statement of the significance of artistic creativity. He begins by contrasting the realist/degenerationists to the technical/materialists, but now notes that there is a third distinctive theory of the development of decorative forms—promoted by Boas, his student Alfred Kroeber (1901), and Clark Wissler (1904)³²—in which interpretation and style are independent.³³

The form of the needlecase itself is ancient, Boas argued, and contains various parts which “excite the imagination of the artist.” The geometric decorative field develops, according to the nature of Eskimo art, into animals or parts of animals (1908b:337). After presenting an exhaustive and extremely detailed analysis of the wide variety of Alaskan needlecases, which range in style from realistic to conventional, Boas made the bold statement that no proof exists that the decorative designs on these cases evolved either from realistic motifs (his “motives”) or from influence of technique; instead, “the only satisfactory explanation lies in the assumption that the multifarious forms are due to the play of the imagination with a fixed old conventional form, the origin of which remains entirely obscure” (p. 337).

Boas asserted that one could easily arrange these objects in a series, placing the naturalistic pieces at one end and the stylized ones at the other end, and then interpret the series as progressing either from naturalistic to stylized or from stylized to naturalistic.³⁴ Neither one nor the other of these series provided any proof of historical sequence, and thus could not be accepted as a verifiable reconstruction of the art historical process. Classification does not imply a genetic series. There exists simultaneously within the human mind a tendency toward abstraction and a tendency toward realism, with each manifesting itself in different ways. Repeating a point made earlier in “Decorative Art,” Boas also commented that the diversity of explanations of the same motif implies that once a group borrows a form, they interpret it according to their cultural values.

The role of the artist’s psychology in art creation became a central focus in this essay. Boas pointed out that while the primitive artist worked within a cultural system that posed certain restrictions on what he could and could not do, the artist could, within those limits, be creative. This he had already demonstrated in terms of the Chilkat blanket, where regardless of the animal depicted, the artist was constrained by one of two fundamental compositions within which the animal had to be fitted. The Eskimo, Boas argued, tended to decorate their carving with zoomorphic imagery; thus, the knob on a needlecase became a perfect field for transformation into a seal head. While tradition and convention imposed some restrictions on the artist decorating the needlecase with seal imagery, he could draw on both his imagination and his creativity in his carving. Boas proposed that a significant factor in the creation of new art forms was the sheer enjoyment felt by the artist while producing art: “one of the most important sources in the development of primitive decorative art is analogous to the pleasure that is given the achievements of the virtuoso” (p. 340). Indeed, Boas suggested that certain stylistic variations might have been the result of an artist’s imaginative play, which functions in the context of the traditional constraints that determine artistic conventions.

Once again insisting on the complexity of the question of decorative art, Boas asserted that its development “can not be simply interpreted by the assumption of a general tendency toward conventionalism or by the theory of an evolution of technical motives into realistic motives by a process of reading in, but that a considerable number of other psychic processes must be taken into consideration if we desire to obtain a clear insight into the history of art” (p. 341). So convinced was Boas about the significance of such mental processes that he encouraged several of his students, including Ruth Bunzel, to pursue studies along these lines. He himself organized a project with James Teit, H. K. Haeberlin, and Helen Roberts, who investigated the “attitude of the individual artist toward his work” among the Interior Salish of British Columbia (Haeberlin et al. 1928:131). The resulting monograph, “Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region,” for which Boas wrote a two-page introduction and a short conclusion, came out one year after Primitive Art (Jacknis 1992).

In his 1916 article, “Representative Art of Primitive Peoples,” Boas described the intimate relationship between an artist’s technical skill and the aesthetic effect of his art. Reiterating points made in the Alaskan needlecase article, he suggested that an artist’s enjoyment of the creative process and technical experiments could lead to new artistic designs, and that representational decorative art and geometrical decorative art were two different types of artistic activity, neither of which could be proved to be older than the other. Boas then addressed a problem posed earlier in his 1897 monograph on Northwest Coast art—the rendering of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface—but with a considerably different objective, for here he compared perspective in European and nonwestern art.

According to Boas, the primitive artist attempts to represent all or most of the features essential for the recognition of a subject, whereas the European artist uses a perspective technique to show the object as it appears at any given moment. Although accepting this essential difference between most European and primitive art, Boas identifies a variety of European artworks that depict their subjects in a fashion that Boas feels is similar to that of primitive art. Narrative painting, such as a depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden followed by the Expulsion, does not illustrate a single moment in time, but instead shows a sequence of events. Dutch painting details with great clarity every element within a broad visual range, instead of blurring all but a small portion of the field of vision, as is the case when one actually observes a scene. Boas described how most artists depict objects with what he refers to as their “permanent” colors (i.e., a flesh-colored face, a red rose); this convention, so much a part of western art tradition, makes it difficult for viewers to understand paintings by modern artists who attempted to render passing color effects, such as a face made green by a tree’s shadow or made red by the reflection of a red wall or curtain.

Boas concluded this short essay with the brief but significant statement that the “absence of realistic forms in the representative art of primitive tribes is not due to lack of skill” (p. 23), citing the example of the Northwest Coast artist who can at will create exceptionally naturalistic sculptures. Instead, he proposed, one “must rather seek for the condition of their art in the depth of the feeling which demands the representation of the permanent characteristics of the object in the representative design” (p. 23). Thus art styles of a primitive society and a literate one were different not because the primitive artist was inferior or was unable to create a naturalistic representation, but because of the constraints imposed by each culture to create a certain kind of art.

PRIMITIVE ART (1927)

In the 1920s, the Oslo Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture invited Boas, who was by that time the most distinguished anthropologist in the United States, to present a series of lectures on primitive art. Here was an opportunity for Boas to consolidate the ideas he had been developing since Northwest Coast art first captured his fancy and present them in a unified form, first in these lectures and then in the Oslo Institute’s 1927 publication Primitive Art (Herskovits 1953:97).³⁵

Primitive Art is far more than the compilation of Boas’s various antievolutionist critiques, for in it he offers a general perspective on the problems of primitive art, a sensitive appreciation of the creative process, and a more mature statement of his aesthetic ideas. He also expands his range of examples to include not only Native America, but Africa, the Pacific, and Siberia as well. In the preface, Boas presents his objective: “to determine the dynamic conditions under which art styles grow up” (p. 7). He then describes the universality of the aesthetic experience and the twofold source of artistic effect—form and meaning—neither of which can be proved to be older than the other. He stresses the importance of “highly developed and perfectly controlled technique” that becomes the fixed form which determines the measure of aesthetic excellence; “without a formal basis the will to create something that appeals to the sense of beauty can hardly exist” (pp. 11–12). The body of the text consists of individual chapters on formal elements, representational art, symbolism, style, Northwest Coast art, and the nonvisual arts. The various points he makes derive in large measure from his previous writings, which in several cases he elaborates and focuses more sharply. Drawing together his ideas on art, Boas discusses the complexity of the artistic process in a relatively coherent fashion. That coherence, I must stress, is indeed relative; because of his unwillingness to come to premature theoretical closure, his definitive statements concerning art are not as frequent as his discussions of its complexities. As I pointed out in my introductory essay, this now can be evaluated as a positive rather than negative feature of the book.

The chapter “Graphic and Plastic Arts: The Formal Element in Art” examines the great significance of technical virtuosity in the creation of art. Indicating that in many cases the aesthetic appeal of primitive art lies in its formal qualities rather than in its iconographic significance or emotional expressions, Boas highlights the mechanical skills and the technical virtuosity of primitive artists, which, as he pointed out in his Alaskan needlecase piece, provide the creator with pleasure. Here Boas does identify certain features that appear to be universal in art: symmetry, a kind of rhythmic repetition that could be the result of the physical actions of the artist creating the work, and emphasis on form, meaning that the artist uses decoration to emphasize the form of the object being decorated. Not all art, he asserts, especially decorative art, conveys meaning or emotion; even art that does represent something includes a formal element “directly due to the impression derived by form” (p. 63).

In the section “Representative Art” (which I will term representational), Boas discusses content that provides an artwork with emotional value quite distinct from its formal aesthetic effect. According to Boas, meaning alone does not make a representation an artwork, for, to create art, the artist must be a technical master; crudely drawn images such as Plains pictographs are not art but simply depictions of animals, humans, and tents. He then identifies two modes in which representational art can depict its subject in three dimensions: one, by depicting its outline simply and forcefully, perhaps filling that outline with decorative elements; the other, giving all the components of the figure with little concern for the whole (p. 69). This leads to a discussion of two dimensional images, those that depict all the characteristics of the subject and those that depict only those parts that are seen at any one moment. Here are the two basic means by which the primitive artist portrays reality: symbolic drawing and its opposite, perspective drawing, neither of which can be proved older than the other and each of which sometimes contains elements of the other. Repeating examples he had used in his 1916 essay of narrative paintings that represent a span of time and the Dutch still lifes with their unnatural clarity of each individual element, Boas demonstrates that not all western art slavishly follows the principles of perspective. He identifies examples of perspective drawing in Eskimo engravings, Bushman rock paintings, and paleolithic cave paintings to show that this representational technique is not the final product of an evolutionary process, but is instead the manifestation of one of several possible visual renderings.

Boas then turns to the relationship between stylized or symbolic art and realistic art (p. 80). Instead of accepting a developmental scheme from abstraction to naturalism, or vice versa, Boas suggests that stylistic differences can derive from the presence or absence of certain technical constraints. He argues that in some cases technique has greater significance than the representation itself, producing a more stylized art in which formal elements become more meaningful and imbued with more emotional value (p. 82). Where, in contrast, the artist’s creativity is not restricted by culturally determined requirements to use a particular technique for all his artworks, a more naturalistic art might develop. In addition, since carving and sculpture are relatively less limiting and restricting techniques than graphic representation, the three-dimensional work of a people is sometimes more naturalistic than their two-dimensional art, as is the case on the Northwest Coast (p. 85).

Boas’s next topic is “Symbolism,” the study of those artistic elements that at first might seem abstract and without meaning but which have considerable significance to the people upon whose art they appear. Here he draws on the work of his students Kroeber, Dixon, Wissler, St. Clair, and Bunzel, and repeats the notion of historical influences discussed in his 1903 “The Decorative Art of the North American Indians,” as well as the conclusions from his Chilkat blanket work, in order to analyze the meaning of geometric or seemingly nonobjective art. Some cultures assign to certain designs a profound meaning universally understood, while other cultures offer extremely divergent explanations of similar or identical images. Sometimes, two or more different cultures interpret identical images quite differently. Moving from inconsistent explanations of abstract images to the impossibility of reconstructing a verifiable sequence, Boas insists that some art can develop from realistic to stylized, and other art from stylized to naturalistic. Without historical proof of such a development, a sequence can be interpreted either way. The only method to reconstruct the development of an art style is by the geographic method, which analyzes the distribution of art styles and their variations in an area. If the same form with the same interpretation occurs over a large area, with those in the center being realistic and those in the outlying regions being stylized, then it can be assumed that the development progressed from realistic to conventionalized. If, in contrast, the realistic and conventional forms with inconsistent meanings are distributed randomly throughout the area, then either a conventional form became assigned a representational meaning or a realistic form became unrecognizable and stylized. Somewhat modifying his analysis of Alaskan needlecases (1908b), Boas suggests that due to the widespread distribution and great frequency of geometric designs, “the earliest form is geometric,” but that “the habit of carving animal forms has induced the artist to produce the variants described here” (p. 126). In his conclusion to this chapter, Boas describes how among those peoples whose art “wavers between the symbolic and representative modes of delineation, opportunity arises for the occurrence of realistic and abbreviated forms, side by side” (p. 143).

In his fourth chapter, “Style,” Boas identifies that which determines the formal treatment of both symbols and geometric motifs, and asks how deeply one can understand “the historical and psychological conditions under which art styles grow up and flourish” (p. 144). Boas demonstrates how the profound conservatism of a people, their resistance to change, ensures the art style’s relative permanence and stability over time. So strong is adherence to tradition that style can restrict the inventiveness of a potentially original artist (pp. 156, 158). This conservatism can result in the application of a style that originated in one medium to another medium, as for example in the case of a pot imitating basketry. The technician, a weaver, for example, can play with technique and thus “discover” simple ornamental decorations. In this chapter, Boas brings the reader’s attention to the creativity of women artists and the influences they may have, as basketmakers and weavers, on the development of their group’s art style: “the most highly developed art is liable to impose its style upon other industries, and that mat weaving and basketry have been particularly influential in developing new forms and powerful in imposing them upon other fields” (p. 182). This brief statement about female creativity hints at Boas’s acceptance of the equality of male and female art, and goes along with his supporting the research by women like his students Ruth Bunzel (1929) and Gladys Reichard (1934, 1936, 1939a, 1939b), and Kroeber’s student Lila O’Neale (1932) who studied the creativity of potters and weavers (Berlo 1992).

In this chapter, Boas directs his attention to the artist, granting him his deserved status; “only in the case of slovenly work have we referred to the artisan” (p. 155). Raising a point made earlier in his Alaskan needlecase article (1908b), Boas suggests that one of the most important means of understanding art is to penetrate the “attitudes and actions of the artist.” Acknowledging the difficulty of this, Boas goes on to insist that the primitive artist, even the individual bound to a particular traditional style, has within himself “creative genius” (p. 156). It is worth pointing out that in these pages, Boas uses the male pronoun, even when he is referring to female artists. We must assume that his language does not imply the superiority of male over female artists, but, instead, is in keeping with the literary conventions of the day.

Why do so many stylistic variations on simple techniques exist? There is no simple answer to this question, for the psychological and historical components of art history are so complex as to render impossible any satisfactory explanation of the origin of a style. All that can be done is “to unravel some of the threads that are woven into the present fabric and determine some of the lines of behavior that may help us to realize what is happening in the minds of the people” (p. 155). To understand the art style of a group, it is necessary to compare it with that of contiguous areas, for no art style can be fully understood as the result of an internal development within a culture, nor as only an expression of the group’s “cultural life.” Rather, historical influences and diffusion of technical processes, formal elements and systems of arrangements of motifs contribute to the art style of any one group (p. 176). The chapters on formal art, representational art, symbolism, and style together cover the various elements in this immensely complex process of artistic development.

After dealing with general concepts touching primitive art, Boas applies his general principles to the art of a specific geographic area, the Northwest Coast. This, the longest chapter of the book, is a revised version of his 1897 monograph, with considerable new information and analysis, much of it drawn from his other Northwest Coast publications discussed in this essay. Boas begins by identifying two very different styles of art found among the North Pacific people: the symbolic and referential art made by men and the formal and nonobjective art made by women. In this chapter, he devotes a fair amount of space to the women’s art of basketry and mat weaving (pp. 289–94). In his introduction to men’s art, he repeats the points he made in 1897, that representational art comes in both naturalistic and conventionalized modes, and the form of the decorated object plays a major role in determining the manner by which one of these symbols is represented, as in the simultaneous image. Drawing on his analysis of the Chilkat blanket (1907), he points out how conventional composition of the artwork determines placement of design (p. 257), and explains that symbols of animals are usually understood by the entire group but are sometimes unique and understood only by the artwork’s owner (pp. 212–16). He also comments that sometimes artists display considerable freedom in their creation of animal images, diverging from rigid norms.³⁶

In “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Boas analyzed the representational art of the Northwest Coast, but dealt little with the formal treatment of the decorative field in that art. Although in his earlier work Boas had suggested that the “eye” design signified a joint mark and was thus consistently meaningful (1897a: 175), here he says the motif is sometimes simply a decorative element. Then he proceeds to enumerate those seemingly completely abstract, geometric elements of Northwest Coast art such as chevrons and zigzags, as well as the various curvilinear motifs we now call constricted eyelids, ovoids, ⋃ forms, and the like, pointing out that some of these are decorative fillers devoid of meaning, while others have deep significance for the artist and his audience (pp. 251–57).³⁷ That some fully abstract designs have symbolic significance and others are purely decorative contradict neat and simplistic schemes on the relationships of imagery and meaning.

Boas also points out that although Northwest Coast art is primarily representational (with the exception of women’s art), geometric elements are not entirely absent, because short parallel lines, cross-hatchings, and circle-and-line patterns appear on some artworks. This brings him to several conclusions: that geometric design “may be recognized even in this highly developed symbolic art,” that some motifs have no meaning at all but are used for “purely ornamental purposes,” and that the exuberant and baroque symbolic style was developed only relatively recently, pushing out these geometric designs that were probably more widely used in the past (p. 279). With this, Boas begins his proposed reconstruction of Northwest Coast art history.

Although in much of Boas’s art history he does not venture too deeply into the broader sociological significance of art, he does touch upon the relationship between Northwest Coast art and social structure. Refining a point he made in 1896, Boas points to the overwhelming importance these Indians ascribe to display of rank, especially by means of artistic renderings of totemic emblems. This, he suggests, demonstrates a dialectical relationship between the development of the use of totemic emblems to symbolize social standing and the development of an exuberant artistic spirit in the region. Totemism provided the incentive for artistic development of a symbolic style which gradually subsumed the earlier, more geometric style by introducing greater numbers of animals and limiting the geometric designs. However, he also suggests that the importance of artistic representation in this culture doubtless stimulated and enhanced the social significance of heraldry (pp. 280–81).

As early as 1888 in “The Development of Culture in Northwest America,” and one year later in “Tattooing of the Haida,” Boas had attempted to reconstruct the history of the development of a regional style, such as the supposed Kwakiutl origin of the totem pole. Now in 1927 he is suggesting that the center of the Northwest Coast symbolic decorative style, which will be referred to here, following Holm’s terminology, as the formline style, originated in northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. By comparing the art of the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and northern Northwest Coast Indians with that of the Coast Salish, Interior Salish, and the Eskimo, pointing out similarities and differences, Boas presented a historical reconstruction of Northwest Coast style, based on his theory that the geometric style is older and that the formline style developed in response to social factors. The people of Vancouver Island, he proposed, maintain the older geometric style in their trays, boxes, and baskets. Illustrating a series of Nootka clubs made of whalebone described in his 1908 essay, Boas pointed to the “fixed art style” characteristic of the more ancient Northwest Coast regional style also found among the Salish (1927: 283–86). During the nineteenth century, the Indians of northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska invented a more complex formline style. As a result, among the Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit one finds far less use of geometrical ornamentation than among the Nootka and the Coast Salish, and far richer ornamentation with motifs such as the eye design, double curve, and slit design. All the tribes have vestiges of the antique style in the women’s arts of basketry and matting.

Between those northern Northwest Coast groups and the southern Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbian peoples are the Kwakiutl, who use a version of the formline style for heraldic purposes, but use geometric ornamentation for objects of everyday use. Boas asserts that the formline art was indeed a recent introduction to the Kwakiutl, for old informants claim that before 1860 the houses and their decorations resembled those of the Coast Salish (p. 289). Boas characterizes Kwakiutl art as having “distortions in painting [that] are, if anything, more daring than those of the Haida,” but little of the interlocking of animal images typical of the northern region (p. 288).

To complete his historical survey, Boas compares Northwest Coast art with the art of the neighboring peoples. Wood carving from the Columbia River area and northern California, although different in style, displays similarities in terms of woodworking techniques, while north of the Tlingit, among the Alaskan Eskimo, an abundance of masks suggests a Northwest Coast influence. But that influence is reciprocal, for the Tlingit may have adopted from the Eskimo the idea of attaching little animals to the features of the mask (p. 295). Then, drawing on his collaborative work with James Teit (1900b), Boas points out the dissimilarity between coastal art and that of the Interior Salish, which has much closer affinities with Plains Indian art.

After an interesting excursion into the topic of literature, music, and dance, Boas concludes Primitive Art with a summary of its major points.³⁸ He reiterates his premise that art arises from both technical endeavors and from expressive needs, but actually does favor the former. Since certain elements—symmetry, rhythm, and emphasis on form—are practically universal, they can be assumed to be most ancient, most fundamental. But other than those antique foundations, it is simply not possible to assume any kind of universal causation of artistic development; the pattern of artistic expression, the type of geometric motifs, the treatment of the decorative field, and the degree of realism in any art style cannot be attributed to strict, unilinear processes. Moreover, even within the art of a single culture, uniform style is not always the rule. Those who excel in technical activities become the community’s artists, whether they are men or women; in those situations where both men and women produce different things, two distinct art styles can emerge, as is the case on the Northwest Coast. Once again, however, Boas points to the fertility of female activities as inspirations for art styles: “It is … more frequent that the style of the dominant industry may be imposed upon work made by other processes. Weaving in coarse material seemed to be a most fertile source of patterns that art imitated in paintings, carvings, and pottery” (p. 355).

Boas asserts that “the pattern of artistic expression that emerges from a long, cumulative process determined by a multiplicity of causes fashions the form of the art work” (p. 354), thus one cannot conclude anything on a grand and abstract scale. His detailed analysis of actual case studies of particular art styles, his focus on the creative process, and his privileging of history all support his rejection of unprovable theories. In Primitive Art, Boas systematically rejects such theories by demonstrating cases in which they do not apply, and proposes a variety of different explanations for the invention and dissemination of artistic images including both cultural conservatism and creativity. In his Northwest Coast chapter, Boas offers an alternative approach to the study of art, by first identifying the principles of representation and then suggesting a historical reconstruction of the art style, drawing on the art of neighboring peoples. This last point is worth stressing. Many twentieth-century scholars of Native art believed that without support from written documents, it was impossible to reconstruct a history without access to “permanent” artworks made of stone or metal. Since so much of primitive art is made of wood and natural materials that decompose over time, many art historians felt bound to an ahistoric analysis of nineteenth-century objects. By using Boas’s historical approach, art historians could include greater time depth in their studies.³⁹

Characterizing Boas’s contributions to art historical scholarship is no easy task, as he premised his studies on the tremendous complexity of the artistic process that makes simple explanations impossible. In his efforts to avoid imposing predetermined unicausal factors in the creation of art styles while consciously purging Native art history of a racist bias, Boas produced a rich body of literature which, as the concluding chapter of this book will demonstrate, profoundly influenced much twentieth-century work on Native art.

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF BOAS’S ART HISTORY

Boas was not a scholar who merely challenged a point of view with which he disagreed. Although his social activism is best known from the period after he left the American Museum and settled into the Anthropology Department at Columbia University, Boas seems early in his life to have had strong social sentiments. Thus one can argue that his treatment of primitive art, in addition to being an interesting analysis of that subject and an attack on what Boas felt to be a wrong-headed theory, was a challenge to a mode of thought which at the end of the nineteenth century had destructive social consequences.⁴⁰

To understand the broader ramifications of Boas’s theories on art it is necessary to review the social implications of the evolutionist’s theories. There was a tendency then, as there is today, to believe that science is objective, rational, and unconnected to social considerations. In fact, science has never been value-free. At the turn of the century, the writings of Brinton, McGee, and others provided “scientific” justification for the increasingly racist attitudes of the native-born American white population.⁴¹ For example, they supported, with “facts,” attitudes which held that Native Americans and other people of color were, simply, genetically inferior to whites. Although the Indian stood somewhat higher in the evolutionary ladder than blacks, many whites believed that his wild natural instincts would get the better of him and he would soon vanish from the earth, unable to evolve further and live in civilization. Although at this time there were some who thought well of the Indians, the general white assessment of their character was not favorable.

Dislike and distrust of Indians was mild compared with the increasingly virulent attitudes toward and outrageous treatment of American blacks. Here, too, evolutionist theories justified such treatment. Since these freed slaves and their descendants, like their Native American counterparts, were seen to occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder, it was not necessary to treat them in a civilized manner. Racist attitudes often greeted the new European immigrants as well (Gossett 1972:292–93). During the 1890s, Jews and southern Europeans entered the United States in great numbers, encountering here hostility on the part of native-born citizens who feared that alien “races” were weakening American blood (Higham 1963:94, 110). Late nineteenth-century white supremacy received a major boost during the Spanish-American War when this country finally established an empire over “colored” people. This was the climate in which Franz Boas worked out his ideas on art—as well as many of his thoughts on culture.

The prevailing American racialist thinking became increasingly blatant as science and racism allied themselves ever more tightly during the first decades of the twentieth century. The president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1932, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a distinguished paleontologist, was a firm believer in the connection between race and social standing, and became an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, the pseudoscience based on the assumption that the human race could be improved through selective breeding.

Osborn’s close friend was Madison Grant, who bemoaned the negative influence on white Anglo-Saxon society of immigrants, especially the Jews. Advancing his own reading of Mendelian genetics, Grant asserted that “the cross between the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (quoted in Higham 1963:156). Grant, president of the New York Zoological Society, in 1906 caged a Pigmy black in the primate house, presumably as an illustration of a Negro-ape on the evolutionary scale (Horowitz 1975:450). Then, in 1916, Grant published the immensely popular The Passing of the Great Race, which described this country’s dismal fate: becoming overrun by immigrants of inferior eastern and central European races. Grant praised the tremendous virtues of “Nordic blood,” and feared its assimilation by intermixture with blood of inferior races: “It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterized the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us race reverting to the more ancient, generalized, and lower type” (Grant 1916:17). To prevent such racial suicide, Grand proposed several remedies, including passage of expanded laws against miscegenation, sterilization of persons with “deficiencies,” encouragement of greater reproduction of the fit, and “a complete change in our political structure … superseding our present reliance on the influence of education by a readjustment based on racial values” (Grant 1916:60).

Osborn, Grant, and others reflected the growing racism which was to become truly destructive after World War I. During the late teens and twenties, the Ku Klux Klan became powerful in both the South and the North, anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism ran rampant, universities imposed quotas limiting the number of Jewish students, psychologists developed intelligence testing which “proved” the mental inferiority of nonwhites, and Congress passed several bills restricting immigration in order to curb the masses of darker-skinned southern and eastern European “races” flooding into the United States.

Throughout all this, Franz Boas kept challenging the scientific basis of racist theories and presenting new information to resist such ideas. Thus, the 1927 publication of Primitive Art was not merely an intellectual exercise meant to argue against esoteric evolutionistic art history. It also embodied an antiracist statement. By the 1920s, Boas’s ideas had been disseminated in a university context, and thus were generally accepted by the profession of anthropology (in part because so many university anthropologists had been trained by Boas).⁴² Yet the racist attitudes that anthropologists had managed largely to eliminate from their profession still prevailed among the American public. Primitive Art actually came out during some of the darkest years in the history of American race prejudice.⁴³ All the manifestations in American society of racialist thinking and policy that had early been reinforced by science were still prevalent, even if anthropology itself no longer supported them.

By bringing attention to the similarities among the different peoples of the world, Primitive Art provided data on western and nonwestern perspective techniques to support assertions of racial equality. Boas noted that a symbolic reading of an abstract motif is not limited to primitive societies, for even in our own civilization, form and color can possess a significance unrelated to the actual shape and hue. As examples, he used national flags, the Nazi swastika, and the Star of David as images that can produce extremely deep emotions by virtue of their symbolic significance rather than their subject matter (pp. 100–102). Then, after describing how members of the same ethnic group can interpret the same motif differently, Boas pointed out that to a Canadian the maple leaf can communicate patriotic feeling quite different from the response of a person who reads that leaf as symbolic of the autumn season. The crescent can symbolize to some a beautiful summer night, to others the Turkish nation; or it can simply be perceived as an elegant form (pp. 105–6). Moreover, primitive cultures are not the only ones with conservative tastes; Boas identified those manifestations of conservatism in our own culture such as localized food preferences, and male versus female attire (pp. 148–50). With such allusions to cross-cultural traits, Boas saw art as a means of forming connections among peoples rather than increasing their distance.

Boas used the preface and conclusion of Primitive Art to attack the core doctrine of evolutionism and the theory of ethnic inequality deducible from it. In his preface he began with the two premises that underpin his book: the identical mental processes of all humans, and the historical causation of all cultural phenomena.⁴⁴ He then asserted that “the mental processes of man are the same everywhere, regardless of race and culture, and regardless of the apparent absurdity of beliefs and customs. Some theorists assume a mental equipment of primitive man distinct from that of civilized man. I have never seen a person in primitive life to whom this theory would apply” (p. 1). On the next page, Boas alludes to his own experiences with non-western cultures:

Anyone who has lived with primitive tribes, who has shared their joys and sorrows, their privations and their luxuries, who sees them not solely as subjects of study to be examined like a cell under the microscope, but feeling and thinking human beings, will agree that there is no such thing as a “primitive mind,” a “magical” or “prelogical” way of thinking, but that each individual in “primitive” society is a man, a woman, a child of the same kind, of the same way of thinking, feeling and acting as man, woman, or child in our own society (p. 2).

At the end of his book, Boas extended that judgment to the highest manifestation of the human spirit. Drawing from his arguments for the complexity of the mind of primitive man as well as for the multidimensional psychological nature of the creative and aesthetic process, he asserted that primitive man has as much capability for aesthetic appreciation as civilized man. The only difference is the relative lack of a fixed style and greater artistic opportunities in western art: “I believe we may safely say that in the narrow field of art that is characteristic of each people the enjoyment of beauty is quite the same as among ourselves.… It is the quality [i.e., the broader scope] of the experience, not a difference in mental makeup that determines the difference between modern and primitive art production and art appreciation” (p. 356). With these words on art, Boas aligned himself with those intellectuals and scholars—many of them anthropologists like himself—increasingly drawn to ideas of social equality and the universality of our humanity. His ideas, along with those of other liberal and leftist intellectuals, would become more widely accepted as the spirit of the New Deal took hold of the United States in the 1930s.⁴⁵

Franz Boas’s research on the history of art—and I stress the word history here—began as part of his multiple-pronged attack on evolutionism. A fundamental assumption of evolutionism was that single answers to questions could be found, that a kind of universal law governed the understanding of nature and culture. Recently, such grand universalizing discourses have been discredited as significant manifestations of elitism and social, racial, and ethnic hierarchies. Particularly troublesome is the fact that these texts, written by omniscient experts who remain outside and above their product, create a timeless discourse that purports to represent authenticity and truth.⁴⁶ Although he did not use the jargon in vogue today, Boas would have agreed with the critique of evolutionism as a metanarrative that disempowers Native people.

In keeping with the efforts of many modern scholars to question the validity of cherished truths, some writers have scrutinized the concept of “culture.” Culture—meaning that which is learned within a particular community or society—was Boas’s alternative to evolutionary theories to which so many late nineteenth-century anthropologists adhered. Finding unacceptable the racial foundations of evolutionism, Boas explained differences between western and nonwestern peoples as manifestations of different, yet equal, cultures, thus using anthropology to promote the concept of human equality. Moreover, for Boas, one of the most compelling deficiencies of evolutionism from a methodological perspective was its tendency to create laws prior to actually analyzing the data those laws purportedly explained; he objected strenuously to using formulae to interpret a priori ethnographic material. Boas, for both scientific and ethical reasons, rejected the imposition in anthropological research of what we in the late twentieth century would label an evolutionist grand narrative.

As is sometimes the case in the history of ideas, a liberating theory in one moment can have elements that at a later moment prove to be less liberating. Valuable as a challenge to the racism of nineteenth-century evolutionism, culture today is one of the grand universalizing definitions of humanity that some scholars have been dismantling. James Clifford was one of the first in recent years to draw attention to the fact that the concept of a unified culture is anachronistic in a multi-cultural world (1988:95).⁴⁷ Clifford points in particular to collecting artifacts as one manifestation of the search for “wholeness, continuity and essence” (1988:233).⁴⁸ The supposedly coherent, unified, static, and essentially ahistoric features that have characterized discourses on Native cultures distinguish them from the diversified, dynamic, and historical features of Euro-American societies.⁴⁹

It must be stressed that the current criticisms of “culture” are far more applicable to the theories of the British structural/functionalists than to Boasian historical particularism. For Richard G. Fox (1991:100–104), an adequate assessment of Boas requires understanding his concepts both of culture and of culture history; elements of the latter concept provide some responses to contemporary criticisms of the former.⁵⁰ Culture history postulates that cultures are assemblages of traits, some of which were invented locally, others obtained by diffusion from elsewhere. Being the products of history, cultures are not necessarily integrated totalities; indeed, it would be erroneous to assume a priori that any cultural elements within a group are necessarily related without careful scrutiny of the data. Boasian culture history, in keeping with Boas’s critique of evolutionism, eschewed the imposition of any theoretical framework on any body of data, and appears to be quite far removed from any kind of grand universalizing discourse.

Indeed, Boas’s concept of culture, especially as it relates to art history, can result in liberation rather than disempowerment. One significant feature of this is the openness with which Boas’s notion of culture allows for inconsistencies that ultimately allow room for multiple voices. In an ironic twist to the postmodernist attacks on the grand narrative of culture, some have criticized Boas for the apparent randomness of the information given in his publications, which prevents the reader from obtaining a unified picture of any one culture.⁵¹ Arnold Krupat (1990, 1992) reads Boas from the perspective of the late nineteenth-century turning away in philosophy and science from absolute certainty to relativity and suggests that Boas also appears to have had, at some level, “a commitment to sustaining contradiction” (Krupat 1992:90). While Krupat expresses uncertainty as to whether Boas worked in this fashion to forestall a premature synthesis or to prevent any synthesis, he does point out that in the 1932 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published later as the first essay on “culture” in Race, Language and Culture (1940), Boas explicitly asserts that laws governing culture cannot be found. And, while Boas most often was interested in the coherent and orderly phenomena of culture, he did on occasion display a fascination with chaos, “an old-fashioned variant of postmodern free play” (Krupat 1990:144).⁵²

Although Krupat, appropriately, warns against reading Boas as a precursor to postmodernism, some current intellectual trends illuminate features of Boas’s art history that might in the past have been bypassed. Reading and rereading the essays reprinted in this book as well as Primitive Art (1927) makes it very clear that we are not dealing with a grand narrative; indeed, a major motivation in Boas’s art history is to reject the false premises of evolutionism and to promote the complexities of historical and psychological processes. Boas warned against too rigid an interpretation of art as solely the product of culture that ignores the influence of history:

It has often been observed that cultural traits are exceedingly tenacious and that features of hoary antiquity survive until the present day. This has led to the impression that primitive culture is almost stable and has remained what it is for many centuries. This does not correspond to the facts. Wherever we have detailed information we see forms of objects and customs in constant flux, sometimes stable for a period, then undergoing rapid changes. Through this process elements that at one time belonged together as cultural units are torn apart. Some survive, others die, and so far as objective traits are concerned, the cultural form may become a kaleidoscopic picture of miscellaneous traits that, however, are remodelled according to the changing spiritual background that pervades the culture and transforms the mosaic into an organic whole (Boas 1927:6–7).

Although Boas ends this quote with a reference to the totality of a culture, he does give it history. At a moment in time, the elements that constitute culture might fit together nicely, but historical changes can disrupt that fit. And, in what could be considered an almost contradictory refinement to his representation of the “organic whole,” later in Primitive Art, Boas both warns against “treating tribes too much as standardized units,” pointing to the individualism inherent in both primitive and western societies (1927:84–85), and stresses that under no circumstances are “primitive forms … absolutely stable” (1927:150). With these words, Boas set the stage for subsequent scholars who would address the histories of continuity and change in Native American art.

A Brief Summary of Boas’s Art History

A. Formal considerations

1. Certain universals do exist: symmetry, rhythmic repetition, emphasis on form.

2. Technique plays a major role in the development of an art style.

3. Relative naturalism or stylization of art results from a variety of factors both technical and cultural.

B. Iconographic considerations

1. Meaning in art is culturally determined.

2. Groups assign meaning to images from outside groups appropriate to their culture.

3. Meaning is sometimes universal within a group, sometimes individual.

C. Historical considerations

1. Designs originate among one group and diffuse elsewhere.

2. Groups borrow images appropriate to their needs.

3. To reconstruct art history, the distribution of style and meaning—which are independent of one another—must be analyzed.

D. Psychological considerations

1. Pleasure in the act of technical virtuosity is an important element in the creation of art.

2. Conservatism and cultural conventions impose restrictions over artistic creativity and innovation.

3. Within cultural restrictions, creativity and originality are evident among all artists.

1. Also see Haberland 1988 for an interesting discussion of the Bella Coola in Germany in 1885–86.

2. On the anthropology and career of Franz Boas, see especially Cole 1985, Rohner 1969, Stocking 1968 and 1974, Jacknis 1984 and 1985, Lesser 1981, and Krupat 1990.

3. I use the term “primitive art” here to cover the material Boas dealt with in his book.

4. For an intriguing study of the British evolutionists, see Stocking 1987.

5. Ernst Grosse even argued that art played a role in social survival: “… art is no idle play, but an indispensable social function, one of the most efficient weapons in the struggle for existence” (1897:312).

6. The biological model informed the work of some of the most important early cultural evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward B. Tylor. (See Haller 1971, Stocking 1987, and Kuper 1991 for more on this.)

7. Lewis Henry Morgan (1877), for example, believed that despite each advance primitive peoples might make, the more advanced groups would forever be outdistancing them. W J McGee (1903 speech, quoted in Haller 1971:107) described how the lower races could not “keep up” with the more advanced, and thus were “the mental and moral beggars of the community who may not be trusted on horseback but only in the rear seat of the wagon.” And Edward B. Tylor (1881:74) stated, “History points [up] the great lesson that some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back, and we should partly look for an explanation of this in differences of intellectual and moral powers between such tribes as the native Americans and Africans, and the Old World nations who overmatch and subdue them.”

8. The inferiority of the nonwhite races supported by social evolutionism provided a useful justification for imperialism. See Manganaro 1990:28; Stocking 1991:4.

9. For more on Franz Boas and politics, see Stocking 1979.

10. See Suttles and Jonaitis (1990:74–77) for a summary of Boas’s contributions to Northwest Coast anthropology.

11. See Goldwater (1986:15–50) for an excellent summary of early attitudes to primitive art.

12. The relative value of “primitive art” as compared to the art of more developed cultures is still, surprisingly, not universally accepted. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, Douglas Fraser would describe his colleagues’ disdain for this type of art. Even today, members of an art history department at a major university have questioned the “maturity” of Native American art history.

13. Just as evolution continues to serve a useful purpose in anthropological theory (see pp. 4–5), it also remains a viable concept for some art historical analyses. See especially Munro 1963 for a sophisticated treatment of evolution in art.

14. However, Boas (1908b:321) notes that in 1905, von den Steinen had begun to emphasize technical considerations in art. Moreover, Stolpe and von den Steinen had differing opinions about the nature of these progressions from naturalism to stylization. See Goldwater (1986:22–30) for a discussion of the theoretical nuances of these and other early students of primitive art.

15. Thoresen (1977) correctly points out the significance of the writings of other turn-of-the-century anthropologists, especially Kroeber (1900a, 1901) and Wissler (1904), as manifestations of this shift away from evolutionism. Although both Kroeber and Wissler studied with and were enormously influenced by Boas, each apparently provided him with interesting material and ideas in return. See also Jacknis 1992 for a useful and subtle discussion of this.

16. See Jacknis 1992 for a similar discussion of the development of Boas’s art theory.

17. See Jacknis 1984 for more on Boas’s use of photographs in the field.

18. Virtually all this material reappeared in his monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897b:366–91).

19. In this essay I use Boas’s names for the Kwakiutl and Nootka which were in use at the time he wrote. Today these people prefer being called Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth, respectively.

20. The actual origin of totem poles is obscure, although they definitely date to precontact times. Early descriptions of interior posts were frequent in the writings of the first explorers and traders in the region, but the only records of large exterior freestanding poles were from the Haida village of Dadans on the Queen Charlottes and the Tlingit village at Yakutat Bay. None was described among any other group. Within a short period of time, however, poles became common among other coastal groups, probably because of both the availability of metal tools and the intertribal contacts that resulted from the fur trade (Cole and Darling 1990:132).

21. The “winter dances” referred to here are the Red Cedar Bark or Tseka ceremonies of the Kwakiutl, which took place over several weeks at the end of the nineteenth century and included masquerades, dancing, and feasting. See Holm 1990a, Suttles 1991.

22. Note that Boas later modifies his position on the centrality of the Kwakiutl in Northwest Coast art history and credits the northern groups with much artistic innovation. See below, pp. 27–28.

23. Boas repeated these points in his 1899 “Summary of the Work of the Committee in British Columbia,” written for the British Association for the Advancement of Science. See Stocking 1974:102–5 for Boas’s brief summary about Northwest Coast art.

24. The guidebook to the hall (Boas 1900a) briefly mentions several of Boas’s principal points about Northwest Coast style.

25. It is perhaps relevant that Putnam, Boas’s mentor and supporter, was on staff at the American Museum of Natural History and instrumental in Boas’s being hired there in 1895 (see Jonaitis 1988a: 135).

26. Although Edmund Carpenter (1975:16) asserts that it was George Emmons who informed Boas about the identification of Northwest Coast animal images, Frederica de Laguna (1991:200) comments that while Boas and Emmons may have discussed this topic, Emmons’s manuscript on Tlingit art (1991:200–209) is evidently influenced by Boas.

27. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902, was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and organized by Boas (see Jonaitis 1988a: 154–213). The aim of this expedition was to study the ethnological relations between the peoples of the Northwest Coast of America and northeastern Siberia (Boas 1898a). The American Museum of Natural History subsidized a monograph series, the Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, which included several volumes on art. Those publications are part of a larger Museum monograph series, American Museum of Natural History Memoirs. The same volume, therefore, has two different volume numbers, that for the Jesup Publications and that for the Memoirs; this has created some confusion.

28. In this essay, Boas described the Salish as being a “receptive race, quick to adopt foreign modes of thought” (1900b:390), perhaps due to “a low stage of development of their early culture, or to social conditions unfavorable to the continued growth of their own culture” (1900b:387). The first explanation sounds rather evolutionist, whereas the second is far more in keeping with his concept of cultural receptivity. See Suttles 1987 for more on the question of the position of the Salish in the Northwest Coast; and Suttles 1990 for recent studies on the Salish.

29. Boas chose this piece, as well as his Alaskan needlecase essay (1908b) and “Representative Art of Primitive Peoples” (1916), to include in Race, Language and Culture (1940); this would suggest that he too felt that these three essays represented his most significant statements on art historical issues.

30. Boas did not deal with the Nootka (or the Salish for that matter) very thoroughly in his art historical writings. In the concluding essay to this volume, I suggest some possible reasons for this that fit into his theoretical interests (see below, p. 314). Another reason, however, less closely tied to his scholarship, could be practical. While conducting research on the Nootka whalers’ washing shrine, Richard Inglis and I (see Jonaitis and Inglis 1992) found a 1902 letter that Boas had sent to Hunt in which he said that the Kwakiutl collections were complete and now it was time to start working on the Nootka. Presumably Boas realized that to accomplish his goals to reconstruct Northwest Coast art history, he needed more abundant materials from the west coast of Vancouver Island than the American Museum of Natural History had. Perhaps because Hunt spent a very long time purchasing the whalers’ shrine (Cole 1985; Jonaitis 1988a:182–83), he had little time to collect anything else from the area. Unfortunately, Boas left the American Museum in 1905 and thus could not realize his goals of acquiring more Nootka materials that would have enriched the collections upon which he based his scholarship.

31. Fox (1991:100–101) discusses this article in the context of Boasian culture history.

32. Wissler briefly studied with Boas. See Freed and Freed 1983.

33. See Boas’s “Decorative Art of the North American Indians” (1903). This point is in keeping with semiotic theory of Saussure (1964), who points to the arbitrary connections between the signifier and the signified in linguistics.

34. In his essay on Sioux decorative art, Clark Wissler made the following not dissimilar point, “The assumption that the law of growth in decorative art is from the representative to the conventional reduces the problem to one of analysis. It is conceivable, however, that the same result could be reached in the reverse order; viz., by synthesis” (1904:232).

35. Harvard University Press issued an American edition of the Oslo work in 1928; in 1955, Dover reprinted the book.

36. Swanton’s monograph on the Haida (1905:147–54) quotes Boas at length on notes taken in 1897 from Charles Edenshaw regarding a set of gambling sticks. In Primitive Art, Boas gives only a short paragraph to this material (1927:212), although he does reproduce the gambling sticks (figs. 200, 201).

37. It was Bill Holm (1965) who first named these stylistic elements. See below, pp. 309–11.

38. By including these other arts in his book, Boas foreshadows the later interest of African art historians such as Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson in performance art. I am indebted to Janet Berlo for this observation.

39. I have included a brief summary of Boas’s principal ideas about art at the end of this essay.

40. In his book on anthropology and social theory, Robert Ulin (1984:2) states how Boas’s opposition to “unilineal evolutionism within anthropological theory was paralleled by his opposition to racism and other social inequities within American society.”

41. For a fascinating account of how international expositions reinforced a racial hierarchy with scientific credibility, see Rydell (1984).

42. Some of the better known of these are A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, and Margaret Mead.

43. As George Stocking has pointed out (1968:270–308, 1985:114–15), there was a brief reaction in the anthropological establishment against the antievolutionism of Boas and his students at the end of World War I. This reaction was, of course, ultimately unsuccessful.

44. This is not dissimilar to some of Tylor’s ideas. See Lowie 1937.

45. However, as Torgovnick (1990:249) points out, Boas’s progressive, egalitarian ideas need repeating in today’s world.

46. See, for example, Foucault 1972 and Lyotard 1984.

47. Several Northwest Coast ethnographers, including Margaret Blackman, Frederica de Laguna, Philip Drucker, Wilson Duff, Michael Kew, and Wayne Suttles, have produced works that acknowledge acculturation and its consequences.

48. In an especially assertive critique, Virginia Dominguez (1992) insists that any discourse on culture is elitist, even when what is being described as culture is populist. As Dominguez states (pp. 34–35), “It is tempting to read the use of ‘culture’ to refer to nonelite circles or to large, diverse communities as an adaptation of a populist, anthropological sense of culture. But the fact is that in these situations ‘cultures’ are being evaluated and placed on some hierarchical scale of comparative value with an objectified European culture sitting pretty at the top. This is the elite European/Eurocentric sense of culture masking itself as populist.”

49. Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) accepts the premise that the notion of culture carries with it a vehicle for separating different peoples and thus maintaining a state of hierarchy and proposes that anthropologists “pursue, without exaggerated hopes for the power of their texts to change the world, a variety of strategies for writing against culture” (pp. 137–38).

50. Fox (1991:100–101) briefly discusses Boas’s art history, noting that Kroeber and Radin both thought Boas did not do enough actual history of art.

51. It is, for example, bewildering to read all of Boas’s Kwakiutl materials, which offer vast amounts of information about myth, art, religion, social organization, and technology, without presenting a neatly packaged representation of Kwakiutl “culture” that can be understood as a unified whole. See also White 1963, 1966 and Goldman 1975:vii–xi.

52. In “Irony in Anthropology: The Work of Franz Boas,” Krupat’s principal focus is “the trope identified by the West for the expression of skepticism as a response to uncertainty” (1990:135).