Bauman and Briggs On Boas and Hunt

"The Foundation of All Future Researches": Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts,
and the Construction of Modernity

Author(s): Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), pp. 479-528
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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"TheFoundationof All FutureResearches":

FranzBoas, GeorgeHunt,NativeAmerican
Texts,andthe Constructionof Modernity
CHARLES
BRIGGS
Universityof California,San Diego
AND
RICHARDBAUMAN
IndianaUniversity,Bloomington
My friend,George Hunt,will readthis to you ... is good thatyou shouldhave

a box in which your laws and your stories are kept. My friend,George Hunt,
will show you a box in which some of your stories will be kept. It is a book
that I have writtenon what I saw and heardwhen I was with you two years
ago. It is a good book, for in it are your laws and stories. Now they will not
be forgotten. Friends, it would be good if my friend, George Hunt, would
become the storage box of your laws and of your stories.1
This quote was culled by Ira Jacknis from the correspondence

between FranzBoas and his long-termcollaborator,George Hunt.The
letterwas appendedto instructionsthat Boas sent Huntin 1897, laying
out how Hunt was to go about acquiringa collection for the American
Museum of Natural History from Kwakwaka'wakw2communities
(which Boas refers to as "Kwakiutl").Hunt was instructedto read the
letter as a means of explainingthe work he was beginningto undertake
in the contextof offeringa feast.

Charles L. Briggs is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California,San
Diego.
RichardBaumanis DistinguishedProfessorof Folklore, Communicationand Culture,
and Anthropologyat IndianaUniversity, Bloomington.
AmericanQuarterly,
Vol.51, No. 3 (September
1999) 1999AmericanStudiesAssociation
479

480
AMERICAN
QUARTERLY
The ironies that emerge from the letter are quite suggestive with
respect to the dynamics of the collaborationbetween Boas and Hunt.
Boas, a GermanJew living in New York,was introducingHunt, son of
an English father and a Tlingit mother, to the members of the
communityin which he had been raised,but in a new guise, capturedin
the metaphor of the storage box. Hunt, in this instance, served as
mediator,voicing Boas's words to the Kwakwaka'wakw,an apparent
mirror-image of the role Boas played in rendering Hunt's
Kwakwaka'wakwtexts to his own scholarly community. On closer
examination,however, there are powerful asymmetriesbetween these
respective acts of mediation, the critical elucidation of which is the
principaltask of this article. The Boas-Hunt collaborationsecured the
removalof vast quantitiesof Kwakwaka'wakwobjects andthe creation
of writtentexts, photographs,recordings,and artifacts.Boas's authority
helped to enhance the legitimacy of Hunt's employment as a collector
at the same time that"theKwakiutl"andparticularlyGeorgeHuntwere
being socialized into a process of constructingtexts in Kwakw'ala (the
language spoken by Kwakwaka'wakw),putting them in "boxes" that
could be likened to the shaped and carved wooden boxes in which the
Kwakwaka'wakwcached their treasuredobjects, and contributingto
their storage and preservation.These roles-writer of books, collector
of artifactsand recorderof tales and customs, and producersof laws,
stories, and objects-were differentiallydistributedamong Boas, Hunt,
and the residentsof Fort Rupertand other communities.Boas played a
crucial role in determining what would be rendered as "laws and
stories," the form and content of the corpus, the discursive frames in
which it would be placed, and what sorts of authoritywould accrue to
the texts.
The Boas-Hunt texts exerted a great deal of influence not just on
"Kwakiutl"ethnographybut on American anthropologyas a whole.
Many of Boas's studentsand defenderssharedhis conviction that texts
collected and writtendown in the languageof the informantconstituted
"the foundation of all future researches."3In her appreciation of
"Boas's 'NaturalHistory' Approachto Field Method,"Marian Smith
wrote that "The texts supplied a nearly perfect record of a people's
languageandof the organizationand style of theirconnecteddiscourse.
The texts were objective in the sense that they were always available
for re-analysis."4Such strong Boasian critics as Marvin Harris and
George P. Murdock confirm this synecdochic role for Boas's texts,

"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 481
using them as a prime example of his preoccupationwith ethnographic

particulars.5
Ethnopoetics and post-structuralistcritiques of ethnographyhave
converged of late in casting a favorable light on Boas's oeuvre. Dell
Hymes's re-analyses of Northwest Coast narrativesin keeping with
new analytic techniques accorded prominence to Boas's texts and
breathednew life into his attemptto place philological analysis at the
center of anthropology.6James Clifford observes that by co-authoring
works with indigenous collaborators,Boas, like Maurice Leenhardt,
created texts that are more dialogic and open, more accessible to
multiple readings than ethnographieswritten duringwhat he views as
the subsequentheyday of anthropologicalmodernism.7George Marcus
and Michael Fischer suggest that these "cooperativetexts" constituted
experimentsin ethnographicwriting, and they also credit Boas with
exploringan early form of culturalcritique.8While ArnoldKrupatsees
Boas's discourse to be so suffused with ironizing self-subversionas to
constitute"a kind of abusive perversitythat.. .underminesthe foundations for any claim to scienticity,"he arguesthatBoas's work can be of
great value at this historicaljuncturefor (re)building"the project of a
scientific anthropology."9
Our goal is neither to praise Boas nor to damn him. Rather,we see
Boas as providing a fascinating window on a larger historical and
theoreticalproject in which we are engaged. Our concern is with the
role of languageideologies-representations of the natureof language,
communication, speech, and the like-and of what we call
metadiscursive practices-techniques for regulating the production,
circulation,and reception of discourse-in the making of modernity.
We are particularlyinterested in three aspects of this process. First,
language ideologies frequentlyprovide implicit bases for legitimating
social and political concepts and relations. In seventeenth-century
England,for example, an opposition between plain, rationaldiscourse
and both the ornaterhetoricof the Scholastics and the "vulgar"speech
of women and the lower classes helped to augmentthe ascendancyof
emergent "modern"elites over increasingly marginalizedsocial sectors. Second, assertionsregardingthe fundamentalnatureof language
privilege those discursivefeaturesthatare deemed to embody them and
subordinateaspects that are characterizedas peripheral, archaic, or
pathological.Just as projectingan idealized image of precise, efficient,
clear, and rational speech has often been central to projects for

482
AMERICANQUARTERLY
standardizinglanguage,nostalgic representationsof pre-modern"folk"

or "traditional"varieties has helped to paint the communities that
purportedlyspeak them as quaint,backward,and disappearing.Finally,
assertions regardingthe natureof language and how it creates social
bonds has been a key means of imbuing modem philosophical and
scholarly texts with authoritysince at least the time of John Locke's
Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding.1Metadiscursivepractices
continue to be central means of authorizingparticularconceptions of
public spheres,citizenship, and political participation,as suggested by
the recent adoptionin Californiaof Proposition227, which attemptsto
largely eliminate bilingual education.
This last example points to the way that language ideologies and
metadiscursivepracticesencompassmore than the speech of dominant
sectors alone: constructingand regulatingsocial Others by projecting
pre- or anti-modern discursive practices has been part of modem
agendas at least since John Aubrey, Locke's contemporary,wrote
Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme.1"Indeed, the vanishing languages of the people that modernityis supposedlyjust about to erase
have generatedsubstantialbodies of literaturethroughoutthe modern
era. We will suggest some of the ways that Boas built on these
modernist textual projections of Others later in the article. These
ideologies and practices are not of merely "academic"or "aesthetic"
interestin thatthey have remaineda key partof nationalistprojectsand
continue to be used in legitimating hierarchical relations between
"modern" and "backward"or "traditional"groups, societies, and
nationsandin naturalizingsocial inequalitywithinnation-statesthrough
assertions of cultural difference. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, claiming control over techniques for the production and analysis of texts played a key role in institutionalizingstudy of
the texts of internal and foreign Others in the guise of the scholarly
disciplines of, respectively, anthropology and folklore, even if this
legacy has been increasingly challenged by practitionersand external
critics in recent decades.
In scrutinizing Boas's text-making project, then, we do not at all
mean to (dis-) credithim with having invented the textual construction
of Others.To the contrary,we would maintainthat he was contributing
to a project that was precisely as old as modernity itself, utilizing a
rhetoricof traditionaland modernthatplayed a key role in constructing
the modernsubject and grantingit a sense of novelty and an historical

"THEFOUNDATION
OFALLFUTURERESEARCHERS"483
trajectory.
A crucialelementof this rhetoric,we suggest,is thatthe
socialoppositionbetweentraditional
andmodemworldsthatit sought
to constructwas sustainedby texts whose rootednessin modernist
discursivepracticesandinterestswas suppressedin favorof producing
an auraof authenticityandverisimilitude.
Moreover,as was the case
for his predecessors,Boas arguedfor the importanceof preserving
culturaltraditionsby textualmeanswithoutquestioningthe inevitability of theirpassingfromthelivingrepertoire
of thepeoplefromwhom
theywererecorded.
Theseintellectualcontinuitiesonceacknowledged,
however,we will
arguethatBoas refittedthe well establishedmetadiscursive
projectin
whichhe was engagedto suitthe particular
brandof modernistangst
that characterized
the life of intellectualsand particularlyof social
scientistsat the turnof the nineteenthcentury.In constructingour
argument,
we considerthatBoasrightlydeservescreditforhavingbeen
more successfulthan anyoneelse in institutionalizing
anthropology
withinscholarlyinstitutionswithinthe UnitedStates.The emphasis
thathe placedon researchthatfocusedon NativeAmericanscertainly
contributed
to theimageof a distinctiveAmericananthropology.
At the
sametime thatit echoedHerder'sculturalnationalism,which influencedhis thinking,Boas'sculturalrelativismresonatedwithAmerican
democratic
ideals,as didhis attackon evolutionismas racist.Butwhat
interestsus most directlywas Boas's sense that anthropologywas
centrally concerned with the collection of texts that documentedthe
languagesandtraditionsof Othersandwiththeirsystematiccomparison, includingtheircomparisonto the discursiveand culturalforms

associatedwith"civilizedman."
Wehavetwo reasonsfor offeringan analysisof FranzBoas andhis
texts to a broad,multidisciplinary
audienceat this juncture.First,
recentworkby JudithBermanandIraJacknishas contributed
greatly
to ourunderstanding
of theBoas-Huntcollaboration.12
It is accordingly
possibleto examinein somedetailhowtheKwakwaka'wakw
andother
textswereproduced,edited,andpublishedandto view themalongside
thetwomen'scollaboration
in providingartifacts,photographs,
recordings, skeletal remains,and other objects for museumcollections.
Second,the theoreticaland methodologicalframeworkthatwe have
developedcan,we suggest,overcomesomeof thehistoricaldislocation
thatcharacterizes
manyappreciations
of these texts. Some observers
seem to view them as antiquitiesin theirown right,fragmentsof an

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older anthropology that can be disassociated from Boas's larger

epistemological and institutionalagenda. Othersview them as roughcut gems, productsof a creative imaginationthat escaped some of the
positivist trappingsof Boas's historicalparticularism.Viewing the texts
through the metadiscursive practices that produced them and the
ideologies that they embodied, we argue that they are especially
revealing windows on the mannerin which Boas sought to construct
anthropologyand to locate its practitioners-and the objects of their
inquiries-within North American society and within a master narrative of modernity.
We have made a principled decision to focus squarely on Boas's
work and his collaborationwith George Hunt and, to a lesser extent,
Henry W. Tate. While Boas's text-makingpractices are clearly related
to those of his predecessors and contemporaries(in the Bureau of
AmericanEthnologyof the SmithsonianInstitutionand elsewhere) and
of his students,including prominentlyEdwardSapir,we could not do
justice to both the similaritiesand the differencesin one article.We go
on to suggest that the relationshipbetween the texts and Boas's rich
narrativetheoryraises a numberof puzzling contradictions.We turnin
a final section to connections between Boas's text-makingand his use
of such notions as consciousness, emotion, rationality,and history in
conceptualizing"modern"and "primitive"societies, arguingthat some
of the epistemological and political problems that we encounteredin
his textual practices also are apparentin his general framework.
Before we offer our analysis of Boas's text-making,we must spell
out exactly what we mean by metadiscursive practices and our
approachto analyzinghow discourse is produced,circulated,received,
and infused with authority.
MetadiscursivePractices
How do texts become imbued with authority?For Mikhail Bakhtin,
"authoritativediscourse" consists of a "prior discourse," one that is
located in a distanced, bounded sphere. It is therefore "indissolubly
fused with its authority-with political power, an institution,a person."
While it may be related to other discourses, authoritativediscourse is
"sharplydemarcated"from them. Static and complete, it permits no
play with its borders,accepts semanticchanges with difficulty,and has
"but a single meaning." Authoritativediscourses are transmittedas

static entities that enter discursive contexts "as an alien body" rather
than throughdialogic processes of mutual interpenetration.Authoritative discourse is often associated with tradition,and traditionalization
is frequentlyused as a strategyof authorization.13
To be sure, Bakhtin's analysis does not apply to all authoritative
discourses;the global circulationof discourses and modes of production and consumption suggest that hybrid, malleable discourses can
become quite authoritativeas well. Nevertheless, Bakhtin's formulation is useful in that he enables us to see how the form, content, and
historicallocation of discoursescan be constructedin such a way as to
make them seem just naturally authoritative. Similarly, Bakhtin's
concept has direct bearing on the way Boas imbued the Northwest
Coast texts with authority.In order to appreciatethe power of this
process, we must examine how Boas socially constructsthese seemingly intrinsic features by dialogically sewing togetherheterogeneous
components and at the same time, as it were, renderingthe stitches
invisible.
We suggest that the mannerin which texts become authoritativecan
be analyzed in terms of two dialogical processes: (1) entextualization
versus detextualization, and (2) recontextualization versus
decontextualization.14
We use the term entextualizationin pointing to
the way that the patterningof the form and content of discourse shapes
its social, cultural,andpolitical-economiceffects. The framingof a text
as part of a particulargenre, for instance, imposes a wide range of
stylistic, rhetorical,lexical, and semantic constraints.15In the case of
the Hunt-Boas texts, by teaching Hunt how to write Kwakw'ala,
providing published texts as models, and critiquing his work, Boas
providedHuntwith ideas regardingthe length, detail, "connectedness,"
and linearityas well as the methodsof translationand organizationthat
he desired. Hunt also developed a set of practices for taking notes on
discourse that was presented orally, sometimes in multiple versions,
and using a fairly consistent stylistic voice with an archaic ring in
writing it down. Detextualization points in the opposite direction.
While detextualization can entail suppressing particular discursive
elements, it refers more broadlyto the erasureof discourse associated
with particulartypes of persons (in keeping with such dimensions as
social class, gender,race, and ethnicity),ideologies, contexts, lexicons,
styles, andthe like. As we arguebelow,Boas systematicallydetextualized
material concerning the ethnographic encounter, such as research

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AMERICANQUARTERLY
agendas, Boas's "requestsand...specific questions,"Hunt's notes, and

correspondence that related to particulartexts. While these textual
elements played a significant role in producing the texts, their
detextualizationwas just as systematic as the entextualizationof the
elements that were deemed to be Kwakwaka'wakw"laws and stories."
Ratherthanbeing entextualizedas a partof a coherentnarrative,the story
of how the story was made was detextualized,displaced as scattered
fragmentsthatwere placedin metanarrative
spaces,as we will argue.
While these processes are closely connected with patternsof form
and content, their significance is not simply textual but social and
political-economic as well. As they are entextualized, discourses are
extractedfrom the multiple practices,events, and sites associated with
their production;we refer to this process as decontextualization.As
texts circulate, they are recontextualized,inserted into new discursive
contexts and contrastive historical and political-economic locations.
Decontextualizationand recontextualizationare effected throughsocial
practices that do not simply correlatewith preexisting discourses and
contexts but ratherconstructboth. We adopt the term metadiscursive
practices in referringto particulareconomies that regulate how discourse is detextualized, entextualized, decontextualized, and
recontextualized.Texts possess value both as objects of exchange in
their own right and facets of broader sets of social and politicaleconomic relations. Texts that represent Others generate social and
culturalimages that help shape how such persons will be constructed
by dominant institutions.Attempts to dominate such economies thus
have effects of great social and political-economic importance. By
looking in some depth at the productionof the Hunt-Boas texts, our
goal is to show how close readingsof texts can illuminatebroadsocial
and historicalquestions.
The CollaborativeProductionof Native AmericanTexts
When Boas began collecting narrativeson the NorthwestCoast, tape
recorderswere obviously not available;Boas used the phonographto
record songs but not narratives. Therefore, prior to initiating his
collaborationwith George Hunt,HenryW. Tate,and others,Boas relied
on dictation.Boas was concernedwith the discursive and interactional
requirementsof dictation.He praisesa KutenaispeakernamedBarnaby,
"who, after very shortpractice,learnedto speak slowly and distinctly,

and whose dictation was perfectly satisfactory"(Kutenai, v). Boas

commentson the awkwardnessof the dictationprocess: "Theslowness
of dictationthat is necessary for recordingtexts makes it difficult for
the narratorto employ that freedom of dictation that belongs to the
well-told tale, and consequently an unnatural simplicity of syntax
prevails in most of the dictatedtexts" (IIJAL, 1).
Boas assessed individuals with respect to how well they learnedto
produce the sorts of texts he desired. He looked for people who
"remember""mythsand traditions"and "thehistoryof theirtribe"(CT,
5), evaluatingthe size of theirrepertoire.As Darnellnotes, Boas valued
the amountof detail containedin texts.16He also valued texts that are
"connected,"a criterionthat seems to have included length, cohesion,
and coherence.Producinga sense of connectednessalso involved using
a linear narrativesequence to encode a linear sense of temporality,
telling the story "frombeginning to end."7
Boas commented that the failure of this procedurecould result not
only from "forgetting" but also from resistance. In speaking of
recalcitrantClatsop speakers of Chinook, Boas writes: "The women
were not able to grasp what I wanted;they claimed to have forgotten
their myths and traditions,and could not or would not give me any
connected texts" (CT, 5; emphasis added).The mannerin which Boas
attemptedto overcome such resistanceprovides a synecdochicinstance
of colonial relations. First, the process of objectificationinvolved the
productionof texts, like the sale of objects, for materialcompensation;
the scientific enterprisethus directlyformedpartof largerstructuresof
political-economicexchange.'18
Boas occasionally warnedHuntthatthe
museum would cut off his salary if more texts and objects were not
produced.One complaintregardingthe numberof texts that had been
sent to New Yorkcontainedthe following exhortation:
I trustthat you will make a good effort and that you will be able to send me
a reportof a good deal of workaccomplished

by yournext letter.Do not
forgetthatthe continuance
of yourworkfor the Museumdependsentirely
uponyoursuccess.UnlessI can showresultsof yourlabors,I cannotget
moneyforcontinuing.As longas you arenotoutcollecting,I trustthatyou
are writing down more texts for me. Although letter-writingis tedious, you
must take the time to let me know fully what you are doing.19
Such threats appear to have made quite an impression.20Second,

Stocking notes Boas's "recurringexpressions of vexation when an
uncooperativeIndian slowed up Boas's work or wasted his time with

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an 'idiotic' story, or when he found it necessary to become 'a little

rough' with informantsin order to make 'their attitude improve."'21
While Boas certainly would not have used physical coercion, his
"roughness"cannot be entirely abstractedfrom the largereconomy of
white dominationover Native Americans.
Collectorsalso had things to learn. Speakingof a collection made by
AlexanderF. Chamberlain,Boas statedthat "it requiresa considerable
amountof practiceto recordlong tales" (TM, v). In a detailed study of
the two versions of the Salmon myth that Charles Cultee narratedfor
Boas, Hymes shows how Cultee varied his renditionin keeping with
Boas's increasing sophistication.22For all parties, dictating texts intended for publication constituted a highly specialized discursive
encounterthat requiredthe acquisitionof a numberof specific skills.
In additionto taking texts by dictation,Boas trainedas many Native
Americans and persons of mixed ancestry as he could find who were
versed in an indigenous language and possessed sufficient literacy
skills, as Berman observes. Boas's collaborationwith George Hunt is
by far the most extensive, spanningmore than 40 years.23
George Hunt was the son of a high-rankingTlingit woman and an
Englishman who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Hunt was
raised in FortRupert,a stockadedoutpost and Hudson'sBay Company
station that brought together Kwakwaka'wakw,English, Scots, Irish,
French-Canadian,M6tis, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and
Haida. Hunt was perceived as a "foreign Indian" by the
Kwakwaka'wakw, and he never considered himself to be
Kwakwaka'wakw;he often referredto his wife's relatives as "these
Kwagols, these Indians"24At the same time, Hunt's noble descent
brought him high status, particularlyafter he marrieda high-ranking
Kwakwaka'wakw woman.25Hunt's rank afforded him exposure to
forms of knowledge and discourse owned by elite lineages, and it
grantedhim a strongsocial position by virtueof the high-rankinglines'
dominanceof trade and indigenous-whiterelations.
As Jacknis details, acquisition of materialculture for white collectors was central to George Hunt's career.Hunt was employed in this
capacity by JohanAdrianJacobsen (of the Berlin Royal Ethnographic
Museum), Edward S. Curtis, and others, and he helped Boas amass
substantialcollections for the World's ColumbianExposition in Chicago (which later became part of the Field Museum), the American
Museum of NaturalHistory,and the Museum of the American Indian.

"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURE RESEARCHERS" 489
Jacknis estimates that Hunt may have obtained the majority of the
Kwakwaka'wakwcollections in the world's museums that were acquired during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first
decade of the twentieth.Boas exhortedHunt to avoid objects that bore
direct evidence of the present:"I want particularlyold specimens with
good explanations."26
This quotationpoints to the way thatBoas linked
the collection of artifactsand texts, insisting that Hunt obtain verbal
documentationfor each object, including an associated song and/or
story.In sending a list of objects that he wanted collected for the Heye
Collection, for example, Boas noted that "[W]e want a good and
carefully selected collection of masks and dancing-implements,but
you must not take any new and shabbymasks. We only want good old
carvings with good painting;and for every single mask we must have
the history written down carefully in Kwakiutl;and if the mask has a
song, you must recordthe song with it, as you have been in the custom
of doing."27In this manner, texts became directly objectified and
objects became deeply textualized.
This reciprocalassociationbetween texts and artifactsincreasedthe
value of both sets of objects through reciprocal processes of
traditionalizationand authentification.When it came to verbalartifacts,
Boas was particularlyinterestedin what he consideredto be traditional
speech. This quest for the archaicand authenticrelatedto form as well
as content; Boas summarized his agenda in a letter to Leonhard
Schultze-Jenaof Phillips Universityin Marburg(Germany):"Weare at
the presenttime engaged in a systematicstudyof AmericanLanguages.
We want particularlyto rescue the vanishing forms of speech. According to our experiencethe most importantthing to obtainis whole series
of texts."28As we will suggest below, Hunt respondeddirectly to this
quest for speech styles that were consideredarchaic.
In his first formal job as an interpreterin 1873, Hunt assisted the
provincial Superintendentof Indian Affairs, Dr. Israel Powell, in a
coastal inspection.Fouryears later,Huntservedas translatorandenvoy
on the H.M.S.Rocketin the course of an official inquiryinto the role of
"nativepiratesand murderers"in the wreck of a U.S. steam ship. Hunt
also interpretedfor missionaryAlfred J. Hall. When he met Boas, Hunt
was working as an interpreterfor the provincialcourts in Victoria.29In
short, Hunt used his fluency in Tlingit, Kwakw'ala, English, and
Chinook Jargon in serving as a mediator between governmental,
business, and religious institutionsand Native Americancommunities.

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In the course of their extensive correspondence,Boas asked Hunt to

produce texts in Kwakw'ala with English interlineal translations"in
answerto my requestsand specific questions"(RKI,x). The correspondence complementedperiodsof face-to-face collaborationin providing
a continuingforum for discussing which texts were to be produced,at
what rate of speed, and how they should be crafted.At the same time
that Boas asked Hunt to collect anything and everything, thereby
providingHuntwith a degree of freedomin shapingthe textual agenda,
Boas exercised a great deal of control over the productionprocess by
continually laying out long-rangeresearchinterests;as Berman notes,
Boas adumbratedtopics as much as five years in advance.30Boas
expected his collaboratorto use his "requestsand specific.. .questions"
systematicallyas a guide to the entextualizationof "Kwakiutl"culture:
"I hope you are readingover my letters, and that you will try to answer
one after another all the different questions. It would be best if you
scratchedthem out one after another after they have been answered,
then we shall know just where we are."31Boas's foci changed over the
years from technology and foodways to ethnozoology and ethnobotany
to social organizationand finally to "the way the Indians think and
feel."32
Boas sent Hunt copies of some of the volumes of texts that he had
published,includingthose documentingotherNativeAmericangroups.33
Hunt acknowledgedreceipt of an early volume in the following terms:
"I have Received a Book also that you sent me with some of the
Eskimo tales and songs in it which I thankyou Very much for it. for it
show me How to Put my letters to gather."34
Perusing such a volume
would seem to provide a numberof importantmodels for developing
metadiscursivepractices, as Hunt's thank-younote suggests. Beyond
suggesting that culturallyand geographicallybounded Native American communities could be represented through a variety of texts
published in book form, such tomes provided models of the sorts of
narrativestructures,rhetorical parameters,and stylistic features that
constitute this type of representation.While it would seem difficult to
believe that Boas did not anticipate that this sort of implicit
metadiscursivemodeling would take place, he tried, as we shall see, to
preventHunt and Tate from creatingany explicit intertextualrelations.
Boas expressed continuing ambivalenceregardingHunt's texts. Many
of his comments focus on questions of phonetic accuracy;he notes as
late as 1930 thathe has "remainingdoubts"regardingboth the phonetic

and syntacticaccuracyof Hunt'stexts as well as his authorityto

represent"Kwakiutl
culture"(RKI,xi). BermansuggeststhatHuntwas
well awareof Boas'sreservations,
a pointto whichwe will return.35
In short,theformandcontentof theBoas-Hunttextsrelateto a great
deal more than featuresof "Kwakiutlcustoms"or George Hunt's
experiencealone.Boas playeda crucialrole in shapingthe texts by
trainingHuntto writeKwakw'ala,presentingresearchagendas,constantlysending"requestsand...specificquestions,"editingthe texts,
positioningthemin collections,andframingthemin prefaces,chapter
headings,and othertextualarchitectonics.
The Hunt-Boastexts are
complexin much more thanpurelytextualtermsin that they form
importantobjectsof productionand exchangebetweenmembersof
ethnicallyheterogeneous
Northwestcommunitiesandindividualsrepresentingwhiteinstitutions.
Hunt'sTextualAuthority
We now turnto contrastsandsimilaritiesin the way thatHuntand
Boas sought to define the natureof the texts, imbue them with
authority,
andshapethewaytheywouldbe circulatedandreceived.By
thetimethatCurtisarrivedin 1910,Hunthadcometo be recognizedas
the local experton Kwakwaka'wakw
communities;Jacknissuggests
that the publishedtexts helpedestablishHunt'sauthority.Cannizzo
claimsthatHuntplayeda key role in inventingwhatcame to be the
ethnographicimage of "the Kwakiutl."He not only helped shaped
canonsforjudgingthe authenticity
of "traditional"
artifactsbutmodified some newly producedarticlesin ensuringtheirconformitywith
thesecriteria.
Huntdidnottakedownstoriesby dictation,butratherlistenedto the
performanceand then went home and reconstructed-and thus
reentextualized-the story.36
As Berman suggests, Hunt wrote in "an
authenticKwakwaka'wakw
speech style formerlyused in the myth
recitations,"even when his consultantsare likely to have used less
archaicstyles. Huntattemptedto locate and documentspeechstyles
thathe deemedto be particularly
traditionalandauthentic;regarding
someof his texts on cooking,HuntwroteBoas:"Theswill showyou
the oldestway of speaking."37
Huntattemptsto infusehis writingwith
authoritythroughthe intertextualappropriation
of authentictexts;he
furthertraditionalizesthese sources by transformingthem into a

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markedlyarchaicstyle. He writes Boas with regardto a recentpotlatch

and winter dance at Alert Bay:
what they Done is new to me, so accordingto that you got all the old way of
the tsietsieko in your book. I see some white men came to get old stories from
these Indians.and your know yourself By looking into the writersBooks, that
thestoriesin themis takenfromfourorfive storiesto makeone story,andit

is whatI call patchedup storyas also I see lots of Paintingsthatonly made
up for sale thereis no HistoryBelongs to them. Now I got some thatI Painted
myself.... So you see you andI Did notget anyfols thing.I will tryto send
them to you to show you that true History Paintingsis a god ting to see and
you got all the stories Belong to them.38
This quote provides an ironic and fascinating assertion; at the same

time that Hunt recognizes the constructedcharacterof paintings that
representKwakwaka'wakwhistory, he asserts that his renditions are
"trueHistory Paintings,"as authenticatedby the narrativesthat render
them value-addedobjects. Hunt'swritingconstructstexts in such a way
as to not only traditionalizebut to mark the social identity of the
narrator-Hunt-as being a high-rankingpossessor of authoritative
knowledge of tradition.
In the face of Boas's lingering doubts about his work, Hunt
attemptedto assertthe authorityof his texts. When Boas asked him for
ethnographicdescriptions,Hunt often provided a story that explained
the origin of the custom. He similarly tried to increase Boas's faith in
his authority by emphasizing his participationin the enactment of
"tradition,"as evidenced in his allusion to being called to feasts as a
boy. Hunt stressed the provenience of his texts, and he often reported
how he obtainedinformation.39
Hunt thus drew on a range of practices
that sought to traditionalize the texts and artifacts he collected by
linking them to antecedentforms, practices, and discourses.40Some of
the ways in which Hunt sought to enhance the value that Boas would
place in his texts-and to augment his authority as a collector and
writer-were tied to his awareness of the place of a work within the
largertextual economy. Hunt asserts "of my 'Pexala' or Doctor songs"
that "thisis the first I gave away of the kind."41He notes with regardto
a series of wailing songs collected from women that
I will try to get them, for it is the only true story a women can tell. ... And
anotherthing the women at swasela. told me that she would not tell any one
about her family Historie. it is only the kindness I have towards her son.

made her tell it to me. and I think that you will like it. for I know that you
have never got this kind of wailing befor this.42
Hunt boasts that the wailing song is not only the best of its kind but a
first for science. Hunt attempts to augment the monetary as well as
symbolic capital associated with a "great secret spirit story" that he
obtained from his second wife; asserting that Boas is now the only
researcherto possess the secret names that it contains, he asks for a
higherrate of compensation:fifty cents a page.43Boas countersthathe
is unable to raise Hunt's pay, but he offers the possibility of some
compensationfor travelexpenses.44Hunthad obviously constructedhis
own economy of Kwakwaka'wakwtexts. That Hunt's economy differed significantly on some points from Boas's is evident in Hunt's
rejectionof Boas's call for informationon "thenames and the rights of
the common people";45afterrepeatedrequests,Hunt simply responded
that "the poor men as Beqwetede, or common people of the chiefs
body, tis is hardto get for them shame to talk aboutthemselves."46On
the otherhand,Hunt'seconomy was stronglyshapedby his assessment
of which texts had been collected andpublishedand by white researchers' preferences; he was, obviously, particularly attuned to Boas's
textual value system, and his letters often contain predictionsthat his
employer would particularlylike a text or corpus or his hopes that his
work would meet with favor.47
The complexity of Hunt's relationship to "Kwakiutltradition"is
apparentin his work with EdwardS. Curtis,where his sense of humor
and interest in lurid and dramaticstories were richly apparent.Hunt
generally suppressed these characteristicsin his collaboration with
Boas, where he adopted a distanced,objective voice, one that viewed
"Kwakiutlculture"from the outside as a reified, distanced,and stable
set of objects.48If Hunt had allowed his humorous,ironic, and playful
take on the ethnographicencounterinto the Hunt-Boastexts, it would
have been much more difficult for Boas to construct them as direct
reflections of "Kwakiutlculture."Moreover, Hunt attemptedto construct his authority vis-a-vis that of Boas. Hunt often framed texts
through use of Kwakw'ala third-person-near-second-person
demonstrativeforms as communicationsaddressedto Boas: "thisthing that is
near to you."49A sense of how deeply the two men's textual authority
was intertwined,of the social and political-economic inequality that

characterizedtheir relationship,and of the esteem and affection with

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which HuntregardedBoas is apparentin the former'sacknowledgment

of Boas's intention to place the text collection in the Columbia
University Libraryin Hunt's name:
Now my Dear Dr F Boas if you think it is Best to Put my name on the Book
as you say it will Please me. But you know that I could not have get these
storieswithoutyourgreatHelpto me, therefor I say my workis only one

thirdof it. to yourtwo third,yet I thankyou Very muchfor puttingmy
Humble name up. for Truly your the only Help I got."5
Hunt's clear awareness of the social and economic inequality of his

relationship with Boas was closely connected to the way that Hunt
positioned his own claims to discursive authority in relation to his
employer's impressive stature.
Boas's TextualAuthority
In spite of his reservationsabout Hunt, Boas sought to legitimate
Hunt's authorityas a writer.The voice that Boas sought to authorize,
however, was not that of George Hunt qua individual. Rather,Boas
downplayed Hunt's background,including his cross-racialancestryin
characterizingHunt as speaking "Kwakiutl as his native language"
(Kwakiutl v) and in recontextualizing Hunt's reflections on
Kwakwaka'wakwculture as "Kwakiutltexts" and "Kwakiutlethnology."5'Boas accordinglymystified the contextualfooting of the texts to
such an extent that his characterizations,accordingto Berman, sometimes come close to fabrications.52
When Hunt is an actor in the texts,
Boas sometimes hides clues to his identity,particularlyin the English
translations.Hunt's first-personaccountof his shamanisticinitiationis
published in Kwakw'ala and English (RKI, 1:1-40, 2:1-41). The
authorship of the texts is mentioned only in the preface to the
Kwakw'ala edition, as Berman notes;53moreover,Boas does not state
that Hunt is the initiate as well. Similarly, Boas describes Hunt's
marriageas an example of Kwakwaka'wakwmarriagerites. Not only
does he fail to identify Hunt, but Boas states that the "young man had
no relatives" (KE, 57). Berman suggests that this statement is flatly
untrue;Hunt'srelativeswere certainlypresent,but they were of Tlingit,
English, and mixed ancestry.54Highlightingthe culturaland historical
complexity of the texts and the circumstances surrounding their
productionwould have challenged the way that Boas was constructing

their authority-as a voice that could speak for "Kwakiutlculture"in

its entirety.
Boas similarly extirpated English when narratorsinterjected it.
Hunt'sresponses in English, as Boas puts it, "in answerto my requests
and to specific questions"(RKI, x) were likewise not included in the
published versions.55By giving the impression that members of
Kwakwaka'wakwcommunities spoke no English, Boas increased the
monologicality and monoglossia of the texts and removed important
evidence regardingtheir rootednessin colonial contexts.
Berman notes that in some cases, Boas probably obscured Hunt's
role in order to shield him from possible prosecution under laws
forbidding participationin certain ceremonies.56Since this sort of
controversythreatenedthe Boas-Hunt collaboration,Boas's obfuscation of Hunt'sidentitymay have sprungfrom concernwith both Hunt's
well being andthe continuityof the research.In any case, we are hardly
in a position to decipher Boas's motives or to judge him for them.
Nevertheless, these erasures also form part of the metadiscursive
practicesthat Boas used in decontextualizingthe texts with respect to
the complexity of life in FortRupertas well as the embeddednessof the
texts in white-Native Americanrelations.The practices Boas adopted
in framing and editing the texts detextualized his own "requests
and...specific questions," Hunt's accounts of where and how he
obtained the information, and the way that Hunt framed his own
writing. Boas thereby retained control over the metadiscursivepractices that shaped its authority.
Boas remarkedthat the value of the corpus was limited by the way
that so many of the texts were obtained from one individual. He
complained in 1910 that the texts accordingly "present a certain
uniformity of diction" (Kwakiutl, v), and he remarkedtwenty years
later that "It is also regrettablethat the bulk of the materialhas been
obtainedfrom one single informant.This leaves us in doubtwhetherwe
are dealing with individual or with tribal style" (RKI, xi). In orderto
demonstratethe reliability (in the technical sense of the term) of the
texts, Boas re-elicited certain materials, "and the agreement of the
statementsis a guarantyof the accuracyof the record"(EK, 45). Boas
also reportsthat Hunt'stexts "werecritically gone over by me with the
assistance of Mr. William Brotchie of Alert Bay."57As a further
warrant,Boas avers that he himself "collected...tales from the lips of
natives, and these present the necessary control materialfor checking

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the reliability of the language and form of the tales recorded by Mr.
Hunt"(Kwakiutl,v).
The natureof this "agreement"is fascinating.Successive elicitations
obviously did not produce verbatimrepetitions.Boas could have read
these gaps as keys to analyzing questions of the style and creativity of
individual narrators,interpersonaldimensions of the entextualization
process, contrastsin the historicalcircumstancesof performances,and
the growing sophisticationof Boas as an audience.Indeed,Dell Hymes
interpretsCharlesCultee's two renditionsof "Salmon'sMyth"for Boas
along these lines.58Boas, on the other hand, minimized the textual
gaps,59 suggesting that consistency guarantees "accuracy." In this
manner,Boas could assertthe authenticityandauthorityof texts thatwere
producedin circumstancesthathe himself deemedto be less thanideal.
Boas also trainedHenry W. Tate to recordmyths in Tsimshian,"his
native language.6""0
In his preface to TsimshianMythology,Boas chides
Tate for oversteppingthe bounds of his role by attemptingto shape the
metadiscursive practices that link Native American "traditions"to
white readers.Boas states thatcomparisonof Tate'stexts with those he
collected himself "shows very clearly that Mr. Tate felt it incumbent
upon himself to omit some of those traitsof the myths of his people that
seem inappropriateto us, and there is no doubt that in this respect the
tales do not quite express the old type of Tsimshiantraditions"(TM,
31). Boas was more troubledby anothersort of transgression:
A few of the tales also bear evidence of the fact that Mr. Tate had read part
of the collection of tales from the Kwakiutl published by myself in
conjunctionwith Mr. George Hunt.A few othersindicatehis familiaritywith
my collection of tales from Nass River. At the time when I received these
tales, I called his attentionat once to the necessity of keeping strictly to the
form in which the traditionsare told by the Tsimshian. (TM, 31)
In Hunt's case, Boas did not object to his becoming a reader of

publishedtexts-Boas sent him copies of Kwakw'ala texts and collections from other areas and books on related anthropologicalissues as
well.61The way Boas's chided Tate suggests, however, that when such
intertextualitybecomes recognizable in the form and/orcontent of the
texts, "the form in which traditionsare told by the Tsimshian"(or "the
Kwakiutl")would be compromisedand the texts would no longer seem
as if they spring directly from oral traditionto written text. Although
Boas imposed his own views as to how traditionalKwakwaka'wakw

and Tsimshiannarrativesare to be told on Tate and Hunt, he did not

seem to consider this process a source of bias or distortion in the
unfolding of tradition.
The way that Boas located Hunt's texts within the published
collections also erased Hunt's attemptsto authorizethem. While Hunt
used myths as means of explainingelements of social life, Boas placed
myths in a separatesection of the text volume.62Texts were frequently
broken into several parts, which were distributedbetween different
content areas.Although Hunt was vitally interestedin contextualizing
the texts vis-a-vis the way he had obtainedthe information(as personal
experience, observation, or through elicitation from particularindividuals), Boas does not seem to have been interestedin these aspects of
Hunt's metadiscursivepractices, and he deleted this materialfrom the
published texts. Even though Hunt wrote the texts in his own voice,
Boas often headed texts with the name of Hunt's source-giving the
impression of a much less mediated route of transmission.63While
Boas thoughtit importantto publishcontrastiveaccountsof the "same"
narrativeor culturalpractice that he obtainedfrom differentindividuals, he did not point out instances in which Hunt had synthesized
several individuals' versions in a single text.
Re-elicitation and cross-checking affordedBoas the right to assess
when therewas "a discrepancyof opinion"between BrotchieandHunt,
between the texts he collected and those provided by Hunt, and
between versions producedby Hunt himself; Boas could then decide
how "to investigate the doubtful points" and how to present the
material in print.64Having transferreda great deal of the process of
writing texts to Hunt, Boas reasserted his authority over the
metadiscursivepractices that produce final texts and translationsfor
publication.We certainly do not want to deny credit where credit is
due; while many anthropologistshave publishedtexts writtenby their
collaboratorswithoutso much as acknowledgingtheirauthorship,Boas
often conveyed Hunt's and Tate's participation on the title page.
Authorship was not, however, extended to Hunt's first and second
wives--even though he acknowledges their extensive and vital collaborationin his lettersto Boas.65Moreover,it is of both theoreticaland
political importance to recognize that sharing authorship does not
automatically lead to sharing control over metadiscursivepractices.
Boas's retentionof control over the processes that producedthe texts
and translationsis signaled by his sole authorshipof the prefaces.

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Discussions in the prefaces of what Boas saw as shortcomingsof the

style, content, or linguistic form of his informants'contributionsmay
have limited the authorityof the texts on specific points; nevertheless,
they form part of a rhetoric that actually asserted their accuracy,
authenticity,and authority.After lamentingthat CharlesCultee was his
"only source"on both Kathlametand Chinook, Boas concluded on the
basis of "internalevidence" and the similaritiesin two versions of two
stories "thatthe language of the texts is fairly good and representsthe
dialect in a comparativelypure state" (Kathlamet,5). Boas similarly
stated in relationto HenryTate'stexts that the way the narrativeswere
told "to white people or to the youngergeneration"is distinctfrom how
they were told "to the older generation,that followed the old way of
living." Nevertheless, Boas concluded that "On the whole, however,
my impressionis that only a slight amountof descriptivematerialhas
been introducedin this way" (TM, 393). These caveats suggest that
Boas's metadiscursive practices provide reliable means of spotting
textual flaws when they occur; we can thus accept that the authorityof
the texts is limited only in the ways that he has specified and that they
are, on the whole, trustworthy.In other words, the caveats that Boas
mentions constitute marked figures that stand out against the backgroundof texts that transparentlyrepresent"the mind of the American
native."66While readers may retain some of Boas's doubts about
specific featuresof the his collaborators'work, we are invited to place
our trustin Boas's textual authority.
Boas's TextualIdeology: From HistoricalPhilology to Cultural
Relativism
To be sure, Boas's efforts to authorizethe Kwakw'alatexts were not
confined to the bounds of the published collections themselves; they
also emerged in his general statementson the natureof narrative,art,
and language. Boas presenteda numberof fascinatinginsights regarding the importanceof these phenomenaand their centralityfor anthropological research. Interestingly, dimensions of the metadiscursive
practicesthat we have outlined seem at first glance to violate some of
the tenets of Boas's narrative,aesthetic, and social theory. We will
examine his conception of narrativeand art in this section.
Boas published a wide range of differenttypes of texts collected in
Native American communities. Arguing that "there exists almost

always a clear distinction"between tales that are set in "a time when
the world had not yet assumed its present form" and those of "our
modem period"(MFNAI, 454-5), Boas set out to examine both types
as well as the flow of materials between them.67Boas criticized
researcherswho avoided collecting "the more recent forms of folklore," such as those containingEuropeanor African elements, or who
devoted less care to their documentation than to "forms that were
currentbefore the adventof the Whites"(MFNAI,453). Boas similarly
chided researchers who had "confined themselves largely to the
collections of native traditions,"meaning traditional narratives;he
argued that "the available material gives a one-sided presentationof
linguistic data, because we have hardly any records of daily occurrences, every-day conversation, descriptions of industries, customs,
and the like" (IIJAL,2).
Why did Boas deem the collection of texts in vernacularlanguages
to be so centralto anthropology?Boas's philological orientationin the
Herderiantraditionseems to have loomed largein shapinghis approach
to texts.68While Boas does not appearto have been formallytrainedin
Indo-Europeanphilology, he was, as Stocking notes, certainlyfamiliar
with the European philological tradition, and he acknowledged an
intellectual debt to Heymann Steinthal, a pupil of Alexander von
Humboldt.69
For Boas, philology offered both a model of the kinds of data
necessary to the study of other cultures and a standardof scholarly
adequacy appropriateto such study. Not only would linguistically
rigorous corpora of native-languagetexts constitute the materials to
sustain current research, but they would be the chief legacy that
anthropologistsmight provide to future scholars. In pushing anthropologists to learn Native American languages, Boas drew a direct
parallelto the deep andrigorousknowledge of languagesthatinformed
philological study of classical civilizations: "It would seem to me that
the classical archeologistor the classical philologist must always have
an indulgent smile when he hears of serious anthropologicalstudies
carriedon by investigators,who have neitherthe time, the inclination,
nor the training to familiarize themselves with the language of the
people whom they study"(PAAR, 642). The remedy lay in the pursuit
of an essentially philological program: "In regard to our American
Indianswe are in the position that practicallyno such literarymaterial
is availablefor study,and it appearsto me as one of the essential things

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thatwe have to do, to make such materialaccessible.... We must furnish

in this way the indispensablematerialfor futurelinguisticstudies."70
The
prideof place thatBoas assignedto texts takendown in NativeAmerican
languagesas a pointof entryinto the thoughtof otherculturesplaces him
in a clear line of intellectualdescent from Herder.George Stockingalso
comments on the deeply Herderiancast of Boas's view of "primitive
literature":
'The mythologyof each tribeembracedits 'whole conceptof
the world',its 'individuality'--onemight almost say, its 'genius."'71
Primitive literature,the rubricunder which Boas pursuedhis interests in narrativeand poetics in general, is variously framed in his
writings as a domain of culture, a mode of language, an aspect of
folklore, and a kind of art. As language, primitive literatureis part of
the properprovince of linguistics, and stylistic dimensions of poetry,
narrative,and "the literary aspects" of music are central topics for
linguistic study (IIJAL,7-8; IHAIL,62). Boas arguedin particularthat
"largemasses of texts are needed in orderto elucidate the structureof
the languages" (IIJAL, 1). As an aspect of folklore, texts figure
prominently in Boas's writings, in that primitive philosophy and
cultural concerns were also shaped by artistic impulses and patterns
(MF, 611). Primitive literature is similarly a necessary part of the
general study of aesthetics, an art of time by contrastwith the plastic
and graphic arts of space, more centrally expressive and representational in Boas's terms than the plastic and graphic arts, which may be
wholly formal in aesthetic appeal (SAPL; PA; MF).72
Primitive literatureand art in general provided Boas with a central
arena for advancinghis view of the intersectionof human universals
and historical particulars.Art, Boas maintains, is universal: "In one
way or anotheresthetic pleasure is felt by all members of mankind"
(PA, 9). At the same time, primitiveliteraturealso providedBoas with
a crucial basis for advancing his claims regarding the historical
developmentof culture,the independenceof culturefrom race, and the
relationshipbetween traditionand creativity (SAPL, 329; PA, 1). He
asserts that "It is essential to bear in mind the twofold source of the
artistic effect, the one based on form alone, the other on ideas
associated with form,"that is, "the purely formal and the significant"
(PA, 13). The distinctionbetween the formaland the significantplays a
crucialrole in advancingBoas's relativistprojectin thatit provideshim
with a means of rhetorically mediating claims regarding cultural
universalsandthe uniquehistoricaldevelopmentof individualcultures.

By contrastwith formalpatterns,where universalprinciplesof symmetry and rhythmicrepetition loom large in Boas's discussions, dimensions of meaning in representationalart are "more apt to develop
differential features" from one culture to another (PA, 144). This
generalizationis qualified by Boas by virtue of his demonstrationthat
form can signal content, as in the way narratorscan use stylistic
featuresin suggesting the desirablecharacteristicsof a hero (PA, 33).
The claim for historical specificity emerged more strongly with
respectto content.Boas noted thatvariousfeaturesof narrativecontent
"give us a picture"of "the mode of life and the chief interests of the
people" (PA, 329). Representationsof "culturalsetting" contained in
narratives,particularlythose focusing on human society (ratherthan
animals, etc.), thus provide excellent tools for ethnographicdocumentation. In an essay included in what has come to be seen as his classic
collection of texts, Boas assertedthat "I give a descriptionof the mode
of life, customs, and ideas of the Tsimshian, so far as these are
expressed in the myths" (TM, 393). Here he makes a strong claim for
the accuracyof these custom-narrativeconnections:
It is obvious that in the tales of a people those incidents of the everyday life
that are of importanceto them will appeareither incidentallyor as the basis
of a plot. Most of the referencesto the mode of life of the people will be an
accuratereflection of their habits. The developmentof the plot of the story,
furthermore,will, on the whole, exhibit clearly what is consideredright and
what wrong. . .. Material of this kind does not represent a systematic
descriptionof the ethnology of the people, but it has the meritof bringingout
those points which are of interestto the people themselves. They presentin
a way an autobiographyof the tribe. (TM, 393)
In reflecting back on this study in 1935, Boas strengthenedthe claim

still further:"Theunderlyingthoughtof this attemptwas that the tales
probablycontain all that is interestingto the narratorsand that in this
way a picture of their way of thinking and feeling will appear that
renderstheir ideas as free from the bias of the Europeanobserveras is
possible" (KC, v). Boas warned that not all aspects of culture are
portrayedin folk tales (MFNAI, 475-6). In particular,some elements
thatmay seem strikingto "theforeign observer"but "self-evidentto the
Indian"are absent (KC, v).
One reason that stories play a key role in socio-culturalprocesses,
accordingto Boas, is that they have great power as means of shaping
experience. He arguedthat works of art in general take on heightened

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significance "becausethey recall past experiences or because they act

as symbols" (PA, 12). Art thus plays a crucial role in individual and
collective affective economies in that "The form and its meaning
combine to elevate the mind above the indifferentemotional state of
everyday life" (PA, 12). In the case of narratives,the relationship
between experience and artisticrepresentationoperates in both directions. Boas stated that "The local culture determines what kind of
experiences have a poetic value and the intensity with which they act"
(PA, 327). While Boas certainly emphasizes the manner in which
cultural patterns shape narratives, he also points, in The Mind of
PrimitiveMan, to the way that myths and tales shape everydaythought
and perceptionin "primitive"groups (MPM, 221-23).
For Boas, this relationshiphas importantimplicationsfor the analysis of narratives:"Not only is the setting distinct, the motivation and
main points of the tales are emphasizedby differenttribes in different
ways and take on a local coloring that can be understood only in
relationto the whole culture"(PA, 330). Arguing the need for holistic
study of narrativeprovided a central rhetoricalmeans of constructing
his holistic perspective on culture.As early as 1898, Boas warned of
decontextualizingforms of analysis: "When we confine ourselves to
comparingisolated traitsof culture,we open the door to misinterpretations without number"(MBC, 127).
Boas spelled out the usefulness of text-based study in the course of
answering two crucial potential objections to the position he was
advancing. Having argued on behalf of "the majority of American
anthropologists"that "thewhole problemof culturalhistory appearsto
us as a historical problem" (ME, 314), Boas admitted that "in the
domain of ethnology, where for most parts of the world, no historical
facts are availableexcept those that may be revealed by archaeological
study," one must rely on "indirect methods" (ME, 314, 315). The
systematic comparison of narrativesand their distributionassociated
with "themoderninvestigationof Americanmythology"is cited as one
of two examples of how this dearth of "historical facts" can be
overcome (ME, 315). Second, Boas rhetoricallyengages "the distant
observer"who may gain the impressionthatAmericananthropologists
are simply lost "in a mass of detailed investigations"by assertingthat
"the ultimate problems of a philosophic history of human civilization
... are as nearto our heartsas they are to those of other scholars"(ME,
314); textual scholarship thus also provided Boas with a model for

seeing how masses of details could be studiedsystematically,scientifically, and comparatively, yielding broad generalizations regarding
constraintand creativityin the humanmind and in culture.
TextualGaps
Boas's remarkregardingthe role of narrativein elevating the mind
"above the indifferentemotional state of everyday life" points at the
same time to key limitationsof his aesthetictheory.While Boas intends
by this remarkto foregroundthe power of verbal art to heighten and
intensify experience, it seems doubtfulthat everyday life was characterized by an indifferentemotional state for most Native Americansat
the time. In addition to the racism, poverty, disease, and exploitation
that individuals and communities faced on a daily basis, acts of
violence, both physical and institutional,and expropriationsof ancestral lands were written indelibly into collective and individualmemories. Evidence that emergedfrom reportsby special commissions, land
claims cases, and statementsmade by Native Americanleaders suggest
that these facets of "the mode of life and the chief interests of the
people" entered profoundly into the production and reception of
narrativesby Native Americans.73
In the prefaces he wrote for the text collections, Boas often
commented on the effects of these destructive forces on Native
American communities. He began his collection of Chinook texts by
notingthat"I learnedthatthe dialects of the lower Chinookwere on the
verge of disappearing,and that only a few individuals survived who
rememberedthe languages of the once powerful tribes of the Clatsop
and Chinook"(CT, 5). Of the Bella Coola he suggests that "It seems
that at a former time the tribe was quite populous; but, owing to the
various epidemics and the introductionof other diseases, its numbers
have dwindled down, so that at the presenttime it has been reducedto
only a few hundredsouls" (MBC, 26). He similarlywrites that "So far
as I have been able to ascertain,the Kathlametdialect is spoken by
three persons only" (Kathlamet,5).
The effects of depopulation become rhetorically relevant in the
prefacesprimarilyinsofaras they hinderscientific practice.In speaking
of the three remaining Clatsop speakers of Chinook, Boas notes that
"Theman had forgottena greatpartof the language, while the women
were not able to grasp what I wanted;they claimed to have forgotten

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their myths and traditions,and could not or would not give me any
connectedtexts. ... The few remainingClatsophad totally forgottenthe
history of their tribe" (CT, 5). These references are embedded in a
metadiscursive and specifically metatextual discourse, and they are
particularlyconcernedwith questions of the authenticityand accuracy
of the texts. Boas draws on discourses of rescue and preservation,also
partof the Herderianlegacy, in justifying the collection andpublication
of texts. Having commentedon the virtualdisappearanceof the Clatsop
and Chinook, for example, he states that "This fact determinedme to
make an effort to collect what little remainedof these languages"(CT,
5). In the letter that Hunt was to have read to Boas's guests, he urges
them to recontextualize Kwakwaka'wakw "laws and stories" in the
storage box so that "they will not be forgotten."Since the object of
study is itself vanishing,texts are needed not only to fix but to recover
and restore its presence. These statements legitimate Boas's textual
programand imbue it with discursive authorityat the same time that
they signal the growing loss of textual authorityby Native Americans,
of which more later.
Since Boas often directlyelicited particularmaterials,he could have
asked systematicallyfor narrativesthat documentedthe circumstances
under which entire communities were disappearing.Indeed, stories of
epidemics and of warfare do appear in many of the collections he
published.74
They relatealmost withoutexception to pre-contactevents;
the warfaretexts are all traditionalized,set at substantialtemporaland
culturaldistancefrom the present,and thereis only a passing reference
to a recent epidemic (CEK, 28-29) in what is framedas a shamanistic
dream narrative.Boas does not use these texts in linking images of
"authentic"Native Americancultureswith the scenes that he describes
so tersely in the prefaces. While the importanceof these texts should
not be discounted,it is evident thatthey played a less prominentrole in
his collecting efforts than did animal stories, origin myths, tales of
supernaturalbeings, migration legends, accounts of material culture,
the life cycle, ritual, religious beliefs, and the like-that is, the more
canonical genres of putativelyauthenticfolk expression establishedby
the philological programof Herderandthe Grimms.It was these genres
that were held to reveal the culturalinheritanceand culturehistory of a
people.
Certainly,Boas was not oblivious to native expressions of resentment and resistancetowardwhite encroachment.In a descriptionof his

first arrivalamong Kwakwaka'wakwat a time when "the minds of the

Indians were much stirredby efforts of the CanadianGovernmentto
put a stop to certaindances and ceremonies,"75
Boas recordsa powerful
speech by the chief of the village in which the latterdemandsto know
"whether you have come to stop our dances and feasts, as the
missionariesand agents who live among our neighborstry to do." He
makes it clear that Boas will be decidedly unwelcome if this is his
purpose.Assertingdivinely accordedrightsto the lands, the chief states
that his communityrejects demandsthat they give up ceremonies and
adoptwhite culturalpatterns."Andnow, if you are come to forbidus to
dance, begone; if not, you will be welcome to us" (IBC, 232).
Clearly, it would be naive to simply assume that Chinookan or
Kwakwaka'wakwor other narratorswere just waiting for the opportunity to talk aboutrecent epidemics and acts of repressionthat they had
suffered under colonial control; talking about violence and tragedy
certainlyraises importantdiscursive constraints.Nonetheless, epidemics and white attempts to prohibit potlatching and other practices
suggest that narratorswould have had much to talk about. Hymes
argues that CharlesCultee's "The Sun's Myth" is a "reflectionon the
destructionof the Chinookan people on the lower Columbia in the
middle of the nineteenthcentury, . . . particularlyby disease."76This
narrativeand the chief's exhortationsuggest thatBoas might well have
found a wealth of examples of this sort, had he looked for them
systematically.The potentialof the Boas-Huntcollaborationfor documenting the ability of Native Americans to reflect critically on their
own history, on efforts to resist marginalizationand depopulation,is
not explored in Boas's writing.
Narratives,History,and "The Mind of PrimitiveMan"
The material on Boas's metadiscursive practices that we have
presented thus far poses a puzzle. His narrativeand aesthetic theory
suggests thatnarrativesnot only reflect social life but are crucialmeans
of constructing,refracting, and intensifying cultural patterns.Moreover, his view of narrativeand of culturalpatternsin generalis strongly
historical. Boas's methodological criticisms of prior research emphasized the need to collect texts that focused on all dimensions of social
life, including the most mundane and those in which European
influence was obvious. Thus, while Boas's framework could have

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provided him with a basis from which to collect narratives that

documentedongoing struggles by Native American communities for
survival, certain types of narratives, exhortations, and the like are
grossly underplayed in the extant corpus. The broader issue here
involves not only selectivity but the political effects of using
metadiscursivepracticesthat systematicallysever connectionsbetween
texts and the complex historical circumstances in which they were
collected. Boas's genuine concern for involving Native Americans in
the process of ethnographicdocumentationand for seeing indigenous
communitiesthroughindigenouslenses did not induce him to surrender
control over the metadiscursivepractices that shaped the production
and receptionof texts.
In this section, we widen the angle of our own lens to examine other
dimensions of Boas's anthropology.We examine his views on such
crucial problems as the nature of genre, aesthetics, consciousness,
emotion, objectivity,and rationality,and we go on to suggest that they
shape his view of agency in cultureand explanationin anthropological
analysis. This theoreticalframingis, we claim, closely caught up with
his efforts to professionalize and institutionalizeAmerican anthropology. This larger perspective provides a basis for examining how the
metadiscursive practices that shaped the texts and the paucity of
attentionhe devoted to Native American reflections on contact with
whites and its effects are firmly rooted in his broaderanthropological
endeavors.
Genre
A useful point of departure here is to examine the way Boas
characterizesthe role of genre in Native American "literature."Boas
distrustedattemptsto discriminateamong narrativegenres, believing
that such distinctions do not remain consistent for specific narratives
across group boundaries. In spite of his insistence on the need for
consistency in the application of generic labels, Boas himself was
inconsistent in his translationof the key Kwakw'ala term nuyam. As
Berman notes, Boas translatedit variously as "myth,""story,""legend," and "tradition,"while Hunt rendered it as "Historie."77Boas
placed much greater weight on the contrast between mythic and
historical narrativesthan other generic distinctions due to its ethnographicrelevance-as being both "perfectlyclear"and "presentin the

minds of the myth-telling people"; he argued that it avoids "the

introductionof an arbitrarydistinction through our modem cultural
point of view" (MFNAI, 455). Nevertheless, this distinction was
flawed, in Boas's view, in that it too failed to serve the functionthat he
establishedfor it and othergeneric distinctions-to providethe kind of
clear,consistentmodes of classificationthatwould have enabledhim to
place each narrativein a distinct category without overlap, residue, or
slippage.
The way that Boas located the distinction between mythic and
historical narratives"in the mind of the American native" is striking
(MFNAI, 454).When Boas offered generalizationsof this magnitude,
they were characteristicallybased on careful comparisonand detailed
study of the relevant data from specific groups; in the case of the
distinction between myth and history, however, Boas never found it
necessary or useful to explore the distinctiondirectly and in detail for
any given Native Americancommunity.Rather,he generalizedbroadly
and summarily, remaining far more centrally interested in those
particularistichistorical/comparativeinvestigations that require that
"folk-talesand myths ... still be studiedas a unit."Ironically,given the
weight that he accords to historical analysis, Boas's location of the
myth/historydistinctionis radicallyahistorical;while narrativecontent
may move between these generic domains, the distinction is stable
across time just as it is across cultureand geography.
Boas's discussion of genre provides anotherangle on the questionof
gaps in the textual collections. His attemptto draw on categories that
are located "in the mind of the Indian" formed part of Boas's
movement from a priori, analytic to ethnographicallyrelevantcategories, which has been so widely celebratedin anthropology.78
Without
denying theirvalue in ethnographicinquiry,it is importantto graspthe
use of such categories in augmenting the discursive authority of
anthropological writing and in covering up the profound role of
anthropologists and their Native American collaborators (such as
George Hunt and Henry Tate) in creating what comes to be taken as
"themind of the Americannative."This rhetoricalmove is powerfulin
that it claims greaterscholarly authorityby equatingmore precise and
scientific modes of analysis with categories that are deemed to be
directly recoverable from Native American cultural patterns without
"the introduction of an arbitrary distinction through our modem
culturalpointof view."Insofaras we embraceBoas's genericpackagings

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of texts as reflecting "the mind of the American Indian,"we tacitly

accept the gaps and silences as springing from their absence or
unimportancein "themode of life andthe chief interestsof the people."
The power of this move becomes evident when we recall that Hunt
generallyproducedtexts, as Boas puts it, "in answerto my requestsand
to specific questions"and that other dimensions of his metadiscursive
practicesshapedwhat was writtenby Hunt (and, obviously, what Boas
obtainedthroughdictationhimself) as well as how it was presentedin
published collections. This is not to say that the content of the
publishedtexts springsfrom Boas's agenda alone; Hunt'sresistanceto
Boas's requests for materialon "the common people" (as opposed to
high-rankinglineages) suggests that Hunt did not simply comply with
his employer's instructionspassively. But it seems clear thatthese gaps
are deeply rooted in Boas's metadiscursivepractices and in his views
on the natureof Native Americannarrative.
Emotion,SecondaryExplanations,and the Unconscious Characterof
Creativity
An importantdifference separates Boas's discussion of narratives
from his view of linguistic categories.Boas holds linguistic researchin
special regard; in a well-known passage in his Introductionto the
Handbook of American Indian Languages, he notes that linguistic
"categorieswhich are formed always remainunconscious, and ... for
this reasonthe processes which lead to their formationcan be followed
without the misleading and disturbingfactors of secondary explanations, which are so common in ethnology, so much so that they
generallyobscurethe real historyof the developmentof ideas entirely"
(IHAIL, 70-71). In speaking of the cross-cultural transmission of
narratives,on the other hand, Boas draws attention to examples in
which Native American informantscomment on issues of style and
content. Boas nevertheless qualifies his assessment of this relative
accessibility to consciousness, and these qualificationsimpose crucial
constraintson the sorts of narrativesthat are collected and the way they
are analyzed.
Boas deems narrativesto be a form of "primitive art," and they
accordinglyfall underthe aegis of his generaltheoryof aesthetics(PA).
For art in general, the creative process is almost entirely unconscious:
"The mental processes of artistic productiondo not take place in the

full light of consciousness. The highest type of artistic productionis

there, and its creatordoes not know whence it comes" (PA, 155). The
conscious accessibility of narrativesseems to emerge primarilywhen
they are appreciatedas objectified texts; Native Americans can, for
example,make aestheticjudgmentsamong multipleversions.Thus, the
productbut not the process can rise into consciousness.
Artistic creation also exists apartfrom the exigencies of everyday
life. For Boas, aesthetic elaboration is opposed to necessity; artists
must enjoy the leisure to be able to "play with technique for other
purposes"(MPM, 200). He also envisions poetic creation as strongly
individual in character.A striking image of isolation and solitude in
"literary"creativityemerges from Boas's portraitof the Eskimo hunter
who "sits for hoursby the breathinghole of the seal. During such times
his fancy is free to wander and many of his songs take shape during
these moments" (PA, 300). On the other hand, Boas sees the group,
embodied in "the strong influence of a pattern of thought on the
imaginationof the people," as constrainingand conservative, "fettering" creativityratherthan simulatingit (DFM, 401). Artistic creativity
thus forms a prime example of the way that Boas sees culture,in part,
throughthe lens of social-environmentaldeterminism.79
While Boas's
aestheticsrunscounterto Kant'sin termsof the emphasisthathe places
on the historicaland culturaldeterminationof aestheticjudgment,Boas
is Kantian in locating artistic creativity beyond consciousness and
cognition, apart from survival, necessity, and everyday life, and in
opposition to collective experience.
In the case of "literature,"Boas deems the "constantdiffusion of the
elements of stories, and the elaborationof new local types of composition" to be the basic process through which narrativerepertoiresare
created,while "on the whole, invention of new themes must have been
rare"(MFNAI, 484). Suggesting that such acts of creationresult from
"theplay of imaginationwith the events of humanlife," Boas goes on
to arguethat "theincidentsof tales and myths ... are not directlytaken
from every-day experience; that they are rather contradictoryto it"
(DFM, 405). Boas asserts that narrativesprovide an emotional rather
than cognitive hold on "the events of human life," such that daily
experiences are imaginatively transformedthrough wish fulfillment
and "the materializationof the objects of fear."
Boas's statementhere may seem to contradictthe assertionswe cited
earlier regardingthe way that narratives"give us a picture"of "the

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mode of life and the chief interestsof the people." Nonetheless, when
Boas refers to the relationshipbetween narrativesand "their way of
thinkingand feeling," or "themode of life, customs, and ideas,"he has
in mind generalized, sharedculturalpatterns(KC, v; TM, 393). When
he speaks of the way narrativesdistort or transform"the events of
human life," on the other hand, he is referringto specific, concrete
historical events; here Native American self-consciousness does not
"exhibitclearly"or provide "an accuratereflection"of everyday life.
The relationshipbetween narrativesand events is doubly displaced
once the narrativesenterinto circulation.While conscious ascriptionof
meaning is largely absent in the creative process, narrativesbecome
objects of consciousness as they are told, appreciated,and retold. Boas
arguedthat this process does not lead to the developmentof historical
self-awareness:
The psychological explanationof custom and its historicaldevelopment are
not by any means the same; on the contrary,owing to secondaryinterpretations thatin course of time set in and the generalcharacterof which depends
upon the cultural interests of the people, the psychological explanation is
much more likely to be quite independentof the actualhistoricalhappenings.
(PA,129)
Boas stressedthat as a narrativepasses by means of diffusion from one

group to another,
The narrativeis given an interpretivesignificance that is quite foreign to the
original tale; and as in decorative art the adventitious meaning varies in
character according to the culture of the people, thus the style of the
interpretationof a tale depends upon the cultural interests of the people
telling it. ... In many cases the symbolic or interpretativeexplanationis a
foreign element added on to the design or to the tale in agreement with a
stylistic patterncontrollingthe imaginationof the people. (PA, 336-37)
In Boas's view, style, "motives [i.e., motifs] of action,"narrativedetail,

and interpretationoperate independently.Plot elements are acquired
primarilyby diffusion, while style is partly universal and partly local;
narrativedetail and interpretationare grafted onto style and plot in
keeping with "theculturalinterestsof the people," quite independently
of both "the original tale" and "the actual historical happenings."
Native Americannarrativesare of great historicalvalue when they are
analyzedscientificallywith respectto the movementof motives, styles,
themes, and the like throughtime and space. But as historicalinterpre-

tations in their own right, they are simply unreliable. Their tellers
simply lack the ability to use narratives in interpretingtheir own
history,in that adventitiousmeanings, styles of interpretation,cultural
interests,and symbolic explanationsdistortconsciousness of historical
events.
What sort of authorityis then attributedto Native Americans?The
discursive authoritythat Boas ascribes to Native Americans is more
limited andinventedthanit might seem at first glance. It is inventednot
in the sense that the texts do not involve highly significant statements
by Native Americans, which they do, but in that a double process of
authorialdisplacementlargely erases the role of the anthropologistand
his indigenous collaboratorsin the elicitation, inscription,and circulation of these texts. Thus, what authorityis grantedto Native Americans
is always already shared with anthropologists.Native Americans are
similarly denied authorityover the receptionof these texts.
Texts, Traditions,and the Constructionof the Modem Subject
Here we might fruitfullyreturnto Bakhtin'sformulation.He argues
thatauthoritativediscourse,which is often connectedwith traditionand
the past, only retains its authoritywhen it is transmitted(ratherthan
represented)as a whole and admits of no play with its borders.As a
general frameworkfor the analysis of authority,Bakhtin'sformulation
presents a numberof limitations.Beyond linking authoritytoo closely
with particulartypes of discourse, Bakhtin's depiction seems to identify it more with specific sortsof texts and theirpropertiesthanwith the
practices that are used in erasing dimensions of context-sensitivity
(what linguists often refer to as "indexicality")and intertextualityin
producing the illusion of boundedness, stability, and impermeability.
We have tried to show how the impression that the published BoasHunt texts constitute a (relatively) unmediatedand direct reflection of
"themind of the Americannative,"which is itself a prime sourceof the
authorityof these documents,emergedfrom the suppressionof a wide
range of complex metadiscursive anchorings in history, politicaleconomy, humanrelations, and in relationshipswith other texts.
Classical texts and their use in philology and pedagogy provide
prime examples of authoritativediscourses. Recall Boas's invocation
of the image of the philologist in relation to the classics in according
both urgency and authorityto the collection of Native Americantexts.

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Boas saw how philology had constructedthe classics as authoritative

voices that continue to transmit not only the words but also the
Weltanschauungof dead languages and civilizations. In orderto create
an "authentic"literaturethat would enable anthropologyto enjoy some
of the authorityof philology, Boas fashionedthese texts as authoritative
remnantsof a distanced,bounded,and disappearingworld of tradition.
His metadiscursivepracticesrigidified the bordersof the texts, erasing
Hunt's attempts to show how they were produced by an interplay
between indigenous and white voices that emerged in the course of a
complex relationshipbetween two unique individuals and a dynamic,
multi-ethnichistoricalcontext.
Boas's failure to provide even minimal explications de texte, which
was roundly criticized by Sapir and others,80can be understood as a
part of his efforts to constructthe texts as self-containedartifactsand
scholarly objects. While interpretationand analysis were necessary,
they could be framed as a scholarly activity that takes place after the
fact andthatplays no role in theircreation:"As we requirea new pointof
view now, so futuretimeswill requirenew pointsof view andfor thesethe
texts, and sampletexts, must be made available."81
In this way, laws and
storiescould be neatlyfit withinthe confines of a textualbox and easily
recontextualizedin quitedifferentculturaland institutionalsettings.
As we suggested in our introductorysection, Boas was not at all the
first to conceive of modernity'sOthersin textualtermsor to insist upon
the urgentneed to collect and preservetraditionaltexts on the premise
that without such interventionthey were fated to disappearfrom the
human record. Indeed, a rhetoric of the eclipse of tradition and
traditionalfolk constitutedan ideological cornerstoneof early modernity. In the interest of placing Boas within this broader modernist
project, we will recountthree formativemoments of its development.
Writing in the decades following the English civil wars of the
seventeenthcentury,JohnAubrey describedwhat he envisioned as the
eclipse of the traditional, superstitious past. He asserted that the
disseminationof books and increases in popularliteracy "have putt all
the old Fables out of doors; and the divine art of printing and
Gunpowderhave frightedaway Robin-good-fellow and the Fayries."82
According to Aubrey,the epistemological foundationof this "history"
has been supersededas well, and rightfully so: "Old Customs and old
wives tales are grosse things,"he wrote, "butyet ought not to be buried
in Oblivion;theremay be some truethand usefulnesse to be picked out

of them, besides, 'tis a pleasureto consider the Erroursthat enveloped

formerages: as also the present."83
He similarlywrote that "Iknow that
some will nauseatethese old Fables:but I doe profess to regardthem as
the most considerablepiece of Antiquity,I collect: and that they are to
be registeredfor Posterity,to let them understandthe Encroachmentof
Ignoranceon Mankind:and to see what strangeAbsurdityMen can by
Custom and educationbe broughtto believe."84
A chartermember of the Royal Society, Aubrey contributedto its
efforts to promote modem epistemology and modem subjects by
constructinga sphere of "Ignorance,""Absurdity,"and Errours"that
defined modernitynegatively as contrastingmaximally with the world
of illiterate and superstitious "poor people" and "woomen." This
oppositiongrantedmodernityan historicallocation and a trajectoryby
deeming it to be a new social and intellectual formation whose
ascendancy was as certain as was the inevitable disappearanceof its
traditionalpredecessor.Aubrey positions himself in a crucial location
between the two, standing firmly in the realm of literacy, modernity,
and rationalitywhile at the same time serving as a crucial witness to
this vanishing world. Invoking a rhetoric that has been used by
anthropologists and folklorists to this day, he imbues his own researches with the power to mediate between past and present through
the act of salvagingthe presenceof this Weltanschauung.
As it inscribes
this world, his text confers it with a particularsort of permanenceonce it has been transposedinto a literarydomain of modernity.
A centurylater,JohannGottfriedHerderplaced das Volkand whathe
deemed to be traditional texts at the center of emergent German
nationality.A people's poetry becomes "the whole treasure of their
life," giving voice to "teachingsand history,law and morality,delight,
joy and comfort.""85
Like language, poetry stores up culture;it is "the
archive of the folk";86it is a clear embodimentof Volksgeist,the spirit
of the people. Herder lamented how reason and sophistication had
largely displaced emotion and authenticityand how misguided imitations of Greekand Latin literarymodels and the adoptionof Frenchby
Germanintellectuals and the nobility had marginalizedVolksdichtung
or folk poetry;the collection, dissemination,and celebrationof authentic expressionsof the GermanVolkthus figuredcentrallyin his program
for political and culturalnationalism.Herder'sauthorityin generatinga
nationalistagenda emerged, in part, from his status simultaneouslyas
an arbiterof Volksgeistand a spokesmanfor contemporarysociety.

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Deriding Herder's methods while aligning themselves with his

agenda, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimmprofessionalizedthe textual work
of emergentnationalismas requiringscientific techniquesfor gathering
authentictexts from genuine bearersof traditionand preservingtheir
integrityin the course of editing and publication.While the success of
the Kinder- und Hausmdirchen87
and other works sprang in part from
the auraof authenticitythatthey emanated,the brothersGrimmdid not
find the tales but ratherinvented a genre that created the illusion of
transparentlybringing to life a prior, oral text. The Grimms erased
obvious signs of their own literary interventions in the narratives,
including the techniques they used in making the tales seem "traditional,""authentic,"and, in a word, old.88Even if Herder,the Grimms,
and other figures associated with Romantic Nationalism may have
accordedwhat they deemed to be disappearingtraditionsa much more
positive and centralstatus as culturalartifacts,they joined Aubrey and
the antiquariansin voicing the words of what they deemed to be
vanishing social groups in the interests of a broad social and political
project-the constructionof the modem state.
Entextualizing Others in the production of new modernist social
formationswas not, of course, an exclusively Europeanproject.In first
half of the nineteenth century, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was Indian
Agent for the Michigan Territory.89
Explicitly taking advantageof the
access to Ojibway communities-including their tales and legendsthat was available to whites in the wake of military conquest and the
signing of treaties, Schoolcraftused his marriageto the daughterof a
successful white traderand a high-statusOjibwaywoman in compiling
a systematiccollection of Native Americantexts from NorthAmerica.
Schoolcraft envisioned his task quite clearly in terms of the need to
create a uniquely American national literature;this nationalist appeal
also formed the basis for creating an internationalmarket.Far from a
simple conversion of orality into the writtenword, Schoolcraftexperimented over the years with a range of techniques for bringing this
authenticAmerican voice to life and imbuing it with authenticityand
literaryappeal.90Takingadvantageof Henry WadsworthLongfellow's
incorporationof some of the Ojibway material in the American epic
poem, Song of Hiawatha,91Schoolcraftframed his texts as sources of
American national literaryindependence within the arena of international poetic culture, fit to take their place alongside the foundational
texts of Greece and Rome, England,Italy and Germany.

Boas's NorthwestCoast researchesthus standin a long tradition,as

it were, of creating textual models of modernity's Others. Like his
predecessors, Boas positioned himself as the authoritativemediator;
the quintessential spokesperson for anthropologicalscience, he also
possessed sufficient knowledge of Native American languages and
customs to make him a key witness to the disappearanceof traditionand the one who took charge of overseeing its textual and artifactual
preservation.The texts are thus superchargedwith presence, uniqueness, authority,and value. Since he saw traditionas being transmitted
unconsciously through processes that are affectively mediated, Boas
felt it necessary to detextualizethe discursive traces of his collaborators' active, conscious participation.It is no accident that Boas was
unimpressedby Hunt's accounts of how he obtainedthe information,
how he collected multiple accounts and producedcomposite versions,
and the like-and that Boas deleted this informationfrom published
versions.
This is not to say that Boas's projectwas identicalto that of Aubrey,
Herder and the Grimms, or Schoolcraft. Indeed, he adapted the
modernistdesire for traditionaltexts skillfully to the historicalcontext
in which he was working. Dorothy Ross has described the way that
many social scientistsin the United Statesreactedto the transformation
of society being effected by industrialcapitalismin the closing years of
the nineteenthcentury and the opening decades of the twentieth.92On
the one hand, advances in mass-production,transportation,and communication seem to offer society a host of cultural and economic
benefits. At the same time, social scientists and intellectuals worried
about the deleterious effects of working conditions on social relations
and humanbeings and on the weakening of local communities. Often
fearful of both unbridled capitalism and socialist revolution, many
feared that class conflict was inevitable.
A key aspect of Boas's intervention into the social and political
debates of his day lay in his characterizationof Native Americans as
people who would necessarily fall victim to modernization. This
perceiveddisplacementof pre-modernpeoples by civilization servedas
the primarywarrantfor Boas's research efforts. The preservationof
Native Americanculturalknowledge throughanthropologicalintervention was for the benefit of "civilization,"since the people themselves
were bound to perish. Boas's employment of Hunt in collecting
artifactsfor museumsprovides a prime example of the way thatNative

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Americanculturalpatrimonywas transferredto white-dominatedinstitutions during that period. In spite of Boas's relativist position, his
work thus fit into the larger contours of colonial domination that
increasinglydeprivedNative American communities of land, material
wealth, and culturaland linguistic autonomy.
Nonetheless, Boas largely erased the direct traces of the context of
his researchersfrom its products.As we noted, Boas told Hunt to seek
"old" artifacts,and he was particularlypleased when they looked old.
Jacknis argues that Boas similarly distressed, in Stewart'sphrase, the
photographsthathe took on the NorthwestCoast, filteringout elements
of the colonial context as much as possible (through posing and
reconstruction)in orderto create visual images that would invoke the
traditional culture he sought.93Our analysis suggests that Boas's
metadiscursivepracticeslikewise distressedthe texts, removing traces
of the colonial context in which they were produced-and thus of the
modernitythat was embeddedin the "traditional."His metadiscursive
practicesthusplayed a role in constructinganthropologyas a science of
culture rather than of the colonial encounter, an historical mode of
inquirythat rested on a principledeffort to constructhistory as a precontact, romanticized past-one that carefully excluded the anthropologist from its purview.
Boas's construction of the texts as authentic and traditional had
profound implications for the way that Native Americans were constructedin his writings and the types of discursive authoritythat they
were granted.As Stocking has argued, Boas was not consistently a
relativist.94He firmly believed that science was the key element that
"has raised into consciousness human activities that are automatically
performedin the life of the individual and of society," a process that
"seems to be one of the fundamentalcharacteristicsof the development
of mankind"(ME, 319).
The predominanceof traditionalmaterialandheterogeneousassociations based on emotional responses in "primitive"culturebore crucial
implications for determiningwho would be granted the authorityto
representNative American discourse. While "the tellers" may enjoy
some conscious control over narratives as discrete objects, Boas
suggests that the mannerin which stories are diffused and created and
the distortinginfluenceof secondaryexplanationsrenderNative Americans incapableof accuratelycharacterizingthe way narrativesrelate to
"theevents of humanlife." This assessmentappearsironic in that Boas

"THEFOUNDATION
OFALLFUTURERESEARCHERS"517
played a dominantrole in severing the relationshipbetween texts and

events-including those associated with both ethnography and the
broadercolonial setting.As a result,Native Americanswere denied the
authority to interprettheir own history and culture; this discursive
terrain was claimed by anthropologists.Even such collaboratorsas
Hunt could exercise little control over the productionand reception
process, including decisions as to which texts would be circulatedto
which audiences and how their authenticityand significance would be
judged. Native American involvement in this process was largely
limited to exchanging words for low wages.
At the same time, Boas used these texts and the generalizationshe
derivedfrom them and othermaterialsin presentingsweeping interpretations of the nature of modernity;these formulationsare especially
elaboratedin TheMindof PrimitiveMan. Using the rhetoricaldevice of
arguingwith an unnamedvoice thathe both opposes andcorrects,Boas
agrees with the "fact"that although"primitiveman"possesses excellent capacities for sensory perception,"his power of logical interpretation seems to be deficient" (MPM, 220). Boas suggests that this
inadequacyis not due to "any fundamentalpeculiarityof mind"but to
the natureof the assumptionsfrom which "primitives"reason and the
manner in which they reach their conclusions. "Primitives"proceed
from "crude,automaticallydevelopedcategories"thatare derivedfrom
experience. For example, "A sudden explosion will associate itself in
his mind, perhaps, with tales which he has heard in regard to the
mythical history of world, and consequently will be accompaniedby
superstitiousfear. The new, unknown epidemic may be explained by
the belief in demons that persecutemankind"(MPM, 221).
On the other hand, "we" have developed such categories into "a
better system of the whole field of knowledge" (MPM, 221). While
primitives' categories are derived from "the crude experience of
generations,"modern knowledge springs from "centuriesof experimentation"(MPM, 221). The "advance of civilization" has enabled
"us""to gain a clearerand clearerinsight into the hypotheticalbasis of
our reasoning" through increasing elimination of "the traditional
element,"one that is quintessentiallyembodied in mythology. "Primitives" draw on this "traditionalmaterial"by making heterogeneous,
subjectiveassociationsthroughthe operationof an "emotionalstate of
mind" without the benefit of conscious reasoning (MPM, 239). The
transitionfromprimitivecultureto civilization andthe "full application

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of our reasoning" entail a repression of emotional life (MPM, 227,

234). Drawing on a classist rhetoric, Boas argues that "the less
educated" have benefited less from "the eradication of traditional
material" (MPM, 223). Here oppositions between tradition, myth,
subjectivity, and emotion on the one hand and experimentation,
science, rationality,and objectivity on the other equate two cartographies of difference-primitive versus civilized and "the poor rural
population . . . and ... the lowest strataof the proletariat"versus "the
active minds representativeof modem culture"(MPM, 198).
Here the concept of traditioncontributesto the modernistproject in
a way thatrecalls the writingsof JohnAubreymore thanthreecenturies
earlier.Describing traditionalthinkingand the people who supposedly
embody it provides a means of constructingthe modem subjectand the
rationality that purportedly guides its thinking. The nature of
traditionalityagain ensures the trajectoryof history-the disappearance of pre-modern forms in favor of a transcendent modernity.
Ironically,three centurieslater,it still seems necessary to constructthe
demise of the pre-modernand to legitimate the rise of the modern.As
a number of scholars have argued, the construction of tradition
continues to be a powerful social and political tool.95Ironically,Boas
rationalizesthe marginalizationand disappearanceof the very people
that his writings celebrated.
Boas's text-makingprojectwas also linked to the movementtowards
the growing institutionalizationand disciplinaryspecializationof scholarship. For Boas, texts and artifactsprovided the primarysources for
the study of "primitive"society. Boas helped create a economy for the
productionand marketingof texts, andhe soughtto increasetheirvalue
within the discursive economy of American science.96In rooting texts
in these sites, Boas was not simply producingand circulatingdiscourse
but shaping the definitions of how discourses could be authoritatively
defined, produced, circulated, and interpreted-and who would be
accorded the authority to do so. We suggested above that Boas's
narratology,includinghis view of the natureof stories,the way they are
rooted in consciousness, and their relationshipto modernity,provided
him with a means of rationalizingthe ascendancy of anthropologists'
interpretive claims over Native American narratives vis-a-vis the
subordinatedtextual authorityof the tellers and their communities.
Boas's efforts to establish anthropologyas a discipline in its own
right, to secure its institutionalposition within universities and muse-

ums, is well known. Text-makingprovided a key component of his

efforts to insure the disciplinaryauthorityof anthropologyby granting
it control over the scientific production and interpretationof a new
body of primarytexts. As George Stockingcomments,"despitehis lack
of training in European philology, Boas still tended to conceive of
linguistics (and indeed culturalanthropology)as the study of written
documents. If these were lacking, then one provided them."97More
thanhalf a decade afterSchoolcraft,Boas helped shift the productionof
Native American texts from literatureto science, from the writer's
study to the offices of universities and museums.
Conclusion
We alluded earlier to the way that James Clifford and other critics
have read the Boas-Hunt and other collaborativetexts. Clearly, Boas
fits squarelyinto Clifford's characterizationof rhetoricsof disappearance and preservationand how they play into strategies for creating
ethnographic authority.As Clifford notes, such rhetorics combine
scientific and moral authorityin constructingthe Otheras weak and in
immediate need of the representationalservices of an outsider.98In
spite of his anti-racistconvictions and his fight to establish the dignity
of Native American cultures, Boas's construction of tradition as
unconscious, affective, and inevitably disappearing in the face of
science, conscious reasoning,and modernityrenderedhim complicit in
naturalizingwhite control of Native American communities and the
ideology of "assimilation."
Our analysis nonetheless departsin significant ways from Clifford
and othercritics on the natureof Boas's collaborativetext-making.Our
goal is not to dismiss the value of rhetoricalreadingsof ethnographies
or to contribute to recent efforts to reassert the authorityof ethnographictexts. We have rathersought to question a tendencyto accorda
special place for "vernacular"or "collaborative"texts within critical
practice. Clifford cites Derridain arguingthat "Logocentricwriting is
conventionallyconceived to be a representationof authenticspeech."99
While he does not clearly exempt "transcription"or "dialogue"from
this process, he does suggest that "The marking off of extended
indigenous discourse shows the ethnography to be a hierarchical
structureof powerfulstoriesthattranslate,encounter,andrecontextualize
otherpowerful stories."'"Clifford also suggests that the productionof

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collaborativetexts "rendersthe ethnographyopen to scholarlyreinterpretation(and to re-appropriationby native speakers)."1

What we do wish to assertis thatit is misguidedto suggest that such
texts should be grantedprivileged status with respect to the politics of
the "representationof authentic speech" as against other forms of
ethnographicwriting. We have shown that Boas deployed an impressive arrayof devices for partiallyconcealing his role in creatingNative
American texts and for re-presenting the nature of his informants'
participationin this process. We arguedin particularthat Boas erased
many of the ways that his collaboratorssought to frame their writing,
thus making the texts speak for "Kwakiutlculture"(etc.) ratherthan
articulating particular interpersonal, social, and historical locations
within a colonial context and advocatingspecific strategiesfor resisting
dominationand marginalization.These texts can be read in ways that
reveal hierarchicalstructuresof powerful stories and rhetoricaltropes
in ethnographicwriting, but collaborative texts are not intrinsically
better suited for sparking awareness of the allegorical character of
ethnographyor the constructednessof ethnographicrepresentations.
Indeed, Boas startedup a cottage industryof textual productionon the
Northwest Coast precisely in order to circumvent these issues-"a
picture of their way of thinking and feeling will appearthat renders
theirideas as free from the bias of the Europeanobserveras is possible"
(KC, v). Ratherthan opening up questions of control over the production and circulationprocess, sharingthe task of writing added a whole
new set of tools for extending and naturalizingethnographicauthority.
Including long stretches of the words of Others does not make
ethnographicwriting automaticallymore dialogic or egalitarian.The
inverse principle is, however, also true--collaborative texts are no
more resistantto attemptsto open up questions of authority,representation, and textual hierarchythan other modes of ethnographywriting.
While we are not suggesting that all other collaborativeor dialogic
texts necessarily involve the same sorts of erasuresand contradictions,
we would suggest that rhetoricsof dialogicality can, as in the case of
Boas, serve to extend the techniques for establishing metadiscursive
control that are open to scholarlywriters.Although we applaudefforts
to incorporateexplicit commentary on the production and editorial
process into dialogic texts, we would cautionthat such reflexive moves
can themselves pave the way for furtherextensions of metadiscursive
authorityby placing more and more of the researcher'sown practices

within the purview of his or her own interpretiveauthority.Emergent

ethnographicgenres of reflexive, dialogic, and non-fictional narrative
arethus no less in need of metadiscursiveanalysis and critiquethanany
of their predecessors.
As we noted in the beginningof this article,our interestin the HuntBoas collaboration forms part of an examination of metadiscursive
practices and modernity. We have attempted to shift the frame of
referencefrom a rhetoricalreadingof texts to analysis of how texts are
produced, circulated, received, and infused with authority. While
attentionto the techniquesof representationand persuasionthat can be
discernedwithin texts is crucial,we have triedto place them within the
full range of historically and socially situated acts of telling, writing,
reading, translating,editing, corresponding,commissioning, publishing, and the like in which they are embedded.We have pointed to the
way that explicit features of the texts (such as the origin narrativesof
the entextualizationprocess presentedin Boas's prefaces) and implicit
dimensions(stylistic parameters,the mannerin which texts are inserted
in publications, the erasure or marginalizationof texts or textual
elements, directives for textual productionthat only appear in correspondence,etc.) attemptto regulatehow discourse is produced,circulated, received, and authorized.We suggested that even in cases in
which one party is able to regulate this process in large measure-as
Boas achieved in the production of Kwakwaka'wakw textsmetadiscursive practices are always sites of contestation. As Pierre
Bourdieu's02work on communicativecompetence suggests, the outcome of such contentionis less adequatelycharacterizedin terms of a
utopian vision of dialogic encounter than as a political-economic
analysisof access to capital,symbolic and otherwise,thatenables some
participantsto more forcefully shape the rules that guide both how
discourse can legitimately be produced, circulated, and received and
who gets to performthese roles and in what manner.
We have suggested that modernity has from the start involved
particularsorts of contestationsover metadiscursivepractices.Textual
constructionsof traditionhave served for more than three centuriesas
a key means of constructingmodern subjects and discourses and of
linking them to supposedly pre-modern subjects and discourses in
linearandteleological ways. As this exercise was scientizedin the early
nineteenthcentury,the ability to cover up the traces of metadiscursive
practices and to eliminate or at least marginalizeforms of resistance

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became key features of the production of authenticallypre-modern

texts. By attempting to place them within the scope of this larger
modernistenterprise,we are hardlysaying thatthe Boas-Hunttexts are
historicallyunimportant.
To the contrary,we have attemptedto show
thattheyformedcrucialdimensionsnot only of creatinganAmerican
discipline of anthropologybut of constructingfin de siecle modernity
as well. While we have focused here on the first 300 years of
modernity,these questions are of no less importanceto contemporary
events. In the debateaboutglobalization,nationalism,and the rhetorics
that target immigrants and communities of color at the end of the
twentiethcentury,textual constructionsof pre-modernOtherscontinue
to be valuable resourcesfor legitimatingimages of modernity.
NOTES
1. IraJacknis,"GeorgeHunt,Collectorof IndianSpecimens,"in ChieflyFeasts: The
EnduringKwakiutlPotlatch, ed. Aldona Jonaitis(New York, 1991): 224. In citing the
works of Franz Boas, we have employed the following abbreviations:
BBT
Bella Bella Texts,ColumbiaUniversity Contributionsto Anthropology,
vol. 5 (New York, 1928).
CEK
Contributionsto the Ethnology of the Kwakiutl,Columbia University
ContributionsTo Anthropology,vol. 3 (New York, 1925).
CT
Chinook Texts, Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin No. 20 (Washington,
D.C., 1894).
DFM
"Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians"in Race,
Language, and Culture(1914; New York, 1940).
EK
"Ethnology of the Kwakiutl" in Thirty-FifthAnnual Report of the
Bureau of AmericanEthnology, 1913-1914, Part 1 (Washington,D.C.,
1921), 41-794.
IBC
IHAIL
IIJAL
Kathlamet
KC
KE
Keresan
Kutenai
The Indiansof BritishColumbia,"Journal of the AmericanGeographical Society of New York28 (1896): 229-243.
"Introduction"in Handbookof American Indian Languages, ed. Franz
Boas (Washington,D.C.,1911), 5-83.
"Introductory,"InternationalJournal of American Linguistics 1 (July
1917): 1-8.
KathlametTexts. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 26. (Washington, D.C., 1901).
KwakiutlCultureas Reflected in Mythology(New York, 1935).
KwakiutlEthnography,ed. Helene Codere (Chicago, 1966).
Keresan Texts,Publicationsof the AmericanEthnologicalSociety, Vol.
3, Parts 1 and 2 (New York, 1928).
Kutenai Tales, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 59 (Washington, D.C., 1918).

KVI
The Kwakiutl of VancouverIsland, Publications of the Jesup North

Pacific Expedition, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural
History, vol. 7, part 2 (New York, 1909).
Kwakiutl
Kwakiutl Tales, Columbia University Contributionsto Anthropology,
Vol. 2 (New York, 1910).
KwakiutlNS KwakiutlTales: New Series, Part 1: Translations,ColumbiaUniversity
Contributionsto Anthropology,vol. 26 (New York, 1935).
MBC
The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians, The Jesup North Pacific
Expedition, Anthropology, Memoirs of the American Museum of
NaturalHistory, vol. 2 (New York, 1898).
ME
"The Methods of Ethnology"AmericanAnthropologist22 (Oct.-Dec.
1920): 311-321.
MF
"Mythology and Folklore" in General Anthropology,ed. Franz Boas
(Boston, 1938), 609-626.
MFNAI
"Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians"in Race,
Language and Culture(1916; New York,1940), 451-490.
MPM
The Mind of PrimitiveMan (1911; New York, 1965).
PA
PrimitiveArt (Oslo, Norway, 1927).
PAAR
"Some Philological Aspects of AnthropologicalResearch,"Science 23
(April 27, 1906): 641-645.
RA
"RecentAnthropology2," Science 98 (1943): 334-337.
RKI
The Religion of the KwakiutlIndians, Part 1: Texts (New York, 1930).
SAPL
"Sytlistic Aspects of PrimitiveLiterature,"Journal of American Folklore 38 (Jult-Sept. 1925): 329-339.
SS
TheSecret Societies and Social Organizationof the Kwakiutl,Reportof
The U.S. National Museum (Washington,D.C., 1897).
TM
"TsimshianMythology,"in Thirty-FirstAnnualReportof the Bureauof
AmericanEthnology (Washington,D.C., 1916), 29-1037.
TT
TsimshianTexts, Bureauof AmericanEthnology, Bulletin 27(1902).
Ira Jacknis and Daniel Segal provided illuminatingand provocativereadings of an
earlier draft of this essay. Audiences at the University of Western Ontario and the
University of Pennsylvania also challenged our argumentin fruitful ways. We also
appreciatecommentsoffered by the reviewersof the essay for AmericanQuarterlyand
by the journal's editors,Lucy Maddox and TeresaMurphy.RobertS. Cox, Manuscript
Librarianof the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia,graciously assisted us
in reviewing the Boas-Hunt correspondence;we would like to thank the Society for
permissionto quote from Boas's unpublishedcorrespondence.
2. We have adopted the term Kwakwaka'wakw, instead of Kwakiutl, in keeping
with contemporaryusage in British Columbiancommunities.
3. Boas 7/24/05, quoted in George Stocking, "The Boas Plan for the Study of
AmericanIndianLanguages,"in Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditionsand
Paradigms, ed. Dell Hymes (Bloomington, Ind., 1974), 123.
4. Marian Smith, "Boas's 'Natural History' Approach of Field Method," in The
Anthropology of Franz Boas, ed. Walter Goldschmidt, American Anthropological
Association Memoir 61, no. 5, pt. 2 (1959), 51.
5. MarvinHarris,TheRise of AnthropologicalTheory(New York, 1968), 314-315;
George Peter Murdock,Social Structure(New York, 1949), xiv.
6. Dell Hymes, "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American
Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia, 1981); Dell Hymes, "Language,Memory, and Selective
Performance:Cultee's 'Salmon's Myth as Twice Told to Boas," Journal of American
Folklore 98 (Oct.-Dec. 1985): 391-434.

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7. James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardtin the Melanesian World
(Berkeley, Calif. 1982); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCenturyEthnography,Literature,and Art (Cambridge,Mass, 1988).
8. George Marcusand Michael M. J. Fischer,Anthropologyas CulturalCritique:An
ExperimentalMomentin the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986).
9. Arnold Krupat,Ethnocriticism:Ethnography,History, Literature(Los Angeles,
Calif., 1992), 98-100.
10. JohnLocke, Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding(1690; New York, 1959).
11. See John Aubrey, Three Prose Works,ed. John Buchanan-Brown(1686-87;
Carbondale,Ill., 1972), 290. Remains of Gentilismeand Judaisme was not published
until the nineteenthcentury.
12. Judith Berman, The Seal's Sleeping Cave: The Interpretation of Boas's
Kwakw'alaTexts.Ph.D. dissertationin Folkloreand Folklife, Universityof Pennsylvania, 1991; Judith Berman, "Oolachan-Woman'sRobe: Fish, Blankets, Masks, and
Meaning in Boas's Kwakw'ala Texts" in On the Translation of Native American
Literature, ed. Brian Swann (Washington, D.C., 1992), 125-162; Judith Berman,
"GeorgeHuntandthe Kwak'walaTexts,"AnthropologicalLinguistics36 (1994): 483514; JudithBerman,"'The Cultureas It Appearsto the IndianHimself: Boas, George
Hunt, and the Methods of Ethnography"in Volksgeistas Methodand Ethic: Essays on
Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W.
Stocking, Jr. (Madison,Wise., 1996), 215-56. Ira Jacknis, "FranzBoas and Photography," Studies in Visual Communication10 (1984): 2-60; IraJacknis, The Storage Box
of Tradition:Museums,Anthropologists,and KwakiutlArt, 1881-1991, Ph.D. dissertation in Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1989; Ira Jacknis, "George Hunt,
Collectorof IndianSpecimens"in ChieflyFeasts: TheEnduringKwakiutlPotlatch, ed.
Aldona Jonaitis (New York, 1991), 177-224; Ira Jacknis, "George Hunt, Kwakiutl
Photographer"in Anthropologyand Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven, Conn.,
1992), 143-51; Ira Jacknis,"The EthnographicObject and the Object of Ethnology in
the Early Careerof FranzBoas," Volksgeistas Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian
Ethnographyand the GermanAnthropologicalTradition,ed. George W. Stocking, Jr.
(Madison, 1996), 185-214.
13. M. M. Bakhtin,The Dialogic Imagination:Four Essays, ed. Michael Holmquist
(Austin, Tex., 1981), 342-344; see also RichardBauman, "Contextualization,Tradition, and the Dialogue of Genres:Icelandic Legends of the Kraftaskild"in Rethinking
Context:Languageas an InteractivePhenomenon,ed. AlessandroDurantiand Charles
Goodwin (Cambridge,1992), 125-145.
14. Cf. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds., Natural Histories of Discourse
(Chicago, 1996).
15. See Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, "Genre, Intertextuality,and Social
Power,"Journal of LinguisticAnthropology2 (Dec. 1992): 131-172.
16. Regna Darnell,"FranzBoas, EdwardSapir,andthe AmericanistText Tradition,"
HistoriographiaLinguistica 17 (1990): 129-44.
17. This phrase is taken from a letter that Boas wrote to Hunt in which he was
speakingspecifically of accountsof the productionof materialculture:"Thebest thing
you could do would be to sit down and think what the Kwakiutl used for cooking,
including every thing from beginning to end, then what they used for wood-working,
for painting, for making basket-work,for fishing, for hunting,etc." Boas to Hunt, 13
Jan. 1899, quoted in Jacknis, "GeorgeHunt, Collector," 190.
18. Berman,"Seals' Sleeping Cave," 33, notes that Hunt repeatedlyasked Boas for
funds to pay elders for information.

19. Boas to Hunt, 7 Jan. 1901, ProfessionalCorrespondenceof FrankBoas, Library

of the AmericanPhilosophical Society, Philadelphia(hereafterAPS).
20. See Cannizzo, "George Hunt and the Invention,"50; Jacknis, "George Hunt,
Collector," 188.
21. George W. Stocking, Jr.,Race, Culture,and Evolution:Essays in the History of
Anthropology(New York, 1968), 204.
22. Hymes, "Language,Memory, and Selective Performance."
23. Berman,"The Cultureas it Appears,"224. For studies of this collaboration,see
Helene Codere, "Introduction"in Franz Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography, ed. Helen
Codere (Chicago, 1966), xi-xxxii; JeanneCannizzo, "GeorgeHunt and the Invention
of Kwakiutl Culture," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 20 (Feb.
1983): 44-58; Douglas Cole, CapturedHeritage: The Scramblefor Northwest Coast
Artifacts (Seattle, 1985); Jacknis, "FranzBoas and Photography";Jacknis, "Storage
Box"; Jacknis,"GeorgeHunt, Collector";Jacknis,"GeorgeHunt, KwakiutlPhotographer";RalphMaud,A Guide to B.C. IndianMythand Legend:A ShortHistoryof MythCollectingand a Surveyof Published Texts(Vancouver,1982); RonaldRohner,"Franz
Boas: Ethnographeron the NorthwestCoast"in Pioneers of AmericanAnthropology:
The Uses of Biography, ed. June Helm (Seattle,1966), 149-212; Ronald Rohner,ed.,
The Ethnographyof Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Writtenon the
Northwest Cost from 1886-1931 (Chicago, 1969). Berman's work is particularly
pertinentin that it details the productionof the Kwagul texts; see Berman,"TheSeal's
Sleeping Cave"; Berman, "Oolachan-Woman'sRobe"; Berman, "George Hunt";
Berman,"The Cultureas it Appears."
24. Berman,"The Cultureas it Appears,"27.
26. Boas to Hunt, 18 Apr. 1906, APS.
27. Boas to Hunt, 5 June 1905, APS.
28. Boas to Schultze-Jena,10 Sept.1928, APS.
29. Jacknis, "GeorgeHunt, Collector," 181.
31. Boas to Hunt, 23 Jan. 1918, APS.
32. Boas to Hunt,29 Sept. 1920, quotedin Berman,"TheSeal's Sleeping Cave,"43.
33. Jacknis, "GeorgeHunt, Collector," 188, 120.
34. Hunt to Boas, 1 Dec. 1897, APS.
35. Berman,"The Seal's Sleeping Cave," 30.
36. Jacknis, "George Hunt, Collector," 205, 222; Cannizzo, "George Hunt";
Berman,"The Cultureas it Appears,"234; Berman,"The Seal's Sleeping Cave," 34.
37. Hunt to Boas, 29 March 1910, APS.
38. Hunt to Boas, 7 May 1916, APS.
39. Berman, "The Seal's Sleeping Cave," 46-48; Berman, "The Culture as it
Appears,"233.
40. Dell Hymes, "Folklore's Nature and the Sun's Myth," Journal of American
Folklore 88 (Oct.-Dec. 1975): 346-369; Bauman,"Contextualization."
42. Hunt to Boas, 7 Oct. 1916, APS.
43. Hunt to Boas, 28 Feb. 1917 and 31 Jan. 1917, APS.
44. Boas to Hunt, 14 Feb. 17, APS.
45. Boas to Hunt, 15 Dec. 17, APS.
46. Hunt to Boas, 4 Feb. 1918, APS.
47. Huntwrote to Boas, for example, on 9 Mar. 1896, "Ittakes lots of stadyingto Put
it Down Right and I hope you like them now?"

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48. Berman,"TheSeal's SleepingCave,"27, 36; see also FlorenceGraybilland Victor

Boesen, EdwardSherriffCurtis:Visionsof a VanishingRace (New York, 1976).
49. Quoted in Berman, "The Seal's Sleeping Cave," 42.
51. It shouldbe noted, however, thatBoas relatedsome texts to "houses,""families,"
and "clans"ratherthan simply to "Kwakiutlculture"as a whole.
55. Berman,"The Seal's Sleeping Cave," 41, 50.
57. Franz Boas and George Hunt, II.-Kwakiutl Texts. Publications of the Jesup
North Pacific Expedition, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History,
Whole Series, vol. V, Anthropology,vol. 4 (Leiden, 1902), 3.
58. Hymes, "Language."
59. See Briggs and Bauman, "Genre,Intertextuality,and Social Power."
60. See Ralph Maud, "The Henry Tate-FranzBoas Collaborationon Tsimshian
Mythology,"American Ethnologist 16 (Feb. 1989): 156-162 for a study of the TateBoas collaboration.
61. Jacknis, "GeorgeHunt, Collector," 188, 220.
62. Berman,"Seal's Sleeping Cave," 48.
64. Franz Boas and George Hunt, Kwakiutl Texts 2. The Jesup North Pacific
Expedition, Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 3 (Leiden,
1920), 3.
65. After the deathof his first wife, T'lalilhi'lakw (or, in English, Lucy), Hunt wrote
Boas on 18 June 1908 that "Thisis aboutthe Hardestthing I ever got. thatis to lose my
Dear loving wife. who was a great Help to Both you and me in the work I have to Do
for you." He added in a letter writtenthree months later that ". I am trying to Do the
work for you. and I find thatit is Hardwithoutthe Help I use to get from my Dear wife
for some times I would forget some thing in my writing these she would tell me. But
now I got to get some one to tell me. and I have to Pay for It. so it come Hardfor me"
(Hunt to Boas, 18 Sept. 1908, APS).
66. Some importantexceptions are worthy of comment. Boas does not follow his
commentson the "disappearance"
of "thewhole cultureof the Bella Bella" and the lack
of informantswith an assertionof the authorityof the texts (BBT, ix).
67. See Briggs and Bauman,"Genre."
68. The philological cast of Americanist ethnology was established well before
Boas. The work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft had a formative influence (see Richard
Bauman, "The Nationalization and Internationalizationof Folklore: The Case of
Schoolcraft's 'Gitshee Gauzinee,'" WesternFolklore 52 (1993): 247-259 and Richard
Bauman, "RepresentingNative American Oral Narrative:The Textual Practices of
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft,"Pragmatics 5 (June 1995): 167-183), and the program
establishedby John Wesley Powell for the Bureauof AmericanEthnology institutionalized a centrally philological orientation(see John Wesley Powell, "Reportof the
Director,"Second Annual Report of the Bureau of [American] Ethnology, 1880-1881
(Washington,D.C., 1883); see also Elizabeth Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington, Ind., 1984); CurtisM. Hinsely, Savages and Scientists:
The SmithsonianInstitutionand the Developmentof AmericanAnthropology(Washington, D.C., 1981); Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and James M. Nyce, "Linguistic Text
Collection and the Developmentof Life History in the Work of EdwardSapir"in New

Perspectives in Language, Culture,and Personality, ed. William Cowan, Michael K.

Foster, and KonradKoemer (Amsterdam,1986), 495-529; StephenO. Murray,Group
Formationin Social Science (Carbondale,Ill., 1983). On Boas and Herder,see Gerald
Broce, "Discontent and Cultural Relativism: Herder and Boasian Anthropology,"
Annals of Scholarship 2 (1981): 1-13, and Matti Bunzl, "Franz Boas and the
HumboldtianTradition:From VolksgeistandNationalcharakterto an Anthropological
Conception of Culture" in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian
Ethnographyand the GermanAnthropologicalTradition,ed. George W. Stocking, Jr.
(Madison,Wise., 1996), 17-78.
69. Stocking, "Boas Plan," 455; Stocking, Race, 214; RobertLowie, "FranzBoas,
Anthropologist,"Scientific Monthly56 (Feb. 1943): 183-184.
70. Letter from Boas to William Holmes, 24 July 1905; quoted in George W.
Stocking, Jr., ed., The Shaping of AmericanAnthropology,1883-1911: A Franz Boas
Reader (New York, 1974), 123.
71. Stocking, Race, 224. On Herder,see RichardBauman and Charles L. Briggs,
"Language Philosophy as Language Ideology: John Locke and Johann Gottfried
Herder,"in Paul Kroskrity,ed., Regimes of Language (Santa Fe, N.M., in press).
72. See also Aldona Jonaitis, ed., A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native
AmericanArt (Seattle, 1995).
73. A compilation with a valuable guide to sources is Peter Nabokov ed, Native
American Testimony:A Chronicle of Indian-WhiteRelations from Prophecy to the
Present (New York, 1991).
74. See for example Kutenai,268-71 and CEK, 29-31 for texts regardingepidemics
and CT, 270-74; TM, 355-92; BBT, 124-47; KC 185 on warfare.
75. See Douglas Cole, "TheHistoryof the KwakiutlPotlatch"in ChieflyFeasts: The
Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch, ed. Aldona Jonaitis (New York, 1991), 135-168 on
attemptsto suppresspotlatchingand Kwakwaka'wakwresponses.
76. Hymes, "Folklore'sNature,"358.
77. Berman,"Oolachan-Woman,"127.
78. See, for example, Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago,
1976).
79. See Stocking, Race, 231.
80. EdwardSapir,Review of KwakiutlTales by FranzBoas, CurrentAnthropological Literature1 (July-Sept. 1912): 193-198.
81. Boas to Holmes, 24 July 1905; quoted in Stocking, The Shaping of American
Anthropology,123.
82. Aubrey, ThreeProse Works.
83. Oliver Lawson Dick, "The Life and Times of John Aubrey."In Aubrey's Brief
Lives (Harmondsworth,1949), Ivii.
84. Dick, Life and Times, xcvi-scvii.
85. JohannGottfriedHerder,SiimtlicheWerke,ed. BernhardSuphan,vol. 8 (18771913; Hildesheim, Germany 1967), 392.
86. Herder,Simtliche Werke,vol. 9, p. 532.
87. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm's Household Tales, trans. MargaretHunt
(London, 1884).
88. See Charles L. Briggs, "MetadiscursivePractices and Scholarly Authority in
Folkloristics,"Journal of AmericanFolklore 106 (Fall 1993): 387-434 and JackZipes,
The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York,
1988); also see Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing:Problems in the Containmentof
Representation(New York, 1991).

528
AMERICAN
QUARTERLY
89. See RichardG. Bremer,IndianAgent and WildernessScholar: TheLife of Henry

Rowe Schoolcraft (Mt. Pleasant,Mich., 1987).
90. See Bauman,"TheNationalization and Internationalizationof Folklore," and
"RepresentingNative American Oral Narrative."
91. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855; Rutland, Vt.,
1992).
92. The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge,1991).
93. Jacknis, "GeorgeHunt, KwakiutlPhotographer."
94. Stocking, Race, 231.
95. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); JonathanFriedman,"ThePast in the Future:History and the Politics of
Identity," American Anthropologist 94 (Dec. 1992): 837-859; Richard Handler,
Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison, Wisc., 1988); Richard
Handlerand Jocelyn Linnekin,"Tradition,Genuineor Spurious,"Journal of American
Folklore 97 (July-Sept. 1984): 273-290; Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, Tex., 1982).
96. To be sure, Boas was not alone in his efforts to expandinstitutionalbases for the
production and reception of Native American texts -he contributedto the textual
agendas of the SmithsonianInstitution,the AmericanMuseum of NaturalHistory, and
other institutions(see Regna Darnell, Daniel Garrison Brinton: The 'Fearless Critic'
of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Publications in Anthropology, No. 3
(Philadelphia,1988); Fine, Folklore Text; Hinsley, Savages; Jacknis, "StorageBox"
and "The EthnographicObject";Murray,Group).
97. George W. Stocking, Jr., The Ethnographer'sMagic and Other Essays in the
History of Anthropology(Madison, Wisc., 1992), 91; emphasis in original.
98. James Clifford, "On EthnographicAllegory" in WritingCulture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography,ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley,
Calif., 1986), 113.
99. Clifford, "EthnographicAllegory," 118; emphasis in original.
100. Clifford, "EthnographicAllegory," 120-121.
101. Clifford, Person and Myth, 138; emphasis in original.
102. Language and SymbolicPower, trans.Gino Raymondand MatthewAdamson.
(Cambridge,Mass., 1991).


Bauman and Briggs On Boas and Hunt

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"The Foundation of All Future Researches": Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts,

and the Construction of Modernity

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"TheFoundationof All FutureResearches":

My friend,George Hunt,will readthis to you ... is good thatyou shouldhave

This quote was culled by Ira Jacknis from the correspondence

in the contextof offeringa feast.

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 481

using them as a prime example of his preoccupationwith ethnographic

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standardizinglanguage,nostalgic representationsof pre-modern"folk"

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languagesandtraditionsof Othersandwiththeirsystematiccomparison, includingtheircomparisonto the discursiveand culturalforms

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older anthropology that can be disassociated from Boas's larger

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 485

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agendas, Boas's "requestsand...specific questions,"Hunt's notes, and

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 487

and whose dictation was perfectly satisfactory"(Kutenai, v). Boas

a reportof a good deal of workaccomplished

Such threats appear to have made quite an impression.20Second,

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an 'idiotic' story, or when he found it necessary to become 'a little

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURE RESEARCHERS" 489

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In the course of their extensive correspondence,Boas asked Hunt to

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 491

and syntacticaccuracyof Hunt'stexts as well as his authorityto

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markedlyarchaicstyle. He writes Boas with regardto a recentpotlatch

thestoriesin themis takenfromfourorfive storiesto makeone story,andit

This quote provides an ironic and fascinating assertion; at the same

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 493

was intertwined,of the social and political-economic inequality that

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which HuntregardedBoas is apparentin the former'sacknowledgment

storieswithoutyourgreatHelpto me, therefor I say my workis only one

Hunt's clear awareness of the social and economic inequality of his

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 495

their authority-as a voice that could speak for "Kwakiutlculture"in

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In Hunt's case, Boas did not object to his becoming a reader of

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURE RESEARCHERS" 497

and Tsimshiannarrativesare to be told on Tate and Hunt, he did not

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Discussions in the prefaces of what Boas saw as shortcomingsof the

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURERESEARCHERS" 499

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thatwe have to do, to make such materialaccessible.... We must furnish

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"THEFOUNDATIONOF ALL FUTURE RESEARCHERS" 501

In reflecting back on this study in 1935, Boas strengthenedthe claim