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Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is known as a "speakerly" text. This essay argues that the novel is also a "listenerly" text—that, as in her work in general, in Their Eyes Hurston celebrates close listening as much as speaking—and that this valuing of listening is informed by the practices of the Black folk she encountered doing research for her anthropological project. In Their Eyes the protagonist Janie performs the kind of critical listenership Hurston observed in the southern Black rural communiuties, and, in contrast to Black communities centered on the male voice, she envisions a different kind of Black community, the organizing principle of which is less individual speaking and more mutual, careful, and sympathetic listening to each other. Widening its focus, finally the essay considers how, with its free indirect discourse, the novel gestures toward establishing a collaboration among the author, the folk characters, and the reader to help bring that "listenerly" Black community into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been significant critical literature on the concept of civilization as intertwined with the concepts of progress and evolution since the 19th century. However, the early work of anthropology does not seem to have received enough attention in the debate on the concept of civilization. The approach of Franz Boas, an important and influential anthropologist who wrote extensively on primitivism, culture and evolution, is noteworthy in this context. This article aims to contribute to the debates around the concept of civilization and to the Turkish literature on Franz Boas by examining how he criticizes the evolutionist-progressivist paradigm. Boas, who thought that the concept of civilization was not identical to the West, rejected the concept of race based on the idea of biological determination and emphasized the relative influence of cultural elements. Thus, against the idea of unidirectional and uniform evolution, he argued that each culture should be explained from within itself. After discussing Boas's ideas, the article also evaluates the main criticisms against him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbuürgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions.

The aim of this article is to offer an initial description and analysis of the material preserved at the Fondo Lenz, kept by the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación in Santiago de Chile, and mainly among the Franz Boas Papers of the American Philosophical Society, concerning the exchange of letters between the German-Chilean linguist Rodolfo Lenz and the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, from 1896 to 1931. It consists of a corpus of 17 letters, in which both scientists exchange materials and information on the development of their research, especially regarding the study of language and culture of the native peoples of the American continent, as well as the development and challenges in the production of proper conditions for the progress of research on such scientific subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franz Boas' articulation of a new historicist and relativistic framework for anthropology stands as the founding moment of the discipline. Accordingly, scholars have sought to trace its source and inspirations, often concluding that Boas' thought was shaped almost exclusively by his German background and characterized by a foundational methodological tension. Here, I instead show that Boas' most creative early work benefitted from close interaction with debates in psychology and that his methodological reflections were part of the much wider series of discussions in North America engendered by the importation of the German Geistes- / Naturwissenschaft debate. Central to such debates, as well as to anthropological ones in these years, were the contested definitions of the human mind and of knowledge. Recovering this shared focus reveals the importance of such questions to Boas' early writings, allowing us to better reconstruct his views on anthropology and to appreciate how he approached the question of how to justify the bounding of human knowledge into specific disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article briefly introduces a path, that starts from the Franz Boas’ anthropological field research in British Columbia about sound, dance and motion among the Indians until the 1930s to the practice of dance and sound as a therapeutic issue in Franziska Boas’ work in New York.

La photographie ethnographique du début du xxe siècle, dans son intention de rendre la « culture » visible à travers la figuration objective de scènes spécifiques de la vie autochtone, peut être envisagée par opposition à deux autres utilisations scientifiques de l’appareil photo à cette époque : d’une part, les photographies anatomiques des anthropologues physiques et, de l’autre, les photographies de fantômes des cercles spirites. En effet, si saisir la « culture » consiste à faire apparaître plus que des corps immobiles sur l’image, ce qui nécessite la mise en place de dispositifs complexes permettant de capturer leur présence devant l’objectif, les premiers ethnographes sont soucieux de ne pas trop en faire non plus, car la « culture » est censée se manifester d’une façon plus subtile que les fantômes révélés par la photographie spirite. Cet article soutient donc que photographier la « culture », au début du xxe siècle, implique de bien calibrer son invisibilité. Il décrit certains des dispositifs et méthodes qu’emploient les premiers ethnographes afin de faire objectivement apparaître la culture.

In 1909 Franz Boas conducted a massive study entitled Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants. In this study, he demonstrated that Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the United States were not racially different from other Europeans because of what he called "the marvelous power of amalgamation." Boas's study dealt a blow to scientific racism because he demonstrated the plasticity and instability of racial types. Boas chose to emphasize the enormous gulf between the white and non‐white races. His research and advocacy were anti‐racist, but the way he promoted assimilation was racist. The next year W.E.B. Du Bois invited Boas to give the final lecture at the conference where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially incorporated. Boas presented "The Real Race Problem," in which he argued that the real problem was the "difference in type." To solve it, the Negro needed to amalgamate by "encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood." American anthropologists joined other Progressive Era reformers committed to assimilation, like the orphan train and Indian boarding school movements. They were each striving to be anti‐racist but went off the rails, contributing to the consolidation of whiteness and the perpetuation of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors argue that Franz Boas had a coherent theory of the secret society, which he did not systematically develop anywhere, but which can be reconstructed from several of his works. The authors are not dealing with the whole theory, but only with the postulate of the warfare origin of secret societies (which later became the foundation of the Männerbund theory). Namely, Boas believed that the secret societies of the North American Indians were originally warlike, but that by the beginning of the 20th century they either retained only the functions of initiation and education, or were transformed into therapeutic and dance societies. Although he claimed that the mythology of the Indians did not provide additional insights into the origins of secret societies, his dealings with the myth of the “culture heroˮ and the “tricksterˮ proved the contrary. The authors try to go a step further and find new contributions for the study of the origins of secret societies in North America in the myth of Wolf as the brother (father) of the “culture hero.ˮ

This article identifies a seminal instance of Indigenous influence on Western thought. It does so by revealing a form of idea power exercised by Indigenous Americans: the power to transmit messages through the medium of people who came to meet and learn from them. In 1894, the Kwakwaka'wakw people of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, invited the anthropologist Franz Boas to take part in their system of Indigenous governance, the potlatch. At a series of dances and feasts, Kwakwaka'wakw leaders performed the notion of transformation, offering a dynamic vision of humanity as a single, varied, and constantly changing global community. Guided by an Indigenous intellectual, George Hunt, the Kwakwaka'wakw civilized Boas into a new way of seeing. They turned him from a static concept of culture, focused on the differences between groups of people, toward a dynamic concept of culture, focused on the universality of global experience—an experience of diversity. To identify such episodes of Indigenous influence, scholars must open a new archive—the vast corpus of Indigenous thought and action compiled by anthropologists—and begin writing a truly global history of ideas.

Copyright of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology is the property of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Memorandum: Memória e História em Psicologia is the property of Memorandum: Memoria e Historia em Psicologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Summary: In the first decades of the 20th century, fieldwork — collection of language data through direct interaction with a native speaker — was foundational to American linguistics. After a mid-century period of neglect, fieldwork has recently been revived as a means to address the increasing rate of language endangerment worldwide. Twenty-first century American fieldwork inherits some, but not all, of the traits of earlier fieldwork. This article examines the history of one controversial issue, whether a field worker should adopt a monolingual approach, learning and using the target language as a medium of exchange with native speakers, as opposed to relying on interpreters or a lingua franca. Although the monolingual approach is not widely practiced, modern proponents argue strongly for its value. The method has been popularized though 'monolingual demonstrations' to audiences of linguists, which, curiously, are not wholly consistent with the character of 21st-century fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fieldwork is a foundational process of reflection and reworking the professional identity of the anthropologist. The ongoing reflexive process provides a hermeneutic whereby the anthropologist recognizes omissions and silences—failures to draw generalizations implicit at the time of the fieldwork. Initial fieldwork in linguistic anthropology among the Cree of northern Alberta is the baseline from which the author's fieldwork has moved from surface description of cultural patterns and behaviors to their underlying ontologies and relationalities, through an increasingly self-conscious commitment to collaborative research directed by community aspirations and agendas. In retrospect, parallel work in the history of Americanist (Boasian) anthropology integrates the insights of long-term fieldwork into rethinking the nature of history and how continuities from the past follow a consistent albeit nonlinear trajectory, with each apparent paradigm shift containing the seeds of its own becoming otherwise. Our present theories and interpretations are no exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A genealogy of the English word racism shows that its dominant sense was shaped by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu around 1940 in order to establish a broad consensus against a narrow form of antisemitism found among some anthropologists in Nazi Germany. Their strategy, which was to challenge the biological concept of race on which racism, on their account, was said to be parasitic was subsequently adopted by UNESCO in 1950 and is still advocated by many today. But this approach was not formulated to address anti-black racism. The limitations of this strategy were quickly exposed by black thinkers such as Oliver Cromwell Cox and Frantz Fanon. They understood that the problem was a form of systemic racism that could not be separated from the economic inequalities produced by slavery and colonialism. It could not be reduced to a system of thought open to scientific refutation: the problem had been misdiagnosed from the outset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its intent to make "culture" visible through the objective depiction of specific scenes of indigenous life, ethnographic photography at the turn of the twentieth century could be understood against two other scientific uses of the camera at that time: the anatomic photographs of physical anthropologists, on the one hand, and the ghost photographs of spiritualist circles, on the other. Indeed, while capturing "culture" involved having more than still bodies appear on the picture, which implied elaborate apparatuses meant to make it happen in front of the camera lens, early ethnographers were anxious not to let too much appear either, as "culture" was supposed to manifest itself more subtly than the ghosts revealed through spirit photography. This article thus argues that photographing "culture" at the turn of the twentieth century meant getting its invisibility right; it describes some of the devices and operations early ethnographers used to make it appear objectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (Albanian and Ligurian 'colonies' in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demographic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of an alternative, 'Latin' eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the 'Race Manifesto', in July 1938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Inspired by Armin W. Geertz’ research into Hopi religion and culture, I focused on the religion of another Native American people, the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) on the American Northwest Coast for the seminar celebrating Geertz’ 70-year birthday. The material on Kwakwaka’wakw is heavily influenced by George Hunt (1854-1933), who worked as a consultant for both Franz Boas and Edward Curtis, but is also to be regarded as an anthropologist in his own right. I choose to concentrate on the ritual aspects of George Hunt’s life story and touch on Hunt’s performance at the Chicago World’s Fair 1893, his participation in the production of Edward Curtis’ feature-length, narrative, ethnographic film In the Land of the Head Hunters(1914), and Hunt’s work as collector for museums and text-editions in collaboration with Franz Boas. In the last part of the paper, I discuss the autobiographical text on his initiation as a shaman “I Desired to Learn the Ways of the Shamans”, published by Boas in 1930, and made famous by Lévi-Strauss in the article “Le sorcier et sa magie” (1949)/ “The Sorcerer and His Magic” (1963) under the initiate’s shaman-name, Quesalid. DANSK RESUME: Med inspiration i Armin W. Geertz’ forskningsindsats inden for hopireligion og -kultur søgte jeg i mit indlæg til Geertz’ 70-års fødselsdags-seminar at belyse nogle kultiske aspekter af religionsudviklingen hos et andet af Amerikas oprindelige folk, kwakwaka’wakw (kwakiutl) på den amerikanske Nordvestkyst. Materialet er stærkt præget af George Hunt (1854-1933), som var konsulent for både Franz Boas og Edward Curtis, men tillige må betragtes som antropolog i sin egen ret. Jeg har valgt at fokusere på de rituelle aspekter af George Hunts livshistorie og berører hans optræden ved verdensudstillingen i Chicago 1893, hans medvirken i produktionen af Edward Curtis’ etnografiske spillefilm In the Land of the Head Hunters1914 og hans meget omfattende indsamling til museer og tekstudgivelser i samarbejde med Franz Boas. Artiklen munder ud i en drøftelse af den selvbiografiske beretning om hans indvielse til shaman “I Desired to learn the Ways of the Shamans”, en tekst, som Boas udgav i 1930, og som Lévi-Strauss gjorde kendt under hovedpersonens shaman-navn, Quesalid, i artiklen “Le sorcier et sa magie” (1949)/“The Sorcerer and His Magic” (1963).

Copyright of O Ideário Patrimonial is the property of Centro Transdisciplinar das Arqueologias do Instituto Politecnico de Tomar and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Franz Boas's 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to ethnography, the use of multiple media, and the collaborative role of Boas's Indigenous partner, George Hunt. Not only did the volume draw on existing museum collections from around the world, but the two men also left behind a vast and now widely distributed archive of unpublished materials relevant to the creation and afterlife of this seminal text. This article discusses an international and intercultural project to create a new, annotated critical edition of the book that reassembles the dispersed materials and reembeds them within Kwakwąką'wakw ontologies of both persons and things. The project mobilizes digital media to link together disparate collections, scholars, and Indigenous communities in order to recuperate long-dormant ethnographic records for use in current and future cultural revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humboldt has had a complex reception in the English-speaking world. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis rhetorical structure he inherited from Fichte has contributed to misunderstanding of his views. In the later nineteenth century he was depicted as an evolutionist, including by his prominent American disciple Brinton. His thought helped to shape twentieth-century anthropology in the USA through the work of Boas, who, however, cited him only once, and it had an impact on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, though how much of one is debated. If Noam Chomsky's claim to be his intellectual heir is dubious, Humboldt's shadow looms over current work on embodied language, and is central to Taylor's (2016) attempt to redirect the Anglophone philosophical tradition towards a conception of man as 'the language animal'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What, if not Durkheim's 'collective representations' acquired during exalted states of effervescence, gives rise to society, culture and science? Marcel Mauss provides another answer by pointing to the different rhythms of social relationships and the human effort to synchronise them. The seasonal cycle of the Eskimo [Inuit], Mauss argues, is in accord with their game; hence people disperse in summer to pursue economic activities in small bands, while they congregate in dense house-complexes in winter and engage in ritual. It would appear that Mauss draws heavily on Boas's contrast between the Kwakiutl winter celebrations and their 'uninitiated' livelihood in summer. These insights have traction for medical anthropologists who are interested in fnding an anthropological explanation for the effcaciousness of 'traditional' medicines or 'indigenous' healing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)