Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920 (review)

There is little dispute about Franz Boas's centrality as a figure in the history of American cultural anthropology. Around Boas coalesced the necessary elements for the founding of a new discipline: the establishment of the academic department as an institutional site; the creation of a distinctive methodology in fieldwork; and the identification of a "big idea" around which his work and that of his many students coalesced. This big idea was, of course, the concept of culture. But the idea of culture—or rather, cultures—antedated Boas by more than a century. Moreover, as Brad Evans points out in this excellent new book, in the decades following the Civil War, what we have come to see as the idea of cultural pluralism was also undergoing a kind of indigenous development, as the tensions attendant upon European immigration, Southern migration, imperialism, and Reconstruction all served to strain to its breaking point the reigning racial ideology of human difference. The work of Before Cultures is in great part to show how the social and ideological pressures of this period necessitated the articulation of something very like cultural pluralism.

As such, this book offers ample evidence for why "culture" eventually came to be such a crucial term in American social and political discourse, as well as an obvious formative concept for the discipline of anthropology. But as its title suggests, Before Cultures is not so much a genealogy of Boasian cultural theory as what Evans calls its "prehistory." Though Evans does show through his discussions of diverse sites the accretions of ideas crucial to the formation of the anthropological culture concept, he also (punning a bit on the idea of cultural lag) emphasizes the problem of why a fully-formed cultural discourse failed to emerge before the early twentieth century. Thus, Evans carefully historicizes the "eccentric" ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing's placement (in full Indian drag) in the pages of popular magazines to show how his use of "culture" (sometimes read as anachronistically modern) partook of the multiple and often contradictory ideas about culture that circulated in the public discourse of the time, including notions of culture as plural and as a measure of cultivation. Or, in his fascinating chapter on the debates over the proper methods for the study of folklore between Joel Chandler Harris (author of the Uncle Remus stories) and John Wesley Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Evans intriguingly suggests that the institutional politics and biases of the BAE contributed to the deferral of the more radical implications of diffusionism (later explored by Boas) and therefore also inhibited the elaboration of a pluralist culture concept.

Evans's disciplinary home is in literary studies, and Before Cultures extends beyond the history of anthropology in a number of ways. Centrally, Evans's book makes a significant contribution to what has been for the past fifteen or so years an important topic in the study of nineteenth century American literature: the place of regionalism in literary realism and literary history more generally. First, he shows how regionalist literature partakes of the spirit of "collecting" that animated folkloristic and ethnological practices in this period. Second (chiefly via a discussion of novelist and critic William Dean Howells) Evans makes an important case for the relationship between American regionalist literature and aestheticism. This emphasis not only serves to challenge dismissals of regionalist writers such as Maine's Sarah Orne Jewett and Louisiana's Kate Chopin as socially and artistically conservative antimodernists, but it allows us to see their work in precisely the opposite light: as participating in the newer spirit of bohemianism and modernism that characterized the most forward-thinking artists and writers of the turn of the century.

If it were possible to separate them, Evans's respective insights into the history of anthropology and literary history would be exciting contributions. But the real impact of the book is in its interdisciplinary juxtaposition of these fields. Thus, Evans also gives us helpful reconsiderations of the racial...