6. Diamond Jenness's Arctic Ethnography and the Potential for a Canadian Anthropology

Diamond Jenness (1886–1969) was one of a handful of professional anthropologists in Canada before the Second World War; however, his theoretical approach appears to have been at least a generation out of date. In the early 1920s, a period marked in Britain by Bronislaw Malinowski's fieldwork innovations and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's novel theoretical approach and in America by Boasian refinements of the culture concept, Jenness was stuck in an evolutionary framework ascendant two decades previously. Jenness had been exposed to both national traditions in his education and early professional life, and his Arctic ethnography was largely contemporaneous with the developments in British and American anthropological theory and methods. In spite of this, his work displays little awareness of the new approaches, leading to his marginalization in the history of the discipline.

Educated at Oxford and employed at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa, Jenness was never located at the center of either tradition. He was, however, one of the first anthropology students of Robert Ranulph Marett, a leader of the British folklore movement and an important figure in the development of British anthropology; afterward, his direct superior in the museum was Edward Sapir, a leading figure in the development of the Boasian paradigm. As a result of his training and employment, Jenness occupies an interesting position at the intersection of the two traditions.

This paper examines the extent to which Jenness's Arctic work represented a distinctly Canadian approach to anthropological method and theory. Jenness was trained in the British tradition but worked in an Americanist context; he went into the Arctic equipped with British theories and methods and returned to an Americanist setting to craft his field notes into ethnography. I am interested in how Jenness's works display the influences of these disparate traditions and whether or not he represents a distinctive combination of the two. I am intrigued as well by the congruency of his work with that of his contemporaries, both in Britain and in the United States. Though Jenness came into contact with younger scholars in the 1930s, for example Frederica de Laguna, William Fenton, and Thomas McIlwraith, he did not supervise the training of any students.¹ However, he is acknowledged as a significant figure in the history of Canadian anthropology.

In this paper I first outline the historiography of anthropology and assesses Jenness's place in the history of Canadian anthropology. Second, I consider the work of Jenness's academic mentor at Oxford, R. R. Marett, and examine Jenness's first fieldwork, in New Guinea. Third, I analyze Jenness's Arctic ethnography. Fourth, I provide a context for his Arctic ethnography by examining the approaches of Jenness's contemporaries, in particular Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Franz Boas, and Edward Sapir. Finally, I discuss Jenness's work as a potentially distinctive Canadian approach to anthropological research. Throughout, I approach Jenness's work on its own terms, though my research on Jenness has not been motivated solely by historicist concerns.

In the historiography of anthropology, Diamond Jenness is one of the "dead ends" in the development of the discipline, interesting to historicists but not presentists largely because he "founded no formal school of Canadian anthropological thought and headed no band of followers" (Lotz 1971:18). Though he was one of the most prominent anthropologists in Canada during the period between the two World Wars (Epp and Sponsel 1980:10; Maxwell 1972:86; Kulchyski 1993:23), he is now largely forgotten.² As a result a strictly presentist approach to his career and works would offer little or no insight or explanatory power. Barnett Richling, who has studied Jenness in depth, offers three hypotheses for the relative invisibility of Jenness in disciplinary histories. First, he notes, Jenness "worked in the shadow of Sapir"; second, he spent his career in the National Museum of Canada, where the range of his research and his contact with colleagues and students was limited; and, third, he made "contributions to anthropological knowledge [which] were primarily substantive, not theoretical" (Richling 1989:71–72).

However...