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Ethnohistory 50.4 (2003) 779-781



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Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902. Edited by Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh. Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology, No. 1. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001. xvi + 335 pp. $18.00 paper.)

With the thawing of America's relations with the former Soviet Union, scholars were stimulated to return to an earlier period of collaboration between the two countries: the Jesup North Pacific Expedition to the [End Page 779] Northwest Coast of North America and eastern Siberia, 1897–1902. Sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and its president Morris K. Jesup, this grand research effort was devised and led by curator Franz Boas. Boas's ultimate goal was to elucidate the relationship of adjacent American and Asian Native cultures and ultimately their historical connections.

As the centennial of the expedition loomed in the late 1980s, an informal collective of anthropologists, historians, and related scholars—dubbed Jesup 2—began to conduct a continuing series of conferences leading to exhibits and publications. These efforts—which effectively started with the Smithsonian Institution's exhibition Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska and its accompanying catalog (published in 1988)—led also to the 1993 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, where most of the chapters in this volume were originally presented.

Gateways marks an attempt to summarize where we stand today, especially from a methodological standpoint. It is divided into three parts plus an introduction. In addition to an orientation by the editors, the introduction contains a reprint of a useful summary of the Jesup Expedition by Boas (a never-translated address given in German in 1908) as well as Igor Krupnik's brief appreciation for historian Douglas Cole, whose death in the summer of 1997 preceded by just three months the AMNH Jesup centennial conference.

"Expedition," the first section, covers "the origins and intellectual background of the expedition" (9). Cole contributes an interesting summary of Boas's biographical context and his relationship with Morris Jesup, while Nikolai Vakhtin presents a complementary treatment of Boas and the shaping of the Siberian research by the Russian ethnographers Waldemar Jochelson, Waldemar Bogoras, and Lev Shernberg.

The second section, on "The Collectors," presents "a critical assessment of [the expedition's] fieldwork and collection practices" (9). The four essays in this part represent a contemporary review of several of the expedition's participants, particularly from the standpoint of researcher-Native relationships. Michael Harkin considers the reasons for Franz Boas's relatively minor work on the central coast (Nuxalk, Oowekeeno, and Heiltsuk). Barbara Mathé and Thomas R. Miller critically examine the expedition's photographs as a form of ethnographic representation. Brian Thom discusses Harlan Smith's archaeological field practices, looking at their place within the contemporary discipline as well as issues of ethics and Native consent. Finally, Judith Berman traces the wealth of untapped data residing in the unpublished materials of Boas's collaboration with George Hunt, his Kwakwaka'wakw assistant. [End Page 780]

The final section, on "The Resources," reviews the expedition's "various archival legacies, which provide a lasting trove of documentary evidence for analysis of the expedition's results" (10). Sergei Kan recounts the tortured history of Lev Shternberg's unpublished Jesup volume on the "Social Organization of the Gilyak." Steven Ousley and Richard Jantz take a look at the vast body of biological data, which had never been comprehensively analyzed. Richard Keeling considers the expedition's thousands of sound recordings and associated ethnomusicological data. To conclude, Igor Krupnik has compiled an extremely useful bibliography of published and archival material, and Paula Willey summarizes the 3,500 photographic records at the AMNH.

There is not enough space here to address each of the essays; suffice it to say that they are uniformly excellent and insightful. While almost all of these scholars have been researching and publishing on these topics for years, this volume contains much new information. One difference between this publication and earlier ones from the Jesup 2 team is that Gateways tends to be less about...

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