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Chapter 1: Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data: Boasian Views
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15 1 Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data Boasian Views Particularly under the stimulus of Jan Vansina (1965, 1986), the possibility of using oral traditions to draw historical inferences regained legitimacy within anthropology (see, for instance, K. Brown and Roberts 1980). The earlier debate in which consideration of any historical value in such data shows a lack of agreement with the Boasian “band of sons,” a phenomenon also evident in the shock to the older sons about what intellectual daughters of “Papa Franz” did, is discussed in chapter 3. The Cultural Elements Paradigm Franz Boas, the prime mover both in the institutionalization of American anthropology and in overthrowing the paradigm of nineteenth-century unilinear evolution theory, purported to view the distribution of cultural elements as not only a basis for reconstructing the history of societies without writing but as the only objective basis. During the first decade of the twentieth century, he directed his students to chart the geographical distribution of institutions, beliefs, and material objects from which to infer the migration of peoples and the diffusion of objects. He and they believed that the center of these scattergrams was the point of origin, that the peripheries where diffusion most recently had extended , and that the wider the distribution, the older the trait was. Sapir (1916) provided the most systematic account of the method for inferring age from area (l distribution). Gathering data and refuting theories were more congenial to Boas than using data for the purposes for which they ostensibly were gathered. When his students began to draw inferences about prehistory, Boas did not support their efforts and shifted to another kind of particularistic study of single cultures, their psychic integration and reproduction. Nev- 16 Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data ertheless, those already pursuing the first Boasian “normal science,” the one in which they had been trained at the turn of the century, continued to try to solve the kinds of historical problems that were never seriously addressed by Boas or by his later students. Particularly in the project of salvaging memory cultures in California, Alfred Kroeber continued mapping cultural traits as reported by his students through the 1930s. John Reed Swanton and Roland Burrage Dixon were the first Boasians to affirm some historical kernel of truth within folk traditions. Both received PhDs from Harvard, where Frederic Ward Putnam, a patron of both Boas and Kroeber, had established a center for anthropological research . Both had taken courses at Columbia from Boas. Swanton would later aver: “Whatever I have done is due to the inspiration of our teacher , Boas” (Swanton:Robert Lowie, July 30, 1957). Dixon, like Boas a veteran of the Jesup North Pacific Coast expeditions (see Freed and Freed 1983), was interested in language family reconstruction. As Kroeber noted in his obituary of Dixon, “Almost alone among their major contemporaries , he and Swanton maintained a sane and constructive interest in tribal and ethnic migration” (1923a:295). This was the enduring interest that motivated Swanton and Dixon at least to consider whether folk traditions might contain grains of history. In their 1914 survey of the continent’s prehistory they did not recommend uncritical acceptance of such traditions as offering transparent history; indeed, they cautiously suggested, “In investigating still existing people like the American Indian we can appeal in the first place to their traditions, which, although sometimes noncommittal and frequently misleading, gain weight when recorded with other data” (Swanton and Dixon 1914:402). The far-from-wholesale endorsement was too much for the Machian positivist Robert Lowie, who was to succeed Swanton as editor of the American Anthropologist in 1923 and was, during the late teens, its book review editor. After claiming that “we are not concerned with the abstract possibility of tradition preserving a knowledge of events, we want to know what historical conclusions may safely be drawn from given oral traditions in ethnological practice” (Lowie 1915:597), Lowie appealed to the exemplification of sound practice provided by attorney-folklorist E. Sidney Hartland (1914). Lowie then proceeded to do nothing other than lay down his absolutistic ban of any even “abstract possibility” of such use of oral tradition: “I cannot attach to oral tradition any histori- [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:56 GMT) Historical Inferences from Ethnohistorical Data 17 cal value whatsoever under any condition whatsoever. We cannot know them to be true except on the basis of extraneous evidence, and in that case they are superfluous, since linguistic, ethnological, or archeological data suffice...