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BOASIAN ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRADITION This volume of HOA has been long in realization. It began with a title, recollected from a colleague's anecdote about a student who had misunderstood a lecturer's reference to the fin-de-siecle. Fantasy Echo seemed a title waiting for a volume, and what volume better than one on the emergent modern anthropology of the 1890s, preresonant, perhaps, of issues facing the postmodern anthropology of the 1990s? Unfortunately, however, suitable material did not come to hand in sufficient quantity, and we tried extending the time span to the First World War-thereby rendering unapt that charmingly suggestive student mishearing. As it happened, the "turn-of-the-century" theme proved also problematic, and it was only with the appearance of several essays on Franz Boas and Boasian ethnography that a somewhat more effective thematic focus began to emerge. On the one hand there were essays on German physical anthropology and archeology in the turn-of-the-century decades; on the other, several on the practice of Boasian ethnography in the same period. In between, mediating, if not unifying, were essays on the German Volksgeist tradition and Franz Boas' own early enculturative experience. Acknowledging the lacunae inherent in such a circumstantially constituted thematic structure, we offer now a volume entitled Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Published in the centennial year of Franz Boas' appointment to the faculty at Columbia University-the establishing moment of Boasian anthropology as the dominant tendency in the United States-the volume may nevertheless have a certain retrospective unity, and perhaps even occasional prospective resonance to the issues facing the discipline at the turn of the millennium. When Franz Boas died in 1942, his obituarist Ruth Benedict-less conflicted , perhaps by oedipal angst than potential inheritors of his patriarchal role-saw him not simply as father of American anthropology, but as a kind of culture-hero forming it out of a preanthropological muck: "[Hje found an3 4 BOASIAN ETHNOGRAPHY AND GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGY thropology a collection of wild guesses and a happy hunting ground for the romantic lover of primitive things; he left it a discipline in which theories could be tested and in which he had delimited possibilities from impossibilities " (Benedict 1943: 61). By the 1950s, however, a reaction had set in: Boas' contribution to the culture concept was minimized (Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952); his ethnography was attacked as atheoretical "particularism" (Wax 1956; White 1963); and among some writers there was a reassertion of the evolutionary approaches he and his early students had systematically critiqued (White 1963; Harris 1968). Along with critique came historiographical revisionism . Far from being a formless slime, there was a well-established preBoasian American anthropological tradition, both ethnographic and theoretical , in at least one member of which (Frank Hamilton Cushing) one could find a pluralistic, holistic "anthropological" notion of culture-based more on ethnographic experience than intellectual inheritance (Mark 1980). Against this it might be argued that Cushing's marginality to the evolving institutional framework forestalled any influence his cultural thought, however premonitory , might have had on later American cultural anthropology. Even so, it is nevertheless the case that, prior to Boas, there was a more deeply rooted Americanist tradition, the appreciation of which was repressed by the Boasian triumph, and the resonances of which may be found not only in the neoevolutionism of Leslie White, Marvin Harris, and others, but in certain more pervasive features of American anthropology-notably the focus on cultural psychology and linguistic differentiation-which were also characteristic of Boasian anthropology itself (Hinsley 1981; Bieder 1986). That said, one must still insist on the formative (or perhaps better, reformative ) role of Franz Boas, both intellectually and institutionally. Although he did not develop a systematic theory of culture, his critique of nineteenthcentury racial and cultural evolutionary assumptions, both in anthropology and popular thought, not only cleared the way for the emergence of a more "anthropological" (Le., pluralistic, holistic, non-hierarchical, relativistic, behaviorally determinist) concept of culture, but in the process established some of its essential presuppositions (cf. Stocking 1968, 1974). And although he did not "invent" the modern ethnographic tradition (and in fact pursued a somewhat different ethnographic agenda), it was primarily among students to whom he gave a postgraduate academic training, and who in turn gave similar training to others, that an academically based professional ethnographic tradition emerged in the United States (cf. Stocking 1976). For Boas, the intellectual and the institutional were...

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