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THE ETHNOGRAPHIC OBJECT AND THE OBJECT OF ETHNOLOGY IN THE EARLY CAREER OF FRANZ BOAS IRA JACKNIS In early 1887, a twenty-nine-year-old, relatively inexperienced anthropologist chose the pages of Science to launch an attack on the establishment of American anthropology. Returning from his first field trip to the Northwest Coast, Franz Boas had stopped in at the United States National Museum to study the Eskimo and Northwest Coast exhibits, which had been arranged by curator Otis T. Mason. Criticizing the classification and arrangement of specimens, Boas observed that Mason had juxtaposed objects from diverse cultures on the basis on physical resemblances, arranging them in a putative evolutionary order . Boas argued instead that these appearances were often misleading, insisting that one must first place the artifact in the setting of its generating culture, and, by extension, those of its neighbors, before its true "meaning" could be understood. With this, he shifted the goal of ethnography from the study of discrete objects, in a universal perspective, to a focus on their cultural context, in a local setting (1887c & d).t Over the long run, Boas' critique of Mason established the epistemological grounding for a radically different approach to the study of culture. Ironically, however, Boas' ethnographic work over the next decade and a half did not fulfill the implications of his critique. For the most part, his research resulted Ira Jacknis is Associate Research Anthropologist, Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology , University of California at Berkeley. His professional interests include the art and culture of the Indians of Western North America. He is currently researching the career of Alfred Kroeber and anthropology at the University of California. 1. Studies of this episode include Buettner-Janusch 1957; Stocking 1965:155-57, 1974c; Mark 1980: 32-36; Hinsley 1981: 98-100;Jacknis 1985: 77 -83; Gruber 1986: 178- 79. 185 186 IRA JACKNIS in the collection or creation of discrete objects, many of them not very different from those created by the fieldwork of the evolutionary scholars of the Smithsonian Institution. It was only gradually, and occasionally, that the basis for a fundamentally different ethnography was, imperfectly, realized. The reasons for this are complex. They reflect Boas' own conceptual and methodological predilections, as well as those of the discipline, and of the institutions that funded his work. They reflect the limitations of the various techniques in his ethnographic "tool box"-some of them quite traditional, some more unconventional , some even experimental (cf. Tomas 1991: 76; Jacknis 1984: 2-4). They reflect also the cultural situation and acculturation of the peoples he studied-in a style that was for the most part quite different than that we have come to associate with "participant observation." These and other factors affected the various kinds of ethnographic "objects" that he collected and the way he conceived and manipulated them. Boas used the tools of Western ethnographic technology to collect or produce an extraordinary array of ethnographic objects. For, in addition to what might be called first-order tangible objects such as native-made artifacts, which might be directly collected, there were also second-order ethnographic objects constituted by the ethnographer as part of the process of ethnographic interpretation and representation. Thus, in physical anthropology, in addition to skeletal material, there were plaster casts, measurements, and photographs. For other ethnographic purposes there were, in a visual mode, maps, drawings, photographs, and films. In the aural sphere, there were sound recordings and musical transcriptions; in a verbal medium, there were various kinds of native texts, informal prose, and ethnographic notes, as well as vocabularies and grammars for linguistics. Although Boas, by the standards of the day, was quite reflective about the nature of such objects and the purposes and methods of their collection and constitution, he did not reflect systematically upon the various senses in which he used the term "object" and its cognates. In his debate with Mason, he complained that "in the collections of the national museum, the marked character of the North-west American tribes is almost lost, because the objects are scattered . .." (1887c:62). That same year, in "The Study of Geography," he insisted that "the whole phenomenon, and not its elements, [was] the object of the cosmographer's study" (1887a :140). Again, in the Mason debate, he spoke of"the main object ofethnographical collections" as "the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative ..." (1887d :66). To these must be added his usages of the cognate form "objective...

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