Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas

410 Pages·2018·11.361 MB·English

by  Ned Blackhawk, Isaiah Lorado Wilner (eds.)

Indigenous Visions
The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity
Series Editors
Ned Blackhawk, Professor of History and American Studies, Yale
University
Kate W. Shanley, Native American Studies, University of Montana
Named in honor of the pioneering Winnebago educational reformer and fi rst
known American Indian graduate of Yale College, Henry Roe Cloud (Class of
1910), this series showcases emergent and leading scholarship in the fi eld of
American Indian Studies. The series draws upon multiple disciplinary perspec-
tives and organizes them around the place of Native Americans within the
development of American and European modernity, emphasizing the shared,
relational ties between Indigenous and Euro- American societies. It seeks to
broaden current historic, literary, and cultural approaches to American Studies
by foregrounding the fraught but generative sites of inquiry provided by the
study of Indigenous communities.
Indigenous
Visions
Rediscovering
the World of
Franz Boas
Edited by Ned Blackhawk
and Isaiah Lorado Wilner
|NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Published with assistance from the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury Memorial
Fund.
Parts of Chapter 11 originally appeared in Benjamin Balthaser, “‘Travels of an
American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia’: Rethinking Indigenous
Modernity and the Popular Front in the Work of Archie Phinney and D’Arcy
McNickle,” American Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2014): 385–416, and Benjamin Balthaser,
Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great
Depression to the Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).
Copyright © 2018 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
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Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944783
ISBN 978- 0- 300- 19651- 1 (paperback : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992 (Permanence of
Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments, vii
Introduction, ix
Part One Origins and Erasures: The Emergence of a Boasian Circle
1 Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of
Global Consciousness Isaiah Lorado Wilner, 3
2 Franz Boas in Africana Philosophy Lewis R. Gordon, 42
3 Expressive Enlightenment: Subjectivity and Solidarity in
Daniel Garrison Brinton, Franz Boas, and Carlos
Montezuma Ryan Carr, 61
4 “Culture” Crosses the Atlantic: The German Sources of
The Mind of Primitive Man Harry Liebersohn, 91
vi Contents
Part Two Worlds of Enlightenment: Boasian Thought as
Process and Practice
5 Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas: Anthropology,
Equality / Diversity, and World Peace James Tully, 111
6 Of Two Minds About Minding Language in Culture
Michael Silverstein, 147
7 Why White People Love Franz Boas; or, The Grammar of
Indigenous Dispossession Audra Simpson, 166
Part Three Routes of Race: The Transnational Networks of Ethnicity
8 Utter Confusion and Contradiction: Franz Boas and the Problem
of Human Complexion Martha Hodes, 185
9 The Death of William Jones: Indian, Anthropologist, Murder
Victim Kiara M. Vigil, 209
10 Woman on the Verge of a Cultural Breakdown:
Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and the Racial Privilege of
Boasian Relativism Eve Dunbar, 231
11 “A New Indian Intelligentsia”: Archie Phinney and the Search for
a Radical Native American Modernity Benjamin Balthaser, 258
Part Four Boasiana: The Global Flow of the Culture Concept
12 The River of Salvation Flows Through Africa: Edward
Wilmot Blyden, Raphael Armattoe, and the Redemption of
the Culture Concept Sean Hanretta, 279
13 A Two- Headed Thinker: Rüdiger Bilden, Gilberto Freyre, and the
Reinvention of Brazilian Identity Maria Lúcia Pallares- Burke, 316
14 Seeing Like an Inca: Julio C. Tello, Indigenous Archaeology, and
Pre- Columbian Trepanation in Peru Christopher Heaney, 344
List of Contributors, 377
Index, 379
Acknowledgments
This book began with an interdisciplinary conference held at Yale on
September 15–17, 2011, in commemoration of the centennial of Franz Boas’s
treatise on the dynamism and diversity of modern belonging, The Mind of
Primitive Man. We wish to thank our sponsors at the Howard R. Lamar Center
for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, John Mack Faragher, Jay Gitlin, and
Edith Rotkopf, and our cosponsors at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the
Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, David Blight, Dana Schaffer, and
Thomas Thurston. Two members of Yale’s faculty, Glenda Gilmore and
William W. Kelly, played instrumental roles in planning the meeting.
Stephen Pitti and Alicia Schmidt Camacho hosted the memorable dinner at
Ezra Stiles College where much of the conversation that inspired this book
began. We also benefi ted from the involvement of the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, particularly that of the curator of Western Americana,
George Miles, and the special interest taken by Harvey Goldblatt of Pierson
College and Mary Miller, the dean of Yale College at the time.
Several of Yale’s interdisciplinary centers and programs provided much-
needed support. We thank the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; the
MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; the Committee on
vii
viii Acknowledgments
Canadian Studies; the European Studies Council; the Council on Latin Ameri-
can and Iberian Studies; and the Center for Comparative Research. We thank
the departments of History, English, Anthropology, and African American
Studies for their fi nancial and intellectual involvement. The Edward J. and
Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Stanley T. Woodward Lecture-
ship made it possible for us to invite international speakers, and for these
investments we would like to thank the Offi ce of the Provost and the Offi ce of
the Secretary.
A few scholars have played critical roles in the conversation that created this
book. We thank Elizabeth Alexander, Taiaiake Alfred, Elijah Anderson, Seyla
Benhabib, Jonathan Holloway, Matthew Jacobson, J. Kēh aulani Kauanui,
Kerwin Lee Klein, Joshua L. Reid, and Michael Warner for discussions of race,
indigeneity, migration, and modernity that contributed directly to the develop-
ment of the project. Our thinking about the global circulation of knowledge
benefi ted from exchanges with Sebastian Conrad, Joanna Radin, and James C.
Scott. Finally, our editors at Yale University Press, Christopher Rogers, Adina
Popescu Berk, and Erica Hanson, helped bring the book to fruition.
Introduction
Few Western thinkers have engaged with Indigenous people more
closely or reaped greater rewards from that engagement than Franz Boas, the
founder of modern anthropology. In the early twentieth century, as the world’s
self-d eclared advanced nations competed to colonize the globe and exploit its
natural resources, Boas drew upon what he had learned among Native peoples
to present an alternative approach to modernity. Questioning the assumption
that the West could claim the prerogative to rule “the rest” by right of natural
endowment, Boas critiqued the idea of race, the master concept of colo-
nialism. He shaped the modern notion of culture as an interactive process to
which each of the world’s peoples has contributed its portion of knowledge.
And he framed the idea of grammar as a universal characteristic of human
cognition, the borderless ability to structure linguistic meaning. These interre-
lated concepts interrogated the standards by which the world measured prog-
ress, ultimately projecting visions of a shared global community.1
Today Boas is beginning to undergo a reevaluation.2 This is partly because of
his unmistakable importance to contemporary discussions of race, inequality,
empire, and migration—conversations emergent from the peoples he worked
with and the places he worked in, which coalesce around the vulnerability of the
ix