Reassembling The Social Organization

Collaboration and Digital Media in (Re)making Boas’s 1897 Book

in Museum Worlds
Author:
Aaron Glass Bard Graduate Center glass@bgc.bard.edu

Search for other papers by Aaron Glass in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
,
Judith Berman University of Victoria jberman@uvic.ca

Search for other papers by Judith Berman in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
, and
Rainer Hatoum Goethe University Frankfurt rainerhatoum@yahoo.com

Search for other papers by Rainer Hatoum in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Restricted access

ABSTRACT

Franz Boas’s 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to ethnography, the use of multiple media, and the collaborative role of Boas’s Indigenous partner, George Hunt. Not only did the volume draw on existing museum collections from around the world, but the two men also left behind a vast and now widely distributed archive of unpublished materials relevant to the creation and afterlife of this seminal text. This article discusses an international and intercultural project to create a new, annotated critical edition of the book that reassembles the dispersed materials and reembeds them within Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw ontologies of both persons and things. The project mobilizes digital media to link together disparate collections, scholars, and Indigenous communities in order to recuperate long-dormant ethnographic records for use in current and future cultural revitalization.

Contributor Notes

AARON GLASS is Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. His research focuses on First Nations art, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast, as well as the history of anthropology and museums. Glass’s books include The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (2010, coauthored with Aldona Jonaitis), Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (2011), and Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema (2013, coedited with Brad Evans). E-mail: glass@bgc.bard.edu

JUDITH BERMAN is Research Associate in the School of Environmental Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Department of Anthropology, both at the University of Victoria. Her Northwest Coast research includes many years’ exploration of the work of Indigenous ethnographers George Hunt and Louis Shotridge, of the ethnohistory of the early contact period, and of the translation and ethnopoetics of traditional narrative. E-mail: jberman@uvic.ca

RAINER HATOUM is Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Since 1990, he has pursued multiple research interests in Native North America. These include traditional song and dance and, since 2005, collaborative research projects in which he explored the potential for building lasting partnerships with Native communities on the basis of digitized museum collections. This focus also reflects in his Northwest Coast research and his Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded research project on Franz Boas’s shorthand field notes. E-mail: rainerhatoum@yahoo.com

  • Collapse
  • Expand

Museum Worlds

Advances in Research

  • Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

  • Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton.

  • Barbeau, Marius. 1950. Totem Poles. 2 vols. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada.

  • Barringer, Tim, and Tom Flynn, eds. 1998. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge.

  • Bell, Joshua, Kimberly Christen, and Mark Turin. 2013. “Introduction: After the Return.” Museum Anthropology Review 7 (1–2): 121.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Benedict, Ruth. (1934) 1989. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

  • Berman, Judith. 1996. “‘The Culture as It Appears to the Indian Himself’: Boas, George Hunt and the Methods of Ethnography.” In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George Stocking, 215256. History of Anthropology 8. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Berman, Judith. 2001. “Unpublished Materials of Franz Boas and George Hunt: A Record of 45 Years of Collaboration.” In Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897–1902, ed. Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, 181213. Arctic Studies Center Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology 1. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Berman, Judith. 2015. “Relating Deep Genealogies, Traditional History, and Early Documentary Records in Southeast Alaska: Questions, Problems, and Progress.” In Sharing Our Knowledge: The Tlingit and Their Coastal Neighbors, ed. Sergei Kan and Steve Henrikson, 187246. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Berman, Judith. n.d. “Raven and Sunbeam, Pencil and Paper: George Hunt of Fort Rupert, BC.” Unpublished biographical article.

  • Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

  • Boas, Franz. 1887. “Museums of Ethnology and their Classification.” Science 9 (228): 587589.

  • Boas, Franz. 1889. “On Alternating Sounds.” American Anthropologist 2 (1): 4753.

  • Boas, Franz. 1890. “The Use of Masks and Head Ornaments on the Northwest Coast of America.” Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie 3: 715.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boas, Franz. 1897. The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. Report of the US National Museum (Smithsonian Institution). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boas, Franz. 1909. “The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island.” The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 5, pt. 2. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 8, pt. 2. New York: Stechert.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boas, Franz. 1911a. “Introduction.” In Handbook of American Indian Languages, ed. Franz Boas, 183. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boas, Franz. 1911b. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan.

  • Boas, Franz. 1928. Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

  • Boas, Franz. Professional Papers, B.B61. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

  • Boas, Franz, and George Hunt. Kwakiutl Materials. 1896–1933. 6 vols. Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguistics, 497.3B63c Section W1a.3. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bohaker, Heidi, Alan Ojiig Corbiere, and Ruth B. Phillips. 2015. “Wampum Unites Us: Digital Access, Interdisciplinarity and Indigenous Knowledge—Situating the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing Database.” In Silverman 2015: 4466.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bolz, Peter, and Hans-Ulrich Sanner. 1999. Native American Art: The Collections of the Ethnological Museum Berlin. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Briggs, Charles L., and Richard Bauman. 1999. “‘The Foundation of All Future Researches’: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity.” American Quarterly 51 (3): 479528.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bureau of American Ethnology Collection. Box 63. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD.

  • Christen, Kimberly. 2005. “Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons.” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (3): 315345.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Christen, Kimberly. 2008. “Ara Irititja: Protecting the Past, Accessing the Future—Indigenous Memories in a Digital Age.” Museum Anthropology 29 (1): 5660.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Christen, Kimberly. 2012. “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge and the Politics of Open Access.” International Journal of Communication 6: 28702893.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Clifford, James. 1997. “Museum As Contact Zone.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 188219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Clifford, James. 2001. “Indigenous Articulations.” The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 468490.

  • Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Codere, Helen. 1950. Fighting with Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlatching and Warfare 1792–1930. Monographs of the American Ethnological Society 18. New York: J. J. Augustin.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Cole, Douglas. 1985. Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

  • Cole, Douglas, and Ira Chaikin. 1990. An Iron Hand Upon the People: The Law Against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Duarte, Marisa Elena, and Miranda Belarde-Lewis. 2015. “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies.” Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 53 (5–6): 677702.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Duncan, Kate. 2000. 1001 Curious Things: Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and Native American Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

  • Fienup-Riordan, Ann. 2005. Yup’ik Elders at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin: Fieldwork Turned on Its Head. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron. 2006. “Conspicuous Consumption: An Intercultural History of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Hamat’sa.” PhD diss., New York University.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron. 2009. “Frozen Poses: Hamat’sa Dioramas, Recursive Representation, and the Making of a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Icon.” In Morton and Edwards 2009: 89116.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron. 2013. “Le Musée Portatif: Les Premières Notes de Terrain Visuelles de Franz Boas et la Récupération des Archives par les Indiens.” In Franz Boas: Le Travail du Regard, ed. Michel Espagne and Isabelle Kalinowski, 109134. Paris: Armand Colin.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron. 2015. “Indigenous Ontologies, Digital Futures: Plural Provenances and the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw collection in Berlin and Beyond.” In Silverman 2015: 1944.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron, and Judith Berman. 2012. “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography.” Culture 6 (1): 18.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron, and Rainer Hatoum. Forthcoming. “From British Columbia to Berlin and Back Again: Jacobsen’s Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Collection Across Three Centuries.” In Johan Adrian Jacobsen: Collector of People and Things, ed. Cathrine Baglo.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Glass, Aaron, and Kate Hennessy. Forthcoming. “Museums Collections, Indigenous Knowledge, and Emergent Digital Networks.” In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 1, ed. Igor Krupnik. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Goldman, Irving. 1975. The Mouth of Heaven: An Introduction to Kwakiutl Religious Thought. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

  • Gosden, Chris, and Chantal Knowles. 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. Oxford: Berg.

  • Gosden, Chris, and Frances Larson, eds. 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gough, Barry. 1984. Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846–90. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Harrison, Rodney, Sarah Byrne, and Anne Clarke, eds. 2013. Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hatoum, Rainer. 2014. “The Berlin Boas Northwest Coast Collection: A Challenging Vocabulary for Cultural Translation.” In Northwest Coast Representations: New Perspectives on History, Art, and Encounters, ed. Andreas Etges, Viola König, Peter Bolz, Rainer Hatoum, and Tina Brüderling, 2778. Berlin: Reimer.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hatoum, Rainer. 2016. “‘I Wrote All My Notes in Shorthand’: A First Glance into the Treasure Chest of Franz Boas’s Shorthand Field Notes.” In Local Knowledge, Global Stage, ed. Frederic Gleach and Regna Darnell, 221272. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hawthorn, Audrey. 1979. Kwakiutl Art. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

  • Henare, Amiria. 2005. Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Hennessy, Kate, Natasha Lyons, Stephen Loring, Charles Arnold, Mervin Joe, Albert Elias, and James Pokiak. 2013. “The Inuvialuit Living History Project: Digital Return as the Forging of Relationships Between Institutions, People, and Data.” Museum Anthropology Review 7 (1–2): 4473.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

  • Hogsden, Carl, and Emma K. Poulter. 2012. “The Real Other? Museum Objects in Digital Contact Networks.” Journal of Material Culture 17 (3): 265286.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Holland, Maurita, and Kari Smith. 1999. “Broadening Access to Native American Collections via the Internet.” In Museums and the Web 1999: Selected Papers from an International Conference, ed. David Bearman and Jennifer Trant. Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics. http://www.mwconf.org/mw99/papers/holland/holland.html.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hunt, George. n.d. Manuscript in the Language of the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island. Preface by Franz Boas, reviser. 14 vols. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hunt, Robert. Biographical Sketch, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

  • Hymes, Dell, ed. 1972. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon.

  • Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

  • Jacknis, Ira. 1984. “Franz Boas and Photography.” Studies in Visual Communication 10 (1): 260.

  • Jacknis, Ira. 1985. “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology.” In Stocking 1985: 75111.

  • Jacknis, Ira. 1996. “The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas.” In Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George Stocking, 185214. History of Anthropology 8. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Jacknis, Ira. 2002. The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl Art, Anthropologists, and Museums, 1881–1981. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Johnson, Patricia. 1972. “Fort Rupert.” The Beaver, Spring, 415.

  • Jonaitis, Aldona. 1988. From the Land of the Totem Poles: The Northwest Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Museum of Natural History. New York: American Museum of Natural History.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Karp, Ivan, and Steven Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kwakiutl texts with interlinear translations. 1897. NAA MS 948. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Suitland, MD.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1982. The Way of the Masks. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

  • Locher, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1932. The Serpent in Kwakiutl Religion: A Study in Primitive Culture. Leiden: Brill.

  • Mauss, Marcel. (1950) 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W. W. Norton.

  • Maxwell, Anne. 1999. Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities. London: Leicester University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Morton, Christopher, and Elizabeth Edwards, eds. 2009. Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame. London: Ashgate.

  • Myers, Fred. 2002. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Ngata, Wayne, Hera Ngata-Gibson, and Amiria Salmond. 2012. “Te Ataakura: Digital Taonga and Cultural Innovation.” Journal of Material Culture 17 (3): 229244.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ostrowitz, Judith. 1999. Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

  • Peers, Laura and Alison K. Brown, eds. 2003. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge.

  • Phillips, Ruth. 2011. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

  • Phillips, Ruth. 2016. “Salvaging Salvage Anthropology: Revisiting Frank Speck’s Field Collecting.” Paper presented at the National Museum of the American Indian Centennial Symposium, New York City, 17 September.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Pigliasco, Guido Carlo. 2009. “Intangible Cultural Property, Tangible Databases, Visible Debates: The Sawau Project.” International Journal of Cultural Property 16 (3): 255272.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rohner, Ronald, ed. 1969. The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Written on the Northwest Coast from 1886 to 1931. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rowley, Susan. 2013. “The Reciprocal Research Network: The Development Process.” Museum Anthropology Review 7 (1–2): 2243.

  • Salmond, Amiria. 2012. “Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects: Special Issue Introduction.” Journal of Material Culture 17 (3): 211228.

  • Silverman, Raymond, ed. 2015. Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London: Routledge.

  • Simpson, Moira. 1996. Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era. London: Routledge.

  • Srinivasan, Ramesh, Katherine Becvar, Robin Boast, and Jim Enote. 2010. “Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum.” Science, Technology and Human Values 35 (5): 735768.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Srinivasan, Ramesh, Jim Enote, Katherine M. Becvar, and Robin Boast. 2009. “Critical and Reflective Uses of New Media Technologies in Tribal Museums.” Museum Management and Curatorship 24 (2): 161181.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stocking, George, Jr., ed. 1985. Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

  • Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Thorner, Sabra. 2010. “Imagining an Indigital Interface: Ara Irititja Indigenizes the Technologies of Knowledge Management.” Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 6 (3): 125146.

    • Crossref
    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Turin, Mark. 2011. “Salvaging the Records of Salvage Ethnography: The Story of the Digital Himalaya Project.” Book 2.0 1 (1): 3946.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Walens, Stanley. 1981. Feasting with Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 1872 949 208
Full Text Views 65 10 1
PDF Downloads 51 13 2