2015 AAA Invited Session: A Familiar Stranger: Franz Boas in Contexts

This session underscores the breadth of Franz Boas' reach geographically, politically, professionally and inter-personally. His relationships and positions, altogether more complex than is documented to date, are tethered here to the question: how familiar are we with, arguably, our most enigmatic ancestor? In many ways, “Papa Franz” remains altogether too familiar to us as an icon; yet, he simultaneously persists in a strange aloofness in the history of anthropology by the glaring absence of any comprehensive biography. This panel highlights the work underway to employ the ongoing Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition project in re-invigorated studies of ethnohistory and the history of anthropology, outlining relational aspects of Boas' work with indigenous peoples and students as part of a larger political program involved in his “cultural relativism.” The Documentary Editions of the Franz Boas Papers will make a vast range of ethnographic and professional correspondence related materials available to academic and community based scholars. Access to these materials provides spaces for re-interpreting the effects of his work on the discipline of anthropology in across breadth and variety. Making available such access also allows community based scholars to demonstrate ongoing presence and persistence of traditions on territorial lands vital to their cultural autonomy and continuity. Even Boas' students seem to be familiar figures to many scholars. Re-assessing popular representations of their work in light of newly available documents shows the strangeness of their peculiar consignments to history; thus, demonstrating how some of their work remains significant to contemporary studies, cultural revitalization initiatives and activism. Debates both within anthropological circles and beyond the confines of our discipline surrounding the use and validity of cultural relativism often dismiss the method as a familiarly acute ideological position with little understanding of what Boas actually said, felt or did, let alone how much his position shifted over the course of his career. Furthermore, discussions of Boas' “un-systematized” style of museum display, often emulated by his students, claim that they were engaged in forms of “salvage ethnography” that disenfranchised and/or looted indigenous communities. While this happened in particular contexts, more often anachronistic interpretations of this research program obscure the complex involvement of these scholars and activists in indigenous communities and the committed engagement they showed to communities' politics of resistance and autonomy to colonial domination. Boas' entanglements with imperialism, colonialism and his relational politics vis-à-vis a relentless commitment to science and intellectual freedom are shown to not be easily disentangled from his moral commitments to justice and freedom for peoples in multiple contexts ranging from the local to the global, from Harlem to the Northwest Coast and beyond.

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• #history_of_anthropology
• #frank_boas
• #race
• #racism