Franz Boas and his early battles against the "establishment" societal model -- after Charles King

In Chapter 3 of his book Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King provides the backstory of the evolution of the establishment position on societal organization and how Franz Boas came to oppose that position. I summarize the high points in this post.

A version of the word anthropology has been around since Aristotle but its impact and meaning has shifted over time. The first academic to have the name Anthropologist in his title -- Edgar Burnett Tyler of Oxford University -- defined the field as the "study of man" while early institutional use -- Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute and France's Musée d'histoire Naturelle -- placed the field as a branch of anatomy or natural history.

For early Anthropologists (a la Frazer), the secrets of human societies lay primarily in the texts that they produced. Beginning in the 1840s, a new word -- Ethnology -- made its way onto the scene, with the premise of extending the study of humans into their "ethnos." The US Government funded the Bureau of Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institute, to go beyond what was ancient and written, to collect observable data about remote groups.

John Wesley Powell was appointed to head up the Bureau of Ethnology and he organized it -- and charged his staffers --after principles espoused by Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan had studied the Iroquois Federation and had written a definitive tome on the history, language, and culture of this alliance. In a follow-up book -- Ancient Society -- he combined his Iroquois learnings with texts from ancient Greek and Roman sources in order to formulate a global model of how societies organize themselves. According to Morgan, all societies run through the same stages in their evolution, beginning with a simple form which becomes more complex over time.

Powell bought into this concept fully, making the book required reading for all staffers and then formalizing his construct in a March 1886 presentation to the Anthropological Society of Washington. The evolution of this thought process is shown in the chart directly below while the characteristics of each societal component are shown in the table immediately following.

Table 1. Identifying characteristics of the three societal components

Characteristic	Savages	Barbarians	Civilized
Societal Organization	Primary kinship group	Tribe	Nation-State
Language	Individual words and simple concepts	Complex phrases	Languages capable of handling complicated abstract ideas
Music	Beat out a rhythm on a log or a stone	Sing a melodic line	Added counterpoint and harmony
Religion	Many gods, often represented as a beast or fowl	Forces of nature as gods	Single god

The role of the Ethnologist, according to the Bureau of Ethnology, was to study (King):

• The frontiers between the stages of human progress and to describe how different peoples have travelled from one end of human culture to the other
• The development of languages and other specific characteristics that defined each of them
• The various institutions --- from tribes to states -- that allowed them to remain coherent units
• Their changing opinions on life and the universe.

In this model, Ethnology was "simply the act of a civilized man conversing with those who had yet to travel the same pathway he had once trod."

After his initial work on Baffin Island, Boas had returned to Germany where he finally fulfilled the requirements for his Ph.D. Based on contacts he had made while in Germany, he returned to North America and traveled to British Columbia to collect cultural data on myths and folktales from North Coast inhabitants.

Upon the completion of that work, he returned to New York where he got a position as an Editorial Assistant at the young and struggling Science magazine. Shortly after beginning work, he traveled to Washington, DC to visit the Smithsonian's collection on the peoples of the Northern Coast. He was questioning of what he saw.

Boas felt that the museum's collection was mis-organized and would continue to be so because the data collection premise and framework were flawed. The solution, he felt, would emerge after comprehensive study of collected data rather than by going in with a template and trying to fit data into boxes. Boas used his platform at Science to argue his position but he was going up against much more powerful people and his contract at Science was not renewed upon its expiration.

©EverythingElse238