Estranhos no Exterior - As Correntes da Tradição (Franz Boas)

I a year of life as an Eskimo among Eskimos had a profound influence upon the development of my views because it led me away from my former interests and towards the desire to understand what determines the behavior of human beings hey-hey in 1883 a young German scientist called Franz buyers arrived here in the Canadian Arctic hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey he came here to do two things he'd originally done part of his training in geography and he was going to map as much of the coastline which was pretty much unchaste in those

days as possible he was also going to indulge his new interest the study of culture the year before he came up here he'd been reading up as much as possible about the Arctic but unlike most explorers he'd also bothered to take some courses in the local language and up to talk he arrived at kakouton Island just over that hill which was run by a Whaler called James March it was a thriving station at the time and in fact the largest Inuit settlement in the area James much made caribou clothing for boas and his servant villian

bike and outfitted them with a team of dogs in the course of the twelve months he was up here Boas travelled something like 3,000 miles on foot by boat and on sleds like this the work he was to do up here was eventually to change the direction of his own life but it was also to change the way we think about other cultures and the way we think about ourselves okay hey hey hey hey wait bars didn't set out with a specific ambition to study human culture but he had dreamt of going to the polar

regions since his boyhood in Germany he was born in 1858 in Minden Westphalia his father was a prosperous businessman in the town and at the age of 20 beau has left home to study geography at the University of Heidelberg it was during his year of compulsory military training in 1881 that he decided to study the relation of the Eskimo to their environment in his own words he was going to collect anthropological material and make a fara study of the language customs and habits of the Eskimo anthropology was beginning to take form and develop about the

time that he entered the picture it was a site a new field and it offered an opportunity to get some idea of the dynamics of culture and their growth and development in their adaptation and the way they spread and many many aspects of this which would be fundamental to understanding our own culture in our own way of life and this kind of research was innovative and pioneering so it offered a very exciting prospect to him before bars day the Eskimo who lived all round the north polar cap had not been closely studied he undertook a

geographical expedition to map uncharted areas of the coastline of Baffin Island and to get to know the different groups of Eskimo who lived there the only way to the Arctic in those days was by boat when the ice had melted and Boas readily accepted Passage to Cumberland Sound on a ship called the Germania in his months on Baffin Island Boas was to complete the first accurate survey of Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait a considerable piece of Arctic exploration in itself but today the trip is better remembered for his observations of Eskimo life he wrote articles

for a German newspaper who had partly sponsored his trip but he also kept a diary of letters to present to his fiancee on his return these provide a fascinating insight into the ambitions frustrations hardships and loneliness of Arctic exploration before the turn of the century only two days more and the year begins which will take me to you the time passes almost too quickly for the amount of work I have to do here if I accomplish everything I still will not have the time to finish the map and the ethnographic work I shall however attain

my own purposes very well I know very accurately about the migration of the Eskimo and the routes they take how they travel back and forth and their relationship to neighboring tribes one of the things that intrigued him as a geographer was their detailed knowledge of the landscape a fact he discovered when he started to chart the coastline as their knowledge of all the directions is very detailed and they are skillful draftsman they can draw very good charts if a man intends to visit a country little known to him he has a map drawn in the

snow by someone well acquainted there and these maps are so good that every point can be recognized I have to what I like to hide after what I forgot no no no document no opened up to could thinking man all your heart into one can never equal to your survey of you know what it is to prepare you connect each other then how you work at acuña also a cool new mode of the loop Paul Noah doing a local tavern a doctor taught anyone to Talia graph the power hole dr. Daniel optical tell nobody rocks

over time ha ni Toa okay if I if this is a Frobisher Bay here and this is Allen Island here yeah which is the north on this map and even equator then of coordinate go email another telegram eternal the Eskimo exhibit a thorough knowledge of the geography of their country the area they travel over is of considerable extent they have a very clear conception of all the countries they have seen or heard of knowing the distances by day's journeys or as they say by sleeps and the directions by the cardinal points Boas got the Eskimo

of Cumberland sound to draw these maps on paper these he collected and brought back they compared remarkably well with his own as a geographer he'd been taught to believe that the life of people like the Eskimo was entirely determined by their environment he was finding out the hard way that this couldn't be the case today I went hunting but not with exactly splendid success the only thing I shot was pulled under the ice by the current there I sat like an Eskimo behind my ice hole at the water's edge and patiently waiting for I head

to appear cannot imagine what an impression it makes in this cold season to sit so near the edge of the water and to hear the roaring and for me thick fog from the cold water envelops me at my feet the water foams and hisses only a strong current keeps the water from freezing here last night I dreamt very vividly that I was in America and with you the dream was so vivid but I was most disappointed when I woke up in the morning to find myself in the igloo you must not imagine that such as

snow hut is a cold home it is completely papered with skins and two lamps are kept burning they supply light and heat we all sit on a large platform which is covered with caribou skins but I think I still prefer a European home today I hunted just as an Eskimo with a spear and all that goes with it och Satan was the only one who caught anything two seals which I immediately acquired as you see Marie I am now a true Eskimo I live as they do hunt with them and belong to the men of

an Arlington some Baffin Island communities live a life that is in many ways the same as the one that beau has witnessed in Cumberland sound almost a hundred years ago and the qualities that so impressed him then are still needed for survival today the populations that Boaz called Eskimo are known as the Inuit for those like ikkaku who choose to live a largely traditional life hunting for food during winter is still precarious even with a rifle like his ancestors are cashew and his family lived largely off caribou or seal even with all the help of

a new technology game can be hard to kill this was the eighth seal he had stalked that day the others had all got away but as witness life among the Eskimo firsthand it was hardly a case of the gentleman Explorer he saw how much they depended on their environment and how unyielding it could be but he also depended on them and as he charted the coast and filled in the physical features of their landscape he was impressed by the way in which they had mastered life on top of the world whether it was traveling over

ice and snow tracking and hunting game or fabricating their clothes and houses or caring for their teams of dogs boas had to admit as he reflected on human life in the frozen north that what he had learnt as a geographer was incomplete he came to realize that the Eskimo often did things in spite of the restrictions of their surroundings and not because of them environment wasn't the only thing that determined culture oxide tone has caught two seals today and every man in the settlement is to receive a piece is it not a beautiful custom among

these savages that they bear all depredations in common and also are at their happiest best eating and drinking when someone has brought back booty from the hunt the Eskimo are sitting around me the mouth is filled with Rossi liver the spot of blood on the back of the paper shows you how I joined in I often ask myself what advantages are good society possesses over that of the savages and find the more I see of their customs that we have no right to look down upon them we have no right to blame them for their

forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us we highly educated people a much worse relatively speaking a person's worth should be judged by the warmth of his heart today most of the Inuit on Baffin Island live in towns like Frobisher Bay but this Inuit community formed around one family have made the decision to live away from those largely white settlements at all this oddly enough was about the dead honey hotteok Alwaleed in the quraíam new bureaucracy but roaming the ordinary optically the hottest image over a taco avenging it catabolic in genomic what's tomorrow's another

song same of tick-tock quite a bit hotter similar word Kennedy uncommon is always around here today ji-hyun wasagamack job are you over or not is the corner to go Horner only collagen dominic camera Casa Vega borough terminally with not Serena umma Peter Orne attitude Indiana accustomed accepted overall the canadian television as soon as you've ordered the color hawk total make everything after age or novelty item Anna over only unlock Takanawa are gonna go with one of the managed to get auto the addict could you could figure the American ago bigger over tough toe economic Tamika

ought to gladly could he just say with a child of Sunita my nose morocco Bionic toward off at Urbana I don't know how to even knowing that could have movement companies or quasi but look it's observable have enough silver you wanted to be a model giving up Mohamed Sayed Abad blow it Amina and will ago to hit Danica a [ __ ] whatever to know wearing a wearing controller to washable I believe if this trip has for me as a thinking person a valuable experience it lies in the strengthening of the few point of the

relativity of all cultivation and that the evil as well as the value of a person lies in the cultivation of the heart which I find or do not find here just as much as amongst us and that all service therefore which a man can perform for Humanity must serve to promote truth indeed if you promotes truth searches for it and spreads it it may be said that he has not lived in vain in 1885 ba has returned to Germany I was working in the Royal ethnographic Museum of Berlin cataloguing the collection of Bella Coola masks

my fancy was struck by the flight of imagination in the works of art I could see the wealth of thought hidden behind the grotesque masks of these tribes the attraction became irresistible because academic jobs were hard to come by for people like boas America seemed like a better prospect his liberal views and Jewish origins counted against him in Germany they would matter less in a country with so many established immigrant communities and then there were affairs of the heart his fiancee Mary krokov itzá lived with her family in New York in America boas had found

himself a freer intellectual climate a new home and a devoted wife in 1887 he married he also found himself an anthropological project that was to occupy him for the rest of his life in 1893 Chicago hosted a world Columbian Exposition as chief assistant to the anthropology section Boaz arranged for native peoples to show off their cultures a group of Eskimos for example built an igloo and worked their dogs but now his major interest was the cultures that lived on the north coast of America his ambition to display the richness of native Indian life led on

to a job as curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York he came here in the late 1890s and during that time he did a tremendous amount of work in building up the research program it began with an idea of Boaz's to go out and work in the northwest coast and worked with the Indian groups there because they were being endangered of disappearing and their culture disintegrated he wanted to make his complete a collection of the their culture as possible and preserve as much of their material culture as he could stretching from

Alaska down to northern California through present-day British Columbia the tribes of the northwest coast of America were one of the richest and most distinctive areas of cultural wealth that Europeans had encountered the Pacific coast here forms an inextricable net of channels and fjords numerous islands form a narrow passage of water from the southern tip of British Columbia to Alaska through which the ships collide as if on a river this is a primeval country in all its loneliness for a European it is interesting to see nature so free you can understand why anyone might think that

environment entirely determines the way a culture develops when you come up here to the Pacific Northwest Coast of America these islands are as dramatic and as mysterious as the cultures they produced of course Boaz knew that environment wasn't the only thing that shaped the way a culture develops in 1886 he came up here to trace some of the other factors by considering the culture among the tribes of these islands and what a fantastic group of tribes they were tribes like the Klingon Simpson Haida Bella Coola and the tribe that Boas came to know best the

Kwakiutl for Boaz this was an exciting area mainly because of the way in which the tribes were related to each other on the other hand there were certain strong similarities in their culture they shared common customs beliefs and ideas Boaz hoped that the pattern of the differences and the similarities between the tribes as he moved from area to area would reveal more about the way in which a culture was shaped at the end of the last century the activities of traders administrators and of course the missionaries were changing native life forever and Boas felt that

his subject matter in all its aspects was disappearing so he set about trying to save as much of it as possible the way he went about this was to collect everything he found that had anything to do with the Indian way of life in 1886 at Fort Rupert then the center of Kwakiutl life though has got to know a prominent family called hunt it was with George hunt that he struck up one of the most remarkable partnerships in anthropology Agnes Alfred is one of the very few people left who remember the old days as chief

Bobby Joseph explains laughs oh she she was born here at the village Island and born in the winter she doesn't remember the month but it was 96 years ago she was born 96 did Franz Boas ever come here did she remember friends bears I haven't got more time until tougher than I look alone will you it's okay yeah she's a hayloft Ella hi dad no I'm medical floating Oh missed here couldn't blacked in what mood Willem only what she says that obviously our boys did come here you mark elephant and I what we get about

procedure and Lewis every evening that's very important she says that Georgia hunt worked very closely with we both not only as an interpreter but is a total resource person granny says that had it not been for judge Henton boys his effort than a lot of the traditions and customs now recorded may not have been recorded together they were scrupulous ly to document the world of a culture that nearly vanished they collected everything they could of Indian life though as taught hunt how to write Kwakiutl and this meant that whilst he was away from the field

hunt could continue as the field researcher they published papers jointly and Boaz later emphasized that hunted made an indispensable contribution to his research in 1901 Boaz's experience in organizing the material objects of cultural life both in Berlin and Chicago landed him a job as curator at the American Museum of Natural History here he was radically to change the emphasis and aims of organizing museum display for him these items should not just be a collection of curios but rather impart systematic information and provide healthy entertainment and instruction he held this post simultaneously with that of professor

of anthropology at Columbia University in New York but he didn't only teach he was also responsible for organizing a massive research project known as the Jessup North Pacific expedition this among other things was aimed at documenting facts about the physical characteristics culture and languages of all the tribes of the area as well as collecting the elaborate objects that they made if you want to know more about an object it helps not only if you know how it was made but what it was made for because of his intimate and detailed knowledge of Indian life Boaz

was able to place each of these objects in its original context he understood where it fitted in to Indian life so it wasn't just another item in a museum catalog this splendid carving for example of an eagle is a representation of a mythical ancestor of a family that Boaz knew well living at Fort Rupert it's a revealing mask and it shows that from the mythical ancestor the original and first member of the family appeared on earth it's a funeral mask and three or four days after the death of a relative it was used in the

ceremony to symbolize the fact that once someone had died they eventually returned to a land where all members of that family were once again Eagles the ancient and elaborate cultural life of peoples like the Kwakiutl was recorded in minut detail by Franz boas fortunately we also have a visual record of what some aspects of life actually looked like as one of ours contemporaries was the great photographer of American Indians Edward Curtis Curtis had been traveling around America making a photographic record of every remaining Indian tribe as there were enough people alive who remembered the old

ways Curtis commissioned Indians to recreate life as it used to be these were usually dramatic events like the landing of war canoes or performing of ceremonies in authentic fashion and he paid them to make all the necessary traditional objects although it was recreating the past and frowned upon by bars it did place on record just how elaborate ceremonial life had been one unusual feature of certain of these ceremonies was the disposal of vast quantities of personal wealth to the guests who attended had come the distribution focused on two particular objects and raised interesting questions about

value and exchange within the culture knowing what objects are doesn't always tell you everything about them this piece of copper in the shape of a shield for example was almost certainly never used in combat and this amazingly intricate and beautiful blanket of mountain goats here was not designed to keep people warm their ceremonial objects and particularly fine examples of their kind they have great value for collectors of Native art today but when they circulated originally among the tribes along the northwest coast they had a value that couldn't simply be measured in terms of money this

Copic in the shape of a shield is a very interesting example of one of the things that puzzles anthropologists on one level they are a form of currency in fact the highest denomination in a native system of high finance on the other they are ceremonial objects objects of great prestige to own them is an honor a lots known about each individual copper we know who made this one for example we know that it was called the killer whale copper they could be bought or sold they could be exchanged they could even be given away and

very often they were actually cut up and pieces of the copper were distributed very often they were even thrown into the as a flamboyant gesture all of this behavior went on using the copper as a token of exchange in a ceremony both lavish and complex that has earned these tribes a lot of attention from anthropologists and rightly so because it was at the focus of their lives that ceremony was called the potlatch the economic system of the COG Little Indians finds its expression in the so called potlatch the Indian has no system of writing and

therefore to give security to transactions they are performed publicly this public contracting and paying of debts is the potlatch it is largely based on credit justice as the economic system of civilized communities the standard of value is the blanket but for larger transactions objects of imaginary value are used instead particularly pieces of copper these may strictly be compared to our banknotes bo has learned to use film to supplement his anthropological record the subjects he chose were not spectacular but they were an important record of aspects of Indian life a woman swinging her baby in a

cot George hunt carving wood and other crafts like spinning or weaving he wanted to record the attitudes postures and movements that went with various tasks and skills I'm getting a little bit bored with its looks look like a little troll or I you know whoa asian-african she's not that optimistic that it may survive although she's encouraged by the numbers of people who still hold our traditions and her beliefs strongly and those are demonstrated through contemporary policies now beheld now being held every year by young people so she's encouraged by that but she's not certain if

that way of life will sustain itself village Island one of the former centers of Kwakiutl culture is now completely deserted Bobby Joseph recalls life as it was part of the reason for the exodus from these places like village Amman the social pressure to change to to adopt a white man's we we were taught to and told that the way to do that was to become educated and to be productive and be employed out of there so people went with their children to places where there were learning centers where they thought there would be a better

chance with her children to survive what sort of houses were these do these were communal house this a two room house this we're a family of five or six might live you know these would probably be the first houses here and you would notice that a lot of them were built along - yeah for sure because they were seafaring people they just love being that close to the water here this village is quite famous for the potlatch that it held once upon a time yeah one of the most famous polishes ever held was held in

1921 by Chief Dan Cranmer were the authorities that including your CP in the Government of Canada and missionaries chose to prosecute there who was participating in that College because it wasn't really below yeah and once and for all trying to stamp it up like yeah it had already been banned by the so what happened to the people are taking part Oh quite a few of them were around and prosecuted and jailed there are over 22 people were it went to jail and others gave up the quad youtl are not satisfied with the symbolism of their

heraldry but like to add a dramatic touch to the representations this appears most clearly in the images which their Chiefs set up on high poles fronting the houses and in others which are placed in the center of the house and feasts they are intelligible to the audience but their meaning is further elucidated by songs speeches and actions this totem pole stands in the middle of Kwakiutl territory here on village Island it's the ultimate proclamation of Indian identity but it's not the size so much that impresses us it's the fabulous wooden carvings and they're literally fabulous

each one of these animals comes from a fable to which the family for whom this pole was made could lay claim they are crest if you like in this case the family could lay claim to kill a whale raven wolf and grizzly bear this pole represents the status and the identity of the family that commissioned it the fables and the animal emblems will be full of meaning for the man his family his friends his allies and for his rivals some of these villages are now deserted and the meaning of most of these symbols has faded

from memory so it's tempting to think that the culture is dead but because of anthropologists like boas and of course the people themselves the culture is very much alive and well in fact it's undergone a revival among the most prominent families involved in keeping the traditions alive are still a hunts the artist Richard hunt is descended from George hunt the man Boaz trained to observe and record his own culture I started about 20 years ago carving with my father just watched him in the basin and learning playing with his tools and then finally trying to

find a style for myself took about 10 years before I realized what you know what it was supposed to look like and then after that then it started becoming finer and finer and I started working on a style of my own I see myself as a traditional artist because I still make pieces that are used in potlatches that people ordered to be used that's the meaning brick comes out when people asks you to carve something for them now if I wasn't carving the right thing I wouldn't be getting asked very many times to do carvings

for people so do you think anthropologists like boas have helped keep the tradition alive at all yeah he kept a good record of the dances the uses of the masks because some of the masks we wouldn't know how they would have been used unless you we looked at what he wrote and you know because all the older people are going now so there's not really enough of them old people to tell the young people how the things should be done so by reading Boaz son you find out a lot though as either overestimated the likelihood

of all cultural knowledge disappearing or he underestimated the Kwakiutl people can today go back to his films written works and even the photographs he posed for to find out aspects of their own heritage that have been forgotten but a great deal of tradition has been handed on from generation to generation in the old way you call it Hammet well Memorial Hajus and for ordinary pathogens if you're here I'm showing you as chieftainship um how much wealth you got and stuff like that I inherited mine from my grandfather my dad passed it on to me and

now I'll pass it on to my sons one of my oldest son jitter culture and it's we hate to lose it during his visits to Fort Rupert up on the northern tip of Vancouver Island Boas became aware of the importance of language in the beginning it was always hard work to ask about the language such a confusion of dialects and languages exist here that the material overwhelms me the Krug util language is much harder than I thought I work on the grammar in the mornings and in the afternoon old fellows tell me stories and in

the evening when George hunt is free i revise texts with him but boas realized that language was more than simply a means for making yourself understood he was becoming aware of the role of language as a vehicle for transmitting cultural identity itself the old people remember Burr speaking kwok-wai love well but with a heavy accent he understood that as well as customs and objects language was also part of the essence of the life of a culture oh okay we wish so yeah sit yeah would you see you here mm-hmm movement but yeah yeah his hair

shoes hair uh and uh and and my bros but yeah pass okay yeah yes as for you yes are you king's us today although it isn't the first language of most Kwakiutl children it is at least being taught and bars himself was teaching that language like each aspect of the culture being studied was an essential part in the understanding of social worlds that were so dramatically different from his own his students were encouraged to see their own society in the context of a much wider range of possible social worlds in the United States of the

early 1900's this wasn't just a subject of academic interest for people of very different ethnic backgrounds were arriving in vast numbers but these immigrants didn't only provide justification for cultural anthropology to be taught at university the Boas they were ideal material for another of his interests the biological aspect of human beings what their physical characteristics were like their shape size color growth and so on he was interested in the way these features changed as different populations intermarried among other things he wanted to see in what way environment influenced this process and in New York there

was a laboratory for investigation on his doorstep this is the Great Hall on Ellis Island something like 16 million immigrants at the beginning of this century it was the legal gateway to a new life in America they came in there hundreds every day to this island and sat and waited to be processed in this Hall they had to answer in English where they came from how old they were whether they had any serious diseases how much money they had whether they had new jobs to go to whether they were prostitutes whether they were anarchists in

1908 they were asked another question depending on whether they came from Europe or not that was whether they minded if someone took some measurements of their bodies and heads Franz boas was working for the United States Immigration Commission set up to report as to whether people's from certain countries in Europe should be allowed into America were they or were they not racially inferior it may have been a strange beginning to life in America but though as its findings were important development in the heated argument going on as to whether your racial characteristics placed limitations on

your human potential eugenics was very much in the air there's a good deal of the discussion about which races were superior which were inferior and the concern about not letting the National populations not only in this country but in England and in Europe deteriorate with inferior races but to keep the standard up and to improve it and they had ideas about certain races being superior to other races so that Canon Janet's approach with a racist overtone was very widespread in the 1910s 1920s there was a eugenic Society in this country that was very active and

had a number of rather well-known people who were associated with it there's an underground feeling that almost anyone who wasn't anglo-saxon was less than desirable and among the non anglo-saxons of course the Jews but being a Jew naturally he's very sensitive to any anti-semitic overtones issues of race didn't of course only apply to the various groups of white Europeans trying to enter the States since the abolition of slavery the prospects for blacks frustrated the ideal that all men were created equal Boaz actively campaigned on behalf of black people all over America contrary to prevailing notions

of the day he stated that there was no evidence that they were racially inferior the findings that he'd reported from Ellis Island challenged the concept that certain racial characteristics were fixed or stable his were views that white America found almost totally incomprehensible and in some quarters they're still unaccepted today Boas introduced a new way of looking at race Boas was the first distinguished white social scientist in the United States who Menem eyes the importance of race as a determinant of human behavior Boas took a deliberate and bold social stance and agitated for a more tolerant

and informed approach to questions of racial difference even did one thing that's very very little-known but I think is extraordinarily interesting one of the things he asked his field workers to do and they were brilliant group of men that he chose was to make life masks of the people they were working with the fieldwork spread from the north west coast up the borderline to Alaska over into Asia and even some studies as far south as China it's a fantastic collection many of these people have now become extinct and we have the only absolute representation of

these people and their whole facial features we have I don't know at least maybe as many as 2000 Boaz's work on the physical characteristics of humans convinced him that race itself was an awkward category because it was impossible to define it was of no real scientific use biological differences between races are small there is no reason to believe that one race is in nature so much more intelligent and endowed with greater willpower nor emotionally more stable than another Franz boas taught at Columbia University for half a century the list of his students who went on

to set up and teach the subject along his lines at other universities reads like the who's who of American anthropology by the time of his death he was rightly regarded by scholars from all over the world as the founding father of American anthropology I can still remember quite vividly what happened that day December 21st 1942 Boris invited a few person to a luncheon with reveille but the Faculty Club at Columbia University it was an extremely cold day as a matter of fact one of the coldest day I can remember and vos arrived early from his

home his grunt hood on the other side of the Hudson he was wearing I remember a very dilapidated and discolored fur cap which probably dated back to his time with the Eskimo 50 years earlier Boris was in a very in very high spirits and luncheon started quite a gala it and then all of a sudden Boris was struck by something like an electric shock he pushed violently and fell backward on the ground with his chair and I was seated by his side and immediate I tried to help him but he was dead and we all

left struck with sorrow and with the feeling that we had the sad privilege to witness the passing out of one of the very last intellectual Giants such as the 19th century was able to produce and whom probably will not be produced anymore his last words of that supper were that he had a new idea on race his audience never heard what that new idea was in his long and productive career however Franz Boas produced a series of new ideas that change the way that educated Americans thought about race language and culture the value of anthropology

is its power to impress us with a relative value of all forms of culture for we are only two liable to consider our civilization the ultimate goal of human evolution thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of others my whole outlook upon life is determined by one question how can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us for when we recognize them we are also able to break them you