Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas

This compilation of scholarly essays, chosen from an interdisciplinary conference held at Yale in 2011, highlights both the accomplishments and shortcomings of Franz Boas, one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century. Boas’s main contribution, as these essays suggest, was his idea that the worldview of Western civilized peoples misrepresented non-Western cultures and legitimized racism, imperialism, genocide, and the militarism of civilized nations. One of the more relevant and elucidating essays, “Transformation Masks” by the collection’s co-editor Wilner, vividly recounts how Boas, as a 25-year-old museum employee in Berlin, traveled to Vancouver Island to embark on what would become one of modern anthropology’s seminal studies, on masks and storytelling. Another essay portrays Boas as a “penetrating critic” of evolutionary theory, who used ground research to challenge notions of “primitive” versus “civilized.” An essay on Zora Neale Hurston, who studied under Boas as an undergraduate at Barnard College in the 1920s, suggests that, overcome by “Victorian racial theory and long term issues of sexism,” she dropped her studies and pursued writing. Boas’s concept of culture is thoughtfully reassessed in “The River of Salvation Flows through Africa.” Readers of Boas will delight in this excellent and varied collection of essays. (Mar.)