This is Franz Boas on Baffin Island in 1883, dressed in a caribou coat made for him by James Much to help him survive the Arctic winter as he lived amongst the Inuit, making the first of many research trips. Boas – a German Jew – went on to become the father of modern American anthropology. For some reactionaries, though, he will always be “the godfather of the multi-cult nightmare”.
“The value of anthropology,” said Boas, “is its power to impress us with the relative value of all forms of culture. For we are only too liable to consider our civilisation the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of others.”
BBC Radio 4 is currently running an interesting series on the meaning of the word “culture”, and the programme I found most revealing was the one about anthropological definitions of the word.
The programme draws a clear distinction between E.B. Tylor’s views and those of Boas. For Tylor, human culture was progressive. Societies could be going “forwards” or “backwards”, knowledge grew from generation to generation. There were “savage” cultures (like African ones), “barbaric” cultures (like Arabic ones), and “civilised” ones (like European countries). Tylor didn’t think people in “savage” or “barbaric” cultures lacked brains, but he did think they lacked knowledge. Colonial imperialism therefore had a “civilising” purpose.
Boas, on the other hand, didn’t believe in a civilisational “march of progress”. Working at the ethnographic museum in Berlin, he began to see “the wealth of thought hidden behind the grotesque masks”. Writing to his fiancee from the Arctic, he described a growing realisation of “the relativity of all cultivation”; what mattered was that people cultivated “a heart”.
Rather than applying a simple model of Darwinian evolutionism to culture, Boas advocated a historical approach to a multitude of cultures, each – despite apparent similarities, like the presence in multiple locations of animism, for instance – unique and sui generis. There wasn’t a “march of civilisation” but a plurality of cultures: co-existing, equally-valid ways of doing things.
Followers like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead popularised Boas’ approach in the 1960s, when a growing counterculture in the West was also questioning mainstream white European values.
The photos of Boas “dressed up” as an inuit hunter show an admirable willingness (at a time when, as the documentary above describes, native Americans could still be imprisoned for celebrating the potlatch) to “see with” a different culture. “As you see, Marie, I am now a true Eskimo. I live as they do, hunt with them and belong to the men of Anarnitung. I have hardly any European food left, eat only seal and drink coffee. Although seal hunting bores me dreadfully, I do it as it is the only way of obtaining what I need. ”
He describes how a seal is divided equitably between the whole community. “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘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 are much worse, relatively speaking.”
