Judith Berman, a co-director with Glass of the Critical Edition project whose past writings have extensively investigated the nature of Hunt’s background and collaborations with Boas, speculates that Hunt’s notes and drafts make up about a third of Social Organization. Hunt was more than the consultant and informant he has typically been positioned as not only did he assist in the collecting, documenting, and transcription of stories, songs, and objects, but he drafted whole sections of the book. A major takeaway of the exhibition and the broader project is the restoration of symmetry and co-authorship between Boas and Hunt in the production of Social Organization. Two 1893 photographs of Boas and Hunt, flanking a group photo of Boas and the Hunt family, taken in Fort Rupert in 1894, open the central section. By uncovering the layers of dispersed archives that constituted the production of Social Organization, the exhibition and larger project pursue the reconnection and reactivation of the culture knowledge that fills the gildas, or “box of treasures,” of the specific Kwakw ak a’wakw families and communities with whom Hunt and Boas worked and from whom they learned. Emerging out of a larger project to produce a Critical Edition of the 1897 book, Story Box puts the secrets of ethnography on display, opting for a transparency of the anthropological process and a reversal of its hierarchies. Our understanding of its making, however, is far from complete, as Story Box aims to demonstrate.The exhibition, like Boas, takes up the metaphor of the book-as-container – of knowledge, properties, and treasures – to explore the histories and legacies of Boas’s monumental volume and the complexities of its production.Ĭurated by Aaron Glass, associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center, in collaboration with the U’mista Cultural Centre (Alert Bay, BC), the exhibition brings together a wealth of archival documents, Indigenous belongings and material culture, and various forms of multimedia and reproductions to make visible the co-production of anthropological knowledge, particularly as it occurred between Boas and his aforementioned friend and essential collaborator, George Hunt. Frequently acknowledged as one of the most influential texts in the history of anthropology, Social Organization is among the first ethnographies based on first-person fieldwork. Now they will not be forgotten.” The book he is referring to is The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897), Boas’s first monograph on Northwest Coast Indigenous culture. It is a good book, for in it are your laws and your stories. It is a book I have written on what I saw and heard when I was with you two years ago. “My friend, George Hunt, will show you a box in which some of your stories will be kept. “It is good that you should have a box in which your laws and stories are kept,” Boas writes. White.Ī portion of an 1897 letter from Franz Boas to Kwagu’ł Chiefs, reproduced in English and Kwak’wala, opens The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology, an exhibition on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. | p. 131-139 Installation view of Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, February 14 to July 7, 2019.
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