Transcription and Translation of Franz Boas's Kwakwaka'wakw Field Notes for a Critical Edition of His 1897 Monograph

FAIN: RQ-260760-18

Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-9800)
Aaron Glass (Project Director: December 2017 to February 2022)
Judith E. Berman (Co Project Director: December 2017 to February 2022)

Preparation of print and digital translation-editions of anthropologist Franz Boas’s field notes on the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) North American peoples. (12 months)

This Scholarly Editions and Translations grant will support transcription, translation, and interpretation of a large portion of Franz Boas's Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) field notes as a key part of a critical edition of Boas's 1897 monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. Boas recorded most of his field notes in an idiosyncratic German shorthand that we have recently deciphered for the first time. The project will address the field data that Boas incorporated into the book, as well as his later efforts to correct and revise it. A primary goal is to determine how much of a ground-breaking "eye-witness" narrative of ceremony actually developed out of Boas's field notes, and how much was drafted by Boas's Indigenous collaborator, George Hunt. The project will allow an unprecedented examination of Boas's fieldwork methods, primary access to the original sources of his data, and a new analysis of the role of this seminal book in Boas’s larger vision for anthropology and the human sciences.

Associated Products

Re-assembling The Social Organization: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Changing Climates of Collaborative Ethnography in British Columbia. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Re-assembling The Social Organization: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Changing Climates of Collaborative Ethnography in British Columbia.
Author: Aaron Glass
Author: Judith Berman
Author: Rainer Hatoum
Author: Ira Jacknis
Author: Andy Everson
Abstract: In 1897, Franz Boas published what became one of the most influential books in the field of anthropology: The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. The collaborative product of Boas’s own observations and extensive materials authored by his long-time Indigenous co-worker George Hunt, the text was the first systematic attempt to document all sociocultural, spiritual, and aesthetic aspects of a spectacular Native North American ceremonial structure. This session presents the work of a collaborative project between scholars, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw researchers, the U’mista Cultural Centre, and international repositories to create a new critical edition of this founding document in anthropology. The goal of the project is to examine the book’s hidden histories and complex legacies in order to re-envision Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw participation in the original research, to reassemble globally distributed collections and fragmented archives, and to create a critical historiography of the book. While clearly articulating the historical and political contexts for early anthropology, we are also recuperating long-dormant ethnographic records for use by the Indigenous families whose patrimony is represented in them. Academic and community team members will discuss Boas and Hunt’s main sites for conducting “fieldwork” (communities in British Columbia, the Chicago World’s Fair, and museums in North America and Europe); the primary media they utilized (museum objects, texts, photographs, and wax cylinder recordings); the conditions of, and the specific participants in, their research; and the legacy and contemporary use of the 1897 book in Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw communities.
Date: 10/22/19
Conference Name: American Anthropological Association/Canadian Anthropological Society

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