| RQ-260760-18 | Research Programs: Scholarly Editions and Translations | Bard College | Transcription and Translation of Franz Boas's Kwakwaka'wakw Field Notes for a Critical Edition of His 1897 Monograph | 10/1/2018 - 9/30/2019 | $132,340.00 | Aaron | | Glass | Judith | E. | Berman | Bard College | Annandale-on-Hudson | NY | 12504-9800 | USA | 2018 | Cultural Anthropology | Scholarly Editions and Translations | Research Programs | 132340 | 0 | 132340 | 0 | 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. |