In Search of Us E-Book

Lucy Moore

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 392

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick*** The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among civilisations that were first thought of as being primitive and savage. What they discovered, however, would change the way we think about ourselves. In the late nineteenth century, when non-European societies were seen as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how Western civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thrilling new discipline which attracted the brightest minds of the academic world. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonialism was recognised as being inextricably linked to exploitation and outdated labels like 'savage' were inconceivable when so-called 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars. Focusing on twelve key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil fifty years later, Lucy Moore explores the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study with all its insights and ambivalence. In Search of Us tells the story of the men and women whose observations of the 'other' would transform attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated. In an enthralling, perceptive narrative, Moore shows how these radical anthropologists were inspired by their time in the furthest-flung reaches of the known world, becoming pioneers of a new way of thinking. In the end, their legacy is less about understanding foreign cultures and more about their attempts to persuade human beings to look at one another with eyes washed free from prejudice. Their intention may have been to explain what they saw as the primitive world to the civilised one but they ended up changing the way people viewed themselves - at least for a time.

Leseprobe

In Search of Us

Lucy Moore is an author and broadcaster whose nine books include the bestselling Maharanis: The Lives and Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses. She has written for the Sunday Times, Observer, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and has presented series for the BBC and Sky. For further information, please visit the author’s website: www.lucymoorebooks.com

‘In this skilful summary of the early years of anthropology between 1880 and 1939, Lucy Moore reveals a veritable tangle of turf wars, power scrambles and sexual bad behaviour… Moore’s fluent account confirms that there is always room for a new view, especially when it is as well done as this one.’ Sunday Times

‘Moore doesn’t sugar-coat her protagonists’ many prejudices, their cavalier treatment of their indigenous subjects, or the problematic history of their discipline. But though she summarises their scholarly views, the main pleasure of her book lies in its celebration of a dozen colourful, unconventional, free-thinking lives.’ Guardian

‘The story of anthropology’s early pioneers lies at the heart of this joyfully narrated history of a scientific field that, at its best, opens our minds to the rich kaleidoscope of human experience... [A] gripping collection of life stories.’ Literary Review

‘Entertaining... Told with a novelistic eye for the character-revealing anecdote.’ Spectator

By the Same Author

Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book:An Englishwoman’s Life During the Civil War

Nijinsky: A Life

Anything Goes: A Biography of theRoaring Twenties

Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Womenin Revolutionary France

Maharanis: The Lives and Times ofThree Generations of Indian Princesses

Amphibious Thing: The Life of a Georgian Rake

The Thieves’ Opera: The Remarkable Livesand Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker, andJack Sheppard, House-Breaker

Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from theHogarthian Underworld

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Lucy Moore, 2022

The moral right of Lucy Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders.The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-917-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-916-5

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

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‘One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead, and how they take things. I am quite obliged to Mrs Cadwallader for coming and calling me out of the library.’

Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

It thus suffices for history to take its distance from us in time, or for us to take our distance from it in thought, for it to cease being internalizable and to lose its intelligibility, an illusion attached to a provisional interiority. But that does not mean that I am saying that man can or should free himself from this interiority. It is not in his power to do so, and for him wisdom consists in watching himself live it, knowing all the while (but in another register) that what he is living so completely and intensely is a myth, which will appear as such to men of a future century, which will appear as such to himself, perhaps, a few years hence, and which to men of a future millennium will not appear at all.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pensées Sauvages (1962)

Contents

Introduction

1.  The Pioneer: Franz Boas on Baffin Island, 1883

2.  The Mentors: Alfred Haddon and William Rivers inthe Torres Strait, 1898

3.  The Philosopher: Edvard Westermarck in Morocco, 1898

4.  The Magi: Daisy Bates and Alfred Radcliffe-Brownin Western Australia, 1910–1912

5.  The Hero: Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, 1915–1917

6.  The Academy: Franz Boas at Columbia University, 1899–1942

7.  The Maiden: Ruth Benedict in the American Southwest, 1920s

8.  The Child: Margaret Mead in Samoa, 1925

9.  Insider/Outsider: Zora Neale Hurston in New Orleans, 1928

10. The Bluestocking: Audrey Richards in Zambia, 1930–1931

11. The Trickster: Claude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, 1938–1939

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes and Bibliography

More General Reading

Illustrations

Index

Introduction

This book follows twelve European and American anthropologists over a period of fifty years, from the 1880s to the 1930s, as they lived with and systematically observed indigenous people they called savages, in what were then considered the most exotic corners of the globe: the wind-swept snowfields of the Arctic, the impenetrable jungles of Brazil, the sawmills and illicit roadside bars of the American Deep South. Each chapter looks at an anthropologist (or two) during a specific moment in the field, at a formative moment in their career, examining the lessons they learned and the way they communicated them on their return. Taken together, they create a broader narrative about the story anthropology as a whole was telling contemporary Western people about themselves – a story that fundamentally shaped the way we as individuals and societies look at one another today. Over this first half of the tumultuous twentieth century, anthropology, by endeavouring to explain human beings and their cultures, offered the possibility – at once thrillingly contemporary and strangely comforting – that hidden in the way people interacted were universal truths that could be applied to their own rapidly changing world.

Interest in the ‘primitive’, the Other, was blossoming in the developed world during this period, feeding into and stimulated by the emergence of anthropology as an intellectual, cultural and political movement. This was reflected in the broader trends of the day: the serene Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin; an early-twentieth-century soundtrack of African American blues, jazz, ragtime and spirituals echoing out from modern Victrolas; the African-inspired masks of Pablo Picasso; and war-weary Bloomsbury bohemian Gerald Brenan escaping shell shock by living with and writing about the people of remote Andalusia. While Carl Jung was researching his theory of archetypes, he visited the pueblos of the south-western United States, which also sparked the imagination of Aldous Huxley; the Savage Reservation Lenina and Bernard visit by Blue Pacific Rocket in Brave New World (1932) is one of the more memorable and unsettling twentieth-century visions of the future.

This period in the history of anthropology as a discipline was marked by its new devotion to fieldwork, which can be defined as empirical research performed on the ground, in the field, rather than in a laboratory or library. Originally used for research in the natural sciences, over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was enthusiastically adopted by the new social sciences and, particularly, anthropology, the study of humankind, with work in far-flung locales becoming the indispensable initiation into the discipline and an essential part of its mystique. As Alfred Radcliffe-Brown would put it in 1922, after his time with the Andaman Islanders and in Australia, ‘It is only by actually living with and working amongst a primitive people that the social anthropologist can acquire his real training.’

Before fieldwork permeated the discipline, it was divided into data-collectors, often called ethnographers,* and theorisers. ‘Observation and comparison to be kept strictly apart and carried out simultaneously by different classes of workers,’ wrote Sir James Frazer in his notes for an introductory lecture to young anthropologists. Formalising fieldwork allowed the same person (increasingly regularly called an anthropologist) to observe behaviour and later to describe and analyse it. As Alfred Haddon, one of the original British fieldworkers from the generation below Frazer, would explain, ‘the most valuable generalisations are made … when the observer is at the same time a generaliser’. Anthropology was also largely a literary and philosophical exercise until the influence of the sciences, and field research in particular, gave it a more practical focus.

Eager to learn more about their own society and motivated by the desire to improve it, these young social scientists turned to apparently simpler, ‘primitive’ societies with the idea that they provided ‘laboratory conditions’ (Margaret Mead’s phrase) for studying human culture untainted by modern civilisation: a bit like returning to Eden to study Adam and Eve before they had bitten into the apple or, to be more critical, like studying animals in a contained enclosure. It would never have occurred to them that their behaviour might be as strange as that of the ‘savages’ they were observing. At the time, there would have been no question: the pith-helmeted anthropologists with their intrusive questions were advanced and benevolent and their subjects, the indigenous people they ‘studied’, bare-skinned and adorned with feathers and shells, undeniably savage. Today that distinction is very much less clear; indeed, these labels no longer apply, and the work of these pioneering thinkers, whatever we may think of how they did it, is the primary reason for that change.

At some point over these decades, anthropologists began to realise that fieldwork posed more questions than it was able to answer. Just as the astronaut’s journey into space means nothing unless she can come back to earth and tell us what she has seen, so the anthropologist cannot simply observe other people but must interpret their society and communicate her vision. As the saying goes, she must make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, all the better to understand both. Anthropology, as Robert Lowie would observe, should mean more than the study of ‘savages’: at its best, it ought to be ‘an insight into human culture in all its reaches’. The ground-breaking social scientists in this book had intended to explain the primitive world to the civilised one, but they ended up redefining what it meant to be both civilised and savage.

Anthropology in general, and fieldwork in particular, acts like double-sided mirror glass, if such a thing is possible. The anthropologist sees her own society reflected darkly back at her when she looks at another society and the society she observes begins to see itself through her eyes. When these societies are non-literate – or, as in the case of the great Middle and South American cultures when they first encountered Westerners in the sixteenth century, had had their written histories destroyed – very little survives to tell us how they felt about being ‘observed’ or what contact with this strange new culture meant to them. If only one could read this book in reverse, written from the point of view of the people being studied, rather than the studiers; instead their responses must be inferred from the devastating outcomes of their contact with the developed world: the ravages of disease, alcoholism, declining birth rates, fatal lassitude – what one of the anthropologists below would define as ‘racial suicide’.

But the lack of written history among the cultures they studied provided anthropologists with a key justification for their work. Using ‘scientific’ methods, they sought to create a record of vanishing cultures that, even at the start of this period, they recognised contact with their own culture with all its brittle sophistication would inevitably destroy. ‘The great literate civilisations of the world are able to bequeath to subsequent civilisations their art and literature, their laws and inventions, but primitive people without a written language, who fashion their tools and weapons from wood, and build houses which combine perfect adjustment to sun and hurricane with a life expectancy of ten years, have no way of making such a contribution to history,’ wrote Margaret Mead of her desire to commemorate ‘people whose grace lies in the way they sing their songs, and not in the songs themselves’. One of the things that marked Mead’s generation of anthropologists was their determination to understand and communicate these cultures to their own society, for its own benefit, and only secondly for that of the cultures they observed.

People have been conducting anthropological studies through fieldwork in their various ways since antiquity, more or less analytically observing other people and seeking to learn from their different habits and ways of life. Herodotus is often called the father of history but his Histories (dating to the fifth century BC) include numerous ethnographic observations; like the slightly younger Thucydides, another claimant to the father of history title, he evidently did his own field research. Although Pliny the Elder described his own Natural History (c.AD 77) as taking all of the natural world as its subject, including specifically anthropological chapters on humans and their history, art, medicine and magic, agriculture, metallurgy and mining, he was more armchair compiler and theoretician than fieldworker.

In later centuries, Michel de Montaigne in France and Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne in England (among many others) demonstrated notable curiosity about the habits of humanity, as well as the broader natural sciences, but not until the eighteenth century did scholars turn with application and focus to the study of humankind. Anthropology, as it would become known, was the perfect discipline for the Age of Enlightenment, with its dual focus on scientific methods and the rights and workings of the individual within society, although early ethnographers tended to come to a study of man from a broad range of other subjects, from philosophy and politics through physiognomy and palaeontology. Carl Linnaeus classified and named the species of the known world, including humans, while the Comte de Buffon sought to examine and describe them; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant delved into humanity’s heart and soul.

In 1719, the German physician, naturalist and geographer Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt set out from Moscow tasked by Peter the Great with exploring Siberia. He spent eight years surveying the vast and uncharted area, recording his observations on the people he met there as well as the area’s flora and fauna in notebooks, maps and drawings, and collecting rare and exotic items, including the first known woolly mammoth fossils. Messerschmidt never published his findings and died in poverty but he was followed by Johann Georg Gmelin and Georg Wilhelm Steller on extensive Russian state-funded scientific expeditions all the way to the Bering Straits, which involved many hundreds of people over the next decades.

Captain James Cook set out to explore the Southern Seas in the 1760s and 1770s in a similar vein of state-sponsored discovery. Joseph Banks, the young polymath who travelled with Cook on that first voyage on the Endeavour, left a celebrated description of their contact with the inhabitants of Tahiti during a three-month stay there. Although he noted the generosity with which they were welcomed by the islanders, his account of their arrival betrays a sense of privilege that jars today. As they approached land, canoes came out to meet Banks, Cook and their companions and escort them ashore, where, in shaded groves, they exchanged green boughs of friendship with the Tahitians: ‘in short the scene we saw was the truest picture of an arcadia of which we were going to be kings that the imagination can form’.

Banks’s journal reveals various gaffes, like almost immediately insulting the chief ’s wife (‘ugly enough in conscience’) by ignoring her polite welcome to flirt with ‘a very pretty girl with a fire in her eyes that I had not seen before’, but as an observer, he was open-minded and kind, as well as being inquisitive (some might say nosy), having a gift for languages and lacking any sentimental preconceived ideas about the ‘noble savage’. He noted the exquisite tattooing of his new friends, their navigational skills, lovemaking (directly and with enthusiasm), mourning customs, craft, food and hygiene.

Religion and ritual were more opaque. Curious to see that Tahitian women never ate with men, to the point of throwing away food if a man had inadvertently touched the basket containing it, he asked them why but ‘they gave me no other answer but that they did it because it was right, and expressed much disgust when I told them that in England men and women eat together’. What was even more interesting was that when they were alone with Banks and his companions, they were willing to eat with them – as long as the Englishmen promised not to tell.

The world’s first anthropological society, the short-lived Société des observateurs de l’homme, was founded in Paris in 1799 by the poet and educator Louis-François Jauffret with the motto ‘Connais-toi toi-même’ (‘Know yourself ’). It counted the zoologist and palaeontologist Frédéric Cuvier, the physician and psychiatrist Philippe Pinel, and the explorer Antoine de Bougainville among its members. The philosopher Joseph-Marie Degérando was another associate who systematically observed ‘savage people’ for the clues they offered to human nature. Another member, the young explorer François Péron, working in Australia, sought to investigate Rousseau’s theory that indigenous people might be stronger and healthier than Europeans, their physical health in inverse proportion to their ‘moral development’.

Ethnological societies were founded over the next decades in Paris (1839), New York (1842) and London (1844), and anthropological ones in Berlin (1869) and Vienna (1870). Advances in scientific knowledge in related fields – notably the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 but also the development of archaeological excavation and the better understanding of ancient civilisations, for example with the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone – further stimulated anthropological research and the development of the discipline. In 1858, prehistoric human bones were discovered in Brixham Cave on the coast of Devon alongside the remains of extinct species including aurochs and woolly mammoth. It was becoming increasingly clear that humanity had developed over a very long time and that long-vanished or vanishing cultures merited study and reassessment, although the assumption was that these early humans had been markedly different from modern people.

The dominance of the concept of evolution in nineteenth-century scientific thought coloured ethnology, too. It was assumed ‘that all cultural systems … progress slowly and unalterably through the same invariable stages of development’, with non-literate societies at the bottom and sophisticated, industrialised civilisations at the top. All primitive people, it was believed, worshipped ancestor spirits and totems; there were no families, but women and goods were held in common by the men of the group; marriage, as it developed, was a form of exchange between groups. ‘Savages’ could be seen as little more than animals. Gradually as a society became more sophisticated it would move through various predetermined stages before ending in a version of top-hatted, nineteenth-century European society: a robust, monotheistic, monogamous, patriarchal, hierarchical world in which everyone knew his place and status.

Among the first academic anthropologists in England was Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Oxford’s inaugural Reader in Anthropology (in 1883) and the author of the influential Primitive Culture (1871), who formulated a theory of the evolution of society from savagery through barbarism to civilisation. His readership was funded by General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, who also bequeathed to Oxford University the extraordinary archaeological and ethnological collections that would become the Pitt Rivers Museum. Sir James Frazer spent his career largely at Cambridge, writing twelve magisterial volumes of The Golden Bough (published between 1890 and 1915), a comparative study of world mythologies in which he outlined the development of religious thought from animism or magic through organised religion to science and heavily implied that Christianity was a sacrificial cult like any other.

As a young man interested in ‘primitive’ and prehistoric humans, Tylor had encountered tribal people in Mexico, but Frazer seldom vacated his armchair. When William James asked him if he had ever met any ‘natives’, Frazer is said to have exclaimed, ‘Good God, no!’ Instead, he and Tylor made use of the accounts of colonial administrators, explorers, traders and missionaries, amateur ethnographers across the British Empire, to gather information and items of material culture they could analyse in their ivory towers. The French had a word, coutumier, for the official descriptions and inventories of indigenous customs in the areas under their colonial control in Asia and Africa, sent back to their university ethnographic departments. Without substantial overseas territories, anthropologists in the United States focused on the ‘primitive’ people in situ: first Native Americans and then, with a slightly different twist, African Americans.

Social evolutionism appeared, to the white European adherents of the theory, to justify ‘the presumed superiority of white-skinned civilised men to dark-skinned savages by placing them both on a single developmental ladder extending upwards from the apes’. Western man’s suspicion that all primitive societies could be judged against his own and found inferior seemed to be confirmed by social Darwinism. Eugenicists and racists flourished among nineteenth-century anthropologists, who allocated formulaic characteristics to the so-called races of man (Asian or ‘yellow’ people were thought to have genius or cunning, black people possessed soul but were childlike, white northern Europeans were energetic and honest) and justified structural inequality – slavery and genocide, at its worst – with the idea that black people and Jews, for example, were biologically inferior to whites, even subhuman. Unchallenged Nazi anthropologists would run away with these ideas in the 1930s in the darkest possible ways.

It was morally wrong, concluded some, to sustain the weakest in society, who should rather be allowed to wither away, leaving the strongest and fittest to prevail. Not everyone thought this way – some early anthropologists argued against calls for racial ‘purity’, claiming that ‘mongrels’ or miscegenation, the mixing of races, would strengthen human stock – but a confusion about biological and social processes permeated the early decades of the discipline. Hair texture, skin colour or nose size apart, a large part of the work of the anthropologists in this book involved demonstrating that differences between peoples were cultural rather than biological.

It was onto this stage that the first modern fieldworker stepped, snugly dressed in a seal-fur parka (the Inuit word for coat). Franz Boas, born in 1858 and brought up and educated in Germany, had been deeply influenced by his mentor, Adolf Bastian, an early proponent of fieldwork and in 1873 one of the founders, and first director, of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, who believed that all human beings possessed the same mental capacities, and by Rudolf Virchow, a gifted physician and polymath, who passionately rejected scientific racism. (Unable to countenance the idea that man was descended from apes, Virchow also challenged the theory of human evolution.) Boas’s 1883 expedition to the Canadian Arctic is the first episode of modern anthropological fieldwork and the starting point for the academic discipline of anthropology as it is practised today. Over the next fifty years, as Boas and his successors set forth into the field, in the parts of the world least known by developed nations, they sought to understand and engage with people they saw, initially at least, as savages. It is the change in the way they viewed the people they met with which this book is largely concerned.

Boas would become the first champion of the anthropological concept of cultural relativism, which holds that although people see the world as they are conditioned to see it, judging it through culturally acquired norms, no society is intrinsically better or worse, higher or lower, more or less civilised than any other. Beneath a top hat or a penis sheath, one human is the same as another human. Another anthropological insight, linked to the psychological work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, was an awareness of the survival of ‘primitive’ urges in modern life, or rather the understanding that the primitive or the unconscious was an ineradicable part of human nature. Finally, in the academic work done by these anthropologists, the sense that human existence was progressing towards an ideal, predetermined end was undermined by a replacement of dynamic analysis – in which societies were compared with one another as they evolved over time – with synchronic or static analysis, studying a snapshot of a society: life as it functions. Looking at all societies as if they were suspended in time eroded the idea that one – European civilisation – was predominant. There was no ideal endpoint for humanity to reach, or even to aim for.

If, as Eric Hobsbawm has suggested, the twentieth century was marked by a revolution in social relations, these driven young anthropologists and their work were at the heart of that change. A ‘sudden, moral and cultural revolution, a dramatic transformation of the conventions of social and personal behaviour’: new virtues – pluralism, scepticism, tolerance and responsiveness – were replacing deference, faith in organised religion and social hierarchy, and acceptance of the way things were or had to be. Pioneers of a new way of thinking, these fieldworkers redefined ideas of race, gender, sexual orientation, parenting, class and religion. The legacy they would bequeath future generations was teaching people to try and look at one another, as societies and individuals, with eyes washed free from prejudice.

This survey – to use an anthropological term – is intended to be biographical rather than anthropological. As the great historian of the discipline George Stocking observed in 1968, despite their keen interest in ‘informal oral histories’ – otherwise known as gossip – anthropologists have tended to view their discipline through preoccupations with ‘general developmental framework’, ‘theoretical or methodological relevance’ and ‘interpretative centres of gravity’, but I’m concerned with life stories, not academic critique. In these sketches of my subjects’ life and work, I want to address the central question of intellectual history as Stocking posed it: ‘What was bugging them?’

Emmanuelle Loyer speculates in her magisterial biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss that anthropology provided him with a ‘biographical accident’ that ‘was one possible way to reconcile life and writing, scholarly work and adventure, the sensory and rational worlds’. This was true of each of these anthropologists in their different ways. And yet, as Lévi-Strauss observed of his own conversion from philosophy to anthropology, it ‘is one of the few genuine vocations. One can discover it in oneself, even though one may have been taught nothing about it.’ He liked to compare the anthropologist returning from the field with an adolescent returning from an initiation ritual, having sought and found wisdom that will guide her through adulthood and contribute to the well-being of her tribe. He described the young fieldworker living outside her social group for a predetermined period, exposing herself to unfamiliar and often extreme conditions, and returning to share her insights and be garlanded by her community and welcomed into maturity. This was an experience all these anthropologists would have recognised.

They can be seen in their own ways as outsiders, who viewed their own societies with a wary gaze. They might be immigrants, recent arrivals to a new country; slightingly treated as inferior, despite ostensible equality, like the several Jewish and one black scholar; women struggling to achieve professional parity and personal independence; some, men and women, with (or perhaps wanting to have) private lives out of tune with their contemporaries’. The lessons they learned about freedom from ethnocentrism and cultural relativity came naturally to them: they were halfway there before they ever stepped into the field. Innovative, unconventional new disciplines, of which anthropology was the central one, offered academics like them ‘paths to success off the beaten track’, an opportunity to shine in their own way on the edges of the establishment.

This outsider status gave each of them an inner motivational force, a fiery sense of social justice. Throughout his life Franz Boas was trying to overcome the sense of inadequacy internalised by growing up Jewish in an anti-Semitic Europe; Edvard Westermarck kept his private life so private that the best hints at it are only his bachelor status and the closeness of his lifelong friendship with Sîdi Abdsslam; Zora Neale Hurston had to strive and scrap and occasionally lie for every chance she was given. It made them tenacious, persuasive, effective communicators, writers and, in some cases, campaigners. ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,’ famously observed Margaret Mead. ‘Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’

Having said that, they were only human and their ambitions were never entirely altruistic. Anthropologists who had spent a year or so with indigenous people might come home with enough material to formulate an intellectual credo and define their career. While they demanded freedom from prejudice at home, in the field they studied people who could not escape their gaze. Almost all lived in the field as a matter of course with a small army of servants, kitchen boys and bearers they barely mentioned and some revelled unashamedly in being seen as special, almost exalted, by their ‘native’ hosts. When they left the field, having expended all their energy and charm on procuring the information they wanted, they seldom looked back. ‘Where are you now?’ wrote Mead’s Samoan informant and friend, Fa’amotu, two years after her departure. ‘We haven’t received a single letter from you. Why haven’t you written to us? I wish you would write to us. We love you so much and we still remember you.’

Unconscious bias was not a phrase with which they would have been familiar but it is a concept that can be applied to all of them; it’s interesting to consider the concepts they didn’t think to question, especially when they imagined they were in the business of questioning everything. But it’s also too easy to look back and judge their words – and lives – by contemporary standards, forgetting how ground-breaking they were, often how courageous, and how influential in creating the kind of world in which their own words could be used against them. One of the lessons anthropology teaches is that individuals must be seen in the context of their own society; it would be unfair to condemn these fieldworkers for falling below the standards of behaviour accepted today.

‘What did the chief say to the anthropologist after a long afternoon of conversation?’ runs one of the rusty jokes about the discipline. ‘But enough about you, let’s talk about me.’ Not until the end of the period covered by this book did anthropologists begin to grapple with the idea that far from being neutral observers who studied people almost invisibly, in fact they had a profound impact on the groups generous enough to permit them access. One of the notable things about this period is that these anthropologists largely lacked self-awareness, our pervasive postmodern sense of ironic detachment – stemming from that very concept of cultural relativism they espoused.

Over the decades since the Second World War, anthropology has had to contend with deeply troubling accusations: at the least that, unwittingly or not, in its interdependence with colonialism it exploited the people it liked to believe it was helping. Even the foundational concepts of ‘discovery’, ‘exploration’ and ‘knowledge’ are today critiqued as problematic. The language alone raises questions. More recently, indigenous people being ‘studied’ and ‘observed’ have been described as informants, hosts or collaborators; some of the anthropologists in this book called them friends. Casually racist terms sit in anthropological narratives alongside powerful arguments for greater understanding and generosity of spirit. Perhaps a Haitian saying best sums it up: ‘When the anthropologist arrives, the gods depart.’

Fieldwork may have been for many of these academics an excuse for adventure but, by the end of their periods in the field, quite a few had antagonised their hosts and were longing for home. At some point, write Kathleen and Billie DeWalt, authors of a recent guide to fieldwork, ‘we just want to be able to defecate in private, throw the toilet paper in the toilet, look another person in the eye, [and] communicate effectively without being laughed at by the people with whom we are trying to communicate’. Others embraced immersion, returning to the field again and again throughout their careers, following Margaret Mead’s counsel that ‘the way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over’. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown offered characteristically sibylline advice, telling a student at the University of Chicago in the 1930s to ‘get a large notebook and start in the middle because you never know which way things will develop’. Like the best anthropological axioms, it can be applied to almost anything.

___________________

* Dictionary definitions: anthropology, the study of human societies and cultures and their development; ethnography, the scientific description of peoples and cultures, their customs, habits and mutual differences; ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

CHAPTER ONE

The Pioneer

Franz Boas on Baffin Island, 1883

‘It is funny how everybody thinks I am making this trip for fame and glory,’ wrote the young geographer Franz Boas to his fiancée, Marie Krackowizer, in July 1883. It was a letter he hoped she might receive one day; he had no expectation of seeing her again for at least a year, possibly ever. Unable to land, his ship was hovering in the icy seas beyond fog-shrouded Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. ‘You know that I strive for a higher thing and that this trip is only a means to that goal … Empty glory means nothing to me.’

That April, Boas had left Marie behind in Stuttgart without declaring himself to her. They had met initially on a walking holiday in the picturesque Harz Mountains two years earlier and Boas, conscious that he was about to set off for the edge of the world, had feigned an appointment in Stuttgart to see her again. They had only a few weeks together and he thought it unfair to ask her to become engaged to a man about to embark on a long and perilous journey. But, unable to depart without confessing his feelings, he had written to her. After three weeks’ passionate correspondence, she had accepted his proposal. Now he travelled with the dreamy strains of the song he had played for her in Stuttgart when they fell in love, one of Robert Schumann’s four melancholic Nachtstücke, echoing in his head, and his loneliness was eased knowing she was waiting for him.

The expedition he hoped would make his name was a yearlong geographical exploration of the area around Cumberland Sound in the north-east of Canada; the United Kingdom had just transferred its claims of sovereignty over the Arctic region to the newly established Dominion of Canada. Christian missionaries, harbingers of Western ‘civilisation’, wouldn’t arrive until ten years later but the area’s indigenous inhabitants were already in contact with European whalers and dying from the syphilis they had brought with them. Accompanied by Wilhelm Weike, a family servant paid by his father, Boas was considered (and considered himself) ‘alone’. This type of detailed study of a limited region over such a long period of time, by one man living largely off the land, was entirely new.

In July, three months after bidding Marie farewell, he could see his destination but the frozen sea was almost impassable and he was struggling in vain against seasickness. At one point it took four weeks to travel fifteen nautical miles. ‘All we can see, looking landwards, is a desert of ice, shoal after shoal, field upon field, broken only by an occasional iceberg.’ It must have been hard to sight glory, empty or otherwise, in the white distance, but Boas was undaunted.

At last they landed in Kekerten, a small island just off Baffin, having rocked offshore for two months, and Boas settled into the rough Scottish whalers’ station that would be his base for the next year, making his first contact with the Eskimo,* as he called the Inuit people. He’d brought gun cartridges, needles, tobacco and molasses, which he knew they valued highly, to trade for information and guiding. He had also brought basic medical supplies (opium, quinine, ammonia and turpentine) and he was delighted when his new companions began to call him Doctora’dluk, or Big Doctor. During the day, he focused on charting and cartography (‘almost the whole of Kekerten is drawing maps for me’); at night, his new friends sang, told him stories and taught him gambling and games. He noted that the women especially were skilled at string games or cat’s cradle, making ‘figures out of a loop’.

But Boas found it hard to accustom himself to some aspects of his new life. He was repulsed by the strong smell of the caribou-hide tents and the taste of the Inuits’ staple foods, seal meat and gulls’ eggs. His attitude was patronising; he wrote, in his first months in Kekerten, of looking after his Inuit hosts as if he was the adult and they his children, forcing himself to eat the same food as them ‘so that I could always say, I have it no better than you’.

Marie was constantly in his thoughts. ‘Opposite me rose the steep and threatening black cliffs, the rapids we had crossed that afternoon rushed and roared at my side, and in the far distance shone the snow-covered mountains. But I saw only you, my Marie. You and the noble beauty of my surroundings made me conscious of the immensity of our separation.’ The immensity of their separation, the wild romance of his uncharted environment, the rigours of his work and his soaring ambition: Boas’s letter-diaries to his beloved reveal the relish with which he faced the challenges ahead of him. At twenty-five years old, he saw this expedition, which he had planned for a year and dreamed of since childhood, as his chance to prove himself to the world.

Franz Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, one of six children but the only boy in his family to survive to adulthood. His parents were prosperous merchants, selling, importing and exporting high-end millinery, part of a small, long-standing Jewish population in the ancient town. Secular, intellectual and idealistic, they had supported and been disappointed by the revolutions of 1848, after which Sophie Boas’s brother-in-law, Abraham Jacobi, had been exiled. Uncle Jacobi, a friend of Karl Marx, became a doctor in New York, specialising in public health and paediatrics. His nephew, the young Franz, was gifted, particularly in mathematics, but he gave up his hopes of becoming a professional pianist only reluctantly to focus on his academic work.

Laurels shimmered ahead of him, tantalisingly out of reach. For a young Jewish boy in nineteenth-century Prussia, no matter how talented, a public career of any kind was an impossible dream unless he openly renounced his faith and converted to Christianity. Aged sixteen, he wrote to his sister, who had chided him for his ambition, ‘It seems terrible to me to have to spend my life unknown and unnoticed by people. But I am afraid that none of these expectations will ever be fulfilled. I am scared myself of such thirst for glory, but I cannot help it.’

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Boas moved between three universities – starting at Heidelberg and ending in Kiel, via Bonn – where he studied mainly physics, philosophy and geography but also attended courses in mathematics, chemistry, botany, comparative anatomy, astronomy, folklore, geology and biology. He wrote his dissertation on the perception of the colour of water, an early expression of his lifelong intellectual ‘desire to understand the relation between the objective and subjective worlds’. On leaving Kiel (the least well-regarded academically of the three universities he attended but where one of his sisters was living), he received the second highest grade of his year.

At least five times he met fellow students in duels. The first incident was almost frivolous, a dispute over an overplayed rental piano, but later he challenged anti-Semitic students seeking to exclude Jews from university life – ‘the damned Jew baiters’, as he called them in a letter home after one bout, warning his parents to expect him scarred by ‘a few cuts, one even on the nose!’ Duelling, or Mensur, was a craze in German universities at the time, with established conventions including padded clothes and goggles for both insulter and insulted, seconds, an umpire, and a surgeon on hand, and Boas was far from the only student proudly to boast facial scars, or Schmiss, from an opponent’s épée, but his impatience to defend his honour reveals the depth of his internalised feelings of inferiority as a second-class citizen. Later, in his declaration to Marie of his desire to ‘live and die for … equal rights to all, equal possibilities to learn and work for rich and poor alike’, it is not hard to attribute the roots of his egalitarianism to this ingrained and unwelcome sense of inadequacy; its scars, at any rate, were there for all to see.

The empty Arctic might seem an unlikely place to prove oneself, but Boas’s childhood had coincided with a period of German polar exploration and, with Alexander von Humboldt a childhood hero, he had always yearned to travel. The geographical expedition he planned appealed to him partly because it was interdisciplinary, requiring talents across a variety of subjects, but also because it was for him alone: his challenges to be faced and his glory to be achieved. He spent a year applying for grants and writing articles to raise funding and teaching himself everything from meteorology and the new technology of photography to Inuit language and linguistics, to ready himself for the journey that would decide his fate.

When winter came to the Cumberland Sound, Boas travelled with the Inuit, researching their hunting and migration routes. That year the snow was unusually soft and deep (it is to Boas that we owe the fact that the Inuit have fifty different words for snow), so he and his companions sweated through the day in their reindeer-fur coats and boots as they pulled the sleds – the dogs they would normally have used were ill – and each morning woke in their igloos to find their clothes frozen solid. It was impossible, he told Marie, to express the joy with which they would greet the sight of a distant igloo after a march sometimes of more than twenty-four hours through -45° Celsius cold, and ‘how comfortable and beautiful it seems when one enters into these dirty, narrow spaces, at the appearance of which I at first turned away in horror’.

He blushed, he wrote, ‘to remember that during our meal tonight I thought about how good a pudding with plum sauce would taste. But you have no idea what an effect privations and hunger, real hunger, have on a person … the contrast is almost unbelievable when I remember that a year ago I was in society and observed all the rules of good taste, and tonight I sit in this snow hut with Wilhelm and an Eskimo, eating a piece of raw, frozen seal meat which first had to be hacked up with an axe, and greedily gulping my coffee.’

Gradually his ideas of superiority, as a European, began to wear away. The condescending parent–child relationship he had assumed only a few months earlier was replaced by a growing sense that he and his Inuit friends were equals. ‘I am now a true Eskimo,’ he exulted on that first expedition in December. ‘I live as they do, hunt with them, and belong to the men of Anarnitung.’ When Oxaitung, one of his guides, harpooned two seals, they were divided between the settlement families amid celebration. ‘Is it not a beautiful custom among these savages [wildun] that they bear all deprivations in common, and are also at their happiest best – eating and drinking – when someone has brought back booty from the hunt? 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, relatively speaking, are much worse.’

It was as if he had entered an icy Garden of Eden and he was enthralled as much by the way he rose to meet his challenge as by the challenge itself. Many years later, recalling this first expedition of his career, he remembered ‘days of the most joyful feeling of freedom, of self-reliance: ready to meet the dangers of the ice, sea, and wild animals; on the alert to meet and overcome difficulties; no human being there to hinder or help’. No human being, of course, except his servant, Wilhelm Weike, and his Inuit guides and companions. Class and education were tighter chains from which to escape than ‘civilisation’.

Weike, who also kept a diary of his time in Canada, was less interested in the ethnographic and scientific endeavours that so fascinated Boas but arguably interacted more directly with their hosts and, by having an Inuit girlfriend, was better integrated into the society Boas observed as an outsider. Emotionally and culturally, Boas still held himself apart, writing constantly to Marie and his family and spending his evenings in the igloo reading Immanuel Kant in the light from an oil lamp improvised from a butter tin. Thoughts of Marie and their future together sustained him. ‘And you, dear girl, will always help me. If my strength should weaken, you will give me renewed strength – just as you give me new strength here.’ He held her farewell words close to his heart: ‘Vorwärts [Onwards], I wait for you!’

Boas may have seen his time in Canada as an adventure as well as a scientific expedition but, from the Inuits’ point of view, the winter he stayed with them was notably more difficult than usual and they associated him with their hardship. Their sledge dogs were plagued by disease, so hunters and traders had to pull their sleds themselves, seals were scarce and the temperatures were unusually cold. For Boas, this meant his ink froze and he was forced to take notes and write his ‘chicken scratchings’ (as he called his tiny, almost illegible handwriting) to Marie in pencil; for his companions, it meant even more dangerous efforts to move around and find food and deaths that might otherwise have been avoided. Without fully comprehending it, the uninvited guest was a burden to his hosts.

Tragically, diphtheria (previously unknown there) and pneumonia also stalked the Inuit that winter and, although the Doctora’dluk had medicines to relieve fever and pain, not until the advent of penicillin in 1928 could these deadly infections, passed on by contact with the ‘civilised’ world, effectively be cured. ‘Many Eskimo blamed me for it [the diseases], as it really seems as though sickness and death follow my footsteps. If I were superstitious, I really would believe that my presence brought misfortune to the Eskimo! Many are supposed to have said that they did not wish to see me in their iglu [sic