![]() ![]() This was quite unusual, though King sheds little light on why this turned out to be the case. As he put it early on, “the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.” King underscores that Boas, and later his students, were asking Americans “to suspend their belief in their own greatness.”Īnd what students Boas came to have! Papa Franz, as he was often called, built the anthropology department at Columbia University, where, as he noted, his best graduate students were women. He saw each culture as having its own integrity, its own ways of providing meaning and direction to the people who comprised it. Boas worked alongside these fellow anthropologists at museums of natural history, world’s fairs, and universities, but his views were different. Theories of evolution were used to justify imperial ambitions, and anthropologists served up accounts of primitive cultures left far behind in the march to modernity. Ultimately, this was a vested interest legitimating the superiority of those doing the displacing. In the last decades of the 1800s, Western countries were competing to build their empires in far-flung regions, and there was more than a little interest in the peoples being displaced. It was also a form of Herzensbildung, an education of the heart, King notes: “Changing his place in the world had changed his perspective on it.”Īrctic expeditions belonged to the genre of 19th-century explorations of the exotic, but Boas’s cut against their grain. Interviewing Inuit in the region, being introduced to their languages and their social organizations, opened for him a different way of thinking about how particular cultures develop in specific environments. Other Arctic explorers had looked to test themselves in unusual and extreme conditions Boas was interested in those for whom such conditions were normal: indigenous peoples who found the landscape no more extreme than he had found the University of Kiel, his alma mater. In the late 1800s, Boas set off for the Arctic. ![]() What if one tried to grasp how a quite different culture offered a different modality for navigating the world? Could an outsider come to understand that process and those people, and then communicate this understanding to others? Gods of the Upper Air explores how Boas and his extraordinary students sought to do just that. Suddenly he was less interested, Charles King tells the reader, in building mathematical models of how the world changed than in understanding how our own changing conditions altered the way we made sense of it. ![]() ![]() Paths for acceptance were not unknown to him, but after receiving a doctorate in physics, he grew impatient and forged a different path. Born in the middle of Europe, and in the middle of the 1800s, Franz Boas was the son of assimilated German Jews. One of the very first fictional features by an African-American woman, LOSING GROUND remains a stunning and powerful work of art for being a funny, brilliant, and personal member of indie cinema canon.THE FATHER OF 20th-century anthropology in America came - fittingly enough - from another time and another place. Victor decides to rent a country house away from the city, but the couple’s summer idyll becomes complicated by his involvement with a younger model. The inimitable Kathleen Collins' second film tells the story of two remarkable people, married and hurtling toward a crossroads in their lives: Sara Rogers, a Black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest just as her painter husband, Victor, sets off on an exploration of joy. Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982, 86 min.) Under the tutelage of anthropologist Franz Boas (her former Columbia professor) and Harlem Renaissance arts patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, Zora Neale Hurston spent nearly two years, from 1927 to 1929, studying the folkloric customs, work songs, spirituals, and vernacular language of African American communities along the River Road and from New Orleans to Florida-observations that culminated in her 1935 collection Mules and Men. Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage (Zora Neal Hurston, 1928, 7 min.) Tickets: $15 General Admission/$7 Reduced Price Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage + Losing Ground ![]()
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