Reassembling The Social Organization: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph

Summary

Franz Boas's 1897 report, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to museum collections, photographs, and sound recordings as well as text. However, both Boas and his Indigenous collaborator George Hunt remained dissatisfied with the published text, laboring for decades to correct and supplement it. They left behind a vast archive of materials related to the book’s creation and afterlife that are now widely distributed across institutional, disciplinary, and international borders. This paper discusses a collaborative project to create an annotated critical edition of the work that unites published and unpublished materials with museum collections and with Kwakwaka’wakw knowledge in an interactive, multimedia website. Archival revelations about the truly co-authored nature of the original text allow us to better situate the contexts and methods of creating ethnographic knowledge in terms of the Indigenous ontologies it purports to represent. We are harnessing digital technologies to return sensory richness to Boas and Hunt’s synthetic text, to reactivate disparate and long dormant museum collections, and to restore cultural patrimony to its Indigenous inheritors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20002