Towards a Neo-Boasian Anthropology?

In 1887, Franz Boas, at that time a relatively young and unknown anthropologist, launched a full scale attack on American museum anthropology. The father-to-be of American cultural anthropology insisted that first one must place artifacts in the context of the underlying culture, and, by extension, those of its neighbours, before their true meaning can be revealed. In Ira Jacknis?s terms he ?shifted the goal of ethnography from the study of discrete objects, in a universal perspective, to a focus on their cultural context, in a local setting?(Jacknis, 1996: 187).

In the long run, Boas?s critique was due to disentangle the work of anthropology from its original ?primitivist? and museum (Paul-Lévy, 1985) settings, even if his work is closely related to ethnographic museums. The tension between Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, or, in Boas?s own terms, between the ?aesthetic? method of the physicist and the ?affective? one of the cosmographer/ historian (Boas, 1996: 11), transposed to anthropology, dissolved the old evolutionist paradigm. Nevertheless a tension remained. The shift from the part (seen on an evolutionist-universalist canvas) to the whole (seen as a dense but local cultural entity) was never complete. There is, in Boas?s works, a characteristic ?delaying of closure,? an adversity towards formulating general laws and drawing early sinthesis (Jacknis, 1996). Lately this boundary resistance of Boasian anthropology has been decoded as a precursory manifestation of postmodernism (Bunzl, 2004).

If the closure of the evolutionist anthropological discourse was made possible by the general idea of unilineal or multilineal evolution, the Boasian one should have been articulated on the idea of the wholeness of culture. The problem is that ?culture? asa discrete whole is not given but constituted inside ever-disappearing boundaries, as the openness of early Boasian anthropology shows us. Even if it would be probably anachronistic to give this exact formulation to Boas?s ideas, this is a logical and historical outcome of his ?affective? methodology and is one of the reasons why museums ? as a display of ?authentic? artifacts - were slowly removed from the core of cultural anthropology.

Another reason is related probably with the emergence of the malinowskian paradigm in the Trobriand Islands. George Stocking Jr. has artfully situated this fateful event in the larger context of fieldwork in British anthropology from the early 1870s Notes and Queries, through Tylor, Haddon, Rivers, Westermarck, Seligman, the Torres Strait expedition etc. to the forced internment of Bronislaw Malinowski, as an enemy alien, for two years, in Australia, during World War I (Stocking, 1983). Malinowski?s achievement ?helped to establish the special cognitive authority claimed by the modern ethnographic tradition? (Stocking, 1983: 71).

Even if the survivalist tradition could still be perceived in Malinowski?s famous exclamation: ?Alas, there is little time for ethnology!? (Malinowski, 1984) from Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the functionalist and structural-functionalist trends, but, even more prestigious, the fieldwork, the ?ethnographer?s magic,? determined the retreat of museum based ethnology from the cutting edge of anthropological investigation.