American Quarterly

My friend, George Hunt, will read this to you ... is good that you should have a box in which your laws and your stories are kept. My friend, George Hunt, will show you a box in which some of your stories will be kept. It is a book that I have written on what I saw and heard when I was with you two years ago. It is a good book, for in it are your laws and stories. Now they will not be forgotten. Friends, it would be good if my friend, George Hunt, would become the storage box of your laws and of your stories. ¹

This quote was culled by Ira Jacknis from the correspondence between Franz Boas and his long-term collaborator, George Hunt. The letter was appended to instructions that Boas sent Hunt in 1897, laying out how Hunt was to go about acquiring a collection for the American Museum of Natural History from Kwakw a k a ’wakw ² communities (which Boas refers to as “Kwakiutl”). Hunt was instructed to read the letter as a means of explaining the work he was beginning to undertake in the context of offering a feast. [End Page 479]

The ironies that emerge from the letter are quite suggestive with respect to the dynamics of the collaboration between Boas and Hunt. Boas, a German Jew living in New York, was introducing Hunt, son of an English father and a Tlingit mother, to the members of the community in which he had been raised, but in a new guise, captured in the metaphor of the storage box. Hunt, in this instance, served as mediator, voicing Boas’s words to the Kwakw a k a ’wakw, an apparent mirror-image of the role Boas played in rendering Hunt’s Kwakw a k a ’wakw texts to his own scholarly community. On closer examination, however, there are powerful asymmetries between these respective acts of mediation, the critical elucidation of which is the principal task of this article. The Boas-Hunt collaboration secured the removal of vast quantities of Kwakw a k a ’wakw objects and the creation of written texts, photographs, recordings, and artifacts. Boas’s authority helped to enhance the legitimacy of Hunt’s employment as a collector at the same time that “the Kwakiutl” and particularly George Hunt were being socialized into a process of constructing texts in Kwakw’ala (the language spoken by Kwakw a k a ’wakw), putting them in “boxes” that could be likened to the shaped and carved wooden boxes in which the Kwakw a k a ’wakw cached their treasured objects, and contributing to their storage and preservation. These roles—writer of books, collector of artifacts and recorder of tales and customs, and producers of laws, stories, and objects—were differentially distributed among Boas, Hunt, and the residents of Fort Rupert and other communities. Boas played a crucial role in determining what would be rendered as “laws and stories,” the form and content of the corpus, the discursive frames in which it would be placed, and what sorts of authority would accrue to the texts.

The Boas-Hunt texts exerted a great deal of influence not just on “Kwakiutl” ethnography but on American anthropology as a whole. Many of Boas’s students and defenders shared his conviction that texts collected and written down in the language of the informant constituted “the foundation of all future researches.” ³ In her appreciation of “Boas’s ‘Natural History’ Approach to Field Method,” Marian Smith wrote that “The texts supplied a nearly perfect record of a people’s language and of the organization and style of their connected discourse. The texts were objective in the sense that they were always available for re-analysis.” ⁴ Such strong Boasian critics as Marvin Harris and George P. Murdock confirm this synecdochic role for Boas’s texts, [End Page 480] using them as a prime example of his preoccupation with ethnographic particulars. ⁵

Ethnopoetics and post-structuralist critiques of ethnography have converged of late in casting...