Indigenous Visions The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity Series Editors Ned Blackhawk, Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University Kate W. Shanley, Native American Studies, University of Montana Named in honor of the pioneering Winnebago educational reformer and fi rst known American Indian graduate of Yale College, Henry Roe Cloud (Class of 1910), this series showcases emergent and leading scholarship in the fi eld of American Indian Studies. The series draws upon multiple disciplinary perspec- tives and organizes them around the place of Native Americans within the development of American and European modernity, emphasizing the shared, relational ties between Indigenous and Euro- American societies. It seeks to broaden current historic, literary, and cultural approaches to American Studies by foregrounding the fraught but generative sites of inquiry provided by the study of Indigenous communities. Indigenous Visions Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas Edited by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner |NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Published with assistance from the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury Memorial Fund. Parts of Chapter 11 originally appeared in Benjamin Balthaser, “‘Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia’: Rethinking Indigenous Modernity and the Popular Front in the Work of Archie Phinney and D’Arcy McNickle,” American Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2014): 385–416, and Benjamin Balthaser, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail [email protected] (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce). Set in Adobe Garamond type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944783 ISBN 978- 0- 300- 19651- 1 (paperback : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments, vii Introduction, ix Part One Origins and Erasures: The Emergence of a Boasian Circle 1 Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness Isaiah Lorado Wilner, 3 2 Franz Boas in Africana Philosophy Lewis R. Gordon, 42 3 Expressive Enlightenment: Subjectivity and Solidarity in Daniel Garrison Brinton, Franz Boas, and Carlos Montezuma Ryan Carr, 61 4 “Culture” Crosses the Atlantic: The German Sources of The Mind of Primitive Man Harry Liebersohn, 91 vi Contents Part Two Worlds of Enlightenment: Boasian Thought as Process and Practice 5 Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas: Anthropology, Equality / Diversity, and World Peace James Tully, 111 6 Of Two Minds About Minding Language in Culture Michael Silverstein, 147 7 Why White People Love Franz Boas; or, The Grammar of Indigenous Dispossession Audra Simpson, 166 Part Three Routes of Race: The Transnational Networks of Ethnicity 8 Utter Confusion and Contradiction: Franz Boas and the Problem of Human Complexion Martha Hodes, 185 9 The Death of William Jones: Indian, Anthropologist, Murder Victim Kiara M. Vigil, 209 10 Woman on the Verge of a Cultural Breakdown: Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and the Racial Privilege of Boasian Relativism Eve Dunbar, 231 11 “A New Indian Intelligentsia”: Archie Phinney and the Search for a Radical Native American Modernity Benjamin Balthaser, 258 Part Four Boasiana: The Global Flow of the Culture Concept 12 The River of Salvation Flows Through Africa: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Raphael Armattoe, and the Redemption of the Culture Concept Sean Hanretta, 279 13 A Two- Headed Thinker: Rüdiger Bilden, Gilberto Freyre, and the Reinvention of Brazilian Identity Maria Lúcia Pallares- Burke, 316 14 Seeing Like an Inca: Julio C. Tello, Indigenous Archaeology, and Pre- Columbian Trepanation in Peru Christopher Heaney, 344 List of Contributors, 377 Index, 379 Acknowledgments This book began with an interdisciplinary conference held at Yale on September 15–17, 2011, in commemoration of the centennial of Franz Boas’s treatise on the dynamism and diversity of modern belonging, The Mind of Primitive Man. We wish to thank our sponsors at the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, John Mack Faragher, Jay Gitlin, and Edith Rotkopf, and our cosponsors at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, David Blight, Dana Schaffer, and Thomas Thurston. Two members of Yale’s faculty, Glenda Gilmore and William W. Kelly, played instrumental roles in planning the meeting. Stephen Pitti and Alicia Schmidt Camacho hosted the memorable dinner at Ezra Stiles College where much of the conversation that inspired this book began. We also benefi ted from the involvement of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, particularly that of the curator of Western Americana, George Miles, and the special interest taken by Harvey Goldblatt of Pierson College and Mary Miller, the dean of Yale College at the time. Several of Yale’s interdisciplinary centers and programs provided much- needed support. We thank the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; the Committee on vii viii Acknowledgments Canadian Studies; the European Studies Council; the Council on Latin Ameri- can and Iberian Studies; and the Center for Comparative Research. We thank the departments of History, English, Anthropology, and African American Studies for their fi nancial and intellectual involvement. The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Stanley T. Woodward Lecture- ship made it possible for us to invite international speakers, and for these investments we would like to thank the Offi ce of the Provost and the Offi ce of the Secretary. A few scholars have played critical roles in the conversation that created this book. We thank Elizabeth Alexander, Taiaiake Alfred, Elijah Anderson, Seyla Benhabib, Jonathan Holloway, Matthew Jacobson, J. Kēh aulani Kauanui, Kerwin Lee Klein, Joshua L. Reid, and Michael Warner for discussions of race, indigeneity, migration, and modernity that contributed directly to the develop- ment of the project. Our thinking about the global circulation of knowledge benefi ted from exchanges with Sebastian Conrad, Joanna Radin, and James C. Scott. Finally, our editors at Yale University Press, Christopher Rogers, Adina Popescu Berk, and Erica Hanson, helped bring the book to fruition. Introduction Few Western thinkers have engaged with Indigenous people more closely or reaped greater rewards from that engagement than Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology. In the early twentieth century, as the world’s self-d eclared advanced nations competed to colonize the globe and exploit its natural resources, Boas drew upon what he had learned among Native peoples to present an alternative approach to modernity. Questioning the assumption that the West could claim the prerogative to rule “the rest” by right of natural endowment, Boas critiqued the idea of race, the master concept of colo- nialism. He shaped the modern notion of culture as an interactive process to which each of the world’s peoples has contributed its portion of knowledge. And he framed the idea of grammar as a universal characteristic of human cognition, the borderless ability to structure linguistic meaning. These interre- lated concepts interrogated the standards by which the world measured prog- ress, ultimately projecting visions of a shared global community.1 Today Boas is beginning to undergo a reevaluation.2 This is partly because of his unmistakable importance to contemporary discussions of race, inequality, empire, and migration—conversations emergent from the peoples he worked with and the places he worked in, which coalesce around the vulnerability of the ix