Paper short abstract:

In his speech on race in America, Former President Obama paraphrased a quote from Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” How do we as historians of anthropology learn from the past and help shape the future? and how do we do this responsibly and ethically?

Paper long abstract:

In his 2008 speech on race in America, Former President Obama paraphrased a quote from Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” The past reaches out to us as a legacy, and it links us to the future as an obligation. How do we as historians of anthropology draw from the past responsibly and ethically?

I will use my own research on Franz Boas as a case study. Boas shaped our contemporary present both in the U.S. and internationally. His concerns are not dead and are not buried. My work on Boas has been grounded in the detail of the “spoken word,” spoken through writing, largely through archival correspondence.

My frustration with works on Boas has to do with a careless use of historical material. Leslie White, for instance, carved in stone the idea that Boas did little fieldwork. But in his inventory of Boas’s fieldwork, White did not include Boas’s Baffin Land (1883–1884) work, or his work in Mexico, Puerto Rico, or in the U.S. Southwest. Another frustration for me is the current work on race. Mark Anderson in From Boas to Black Power (2019) makes only brief mention of Boas’s foundational and seminal work, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” (1911). Anderson did not discuss Boas’s 1894, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race.” It is this looseness with the facts that renders a distorted account, which does not honor or represent history.