Category Archives: key words

09/21/24

Boas & Morley – left & right

There is no inherent theoretical or political tendency within any discipline. More relevant are the wider social forces at play and the particularities of history. While many anthropologists in North America consider themselves liberal in social values and progressive in economic terms, this has not always been the case.  The earlier version, especially that segment link to physical and archaeological anthropology, tended toward the more conservative and flirted with ideas of eugenics and notions of biological racial differences that are today discredited. Politically such early anthropologists maintained strong connections with economic elites that funded many of the prominent private universities.

One of the earliest political conflicts within the discipline of anthropology involved Franz Boas and Sylvanus G. Morley. Morely was a fourth generation white American whose middle class family had ties to New England’s political elites. At the center of the controversy was Morley’s work in central American during World War I on behalf of the U.S. Naval Intelligence agency. At the same time Morley was presenting himself as a practicing archaeologist of Mayan society.

Franz Boas, a German émigré, is widely identified as one of the founding figures of American anthropology.  Boas was very much opposed to so-called scientific racism – the ideology that different races of humans have different inherent attributes like intelligence, physical capacity, etc.   Boas used detailed empirical methods to document decisively that there were no inherent biological differences between putative races, rather all of humanity shared the same capacities. He took his scientific discoveries into the realm of politics where he advocated for racial equality, democratic practices, and the right of all people for equity and autonomy.  Boas’ principles of honesty and fairness brought him into conflict with Morley’s deceptive use of archaeology as a cover for espionage. Boas publicly repudiated the action Morley and others connected to him and for his pains the American Anthropological Association censured him.

Both men continued their careers in anthropology, Morley working at the School for American Archaeology (known today as the School for Advanced Research) in Santa Fe. The school was, for much of the 20th century a center that attracted a host of conservative thinkers and was funded by heirs of major publishing empire who toyed with the politics of fascism.  Boas was a professor at Columbia University were the students he trained went on to found most of the major departments of American anthropology in the 20th century.

The underlying conflict between individuals who value social justice and equality versus those that admire a more conservative and Tory future continues, as in society in general, within the worlds of anthropology today.

09/9/24

Where is ‘The Field?’

Anthropologists do their research in ‘the field.’ This is to set it apart from where we write up our research results.  That is we make a distinction between where and when we conduct our research and the place and time within which we write up our findings.  In recent decades this fairly simplistic distinction between field and home has become complicated by critique (Geertz 1988), advances in information technology, and changes in research practices.  Nonetheless, practicing anthropologists still refer to their place of research as the ‘field’ and what we do in the field as ‘fieldwork.’

My impressions and observations of many years of research in the Bigoudennie (an area within Brittany, France) are recorded in notebooks, files and in the photos I took during my time in there.  Glancing through my family photo albums I see the passage of many years in Brittany recorded from the perspective of the everyday life of a family.  These photos mark the events, trips, birthdays, guests, anniversaries and other everyday moments of parenthood and family.  The place, that is to say the “field-site,” enters this record as glimpses of landscape and blurred backgrounds against which the normal life of a family progresses.  Later photos, taken on return visits, tend to capture reunions with friends in their homes.

My experience being in the Bigoudennie is overwritten by my experience as a father and as a partner to my spouse.  We attended the public-school festival like the other parents.  Some sunny afternoons we might pile into our car and take a picnic on the beach, along some nearby lakeshore or in a neighboring wood.  On my way home from the daily commercial fish auction I often stopped to pick up a few things at the supermarket or bakery.  These are not earth-shattering events.  They are part of a family life, which continues irrespective of whether or not one is in France, Canada, the United States, or elsewhere.

One of our early arrivals in Brittany is captured in a series of pictures of my sons, playing on a beach near our first temporary lodgings.  It is late in the afternoon and the setting sun colors the landscape.  In one picture, the boys are standing behind an inscription etched in the sand: “Jarek and Tristan, Oct. 16, 1994, Brittany.”   This photo masks the anxiety of navigating along highways and county lanes, searching out what is for us, strangers here, difficult and incomprehensible.  Now, having finished with the necessities of shopping, signing leases, and cleaning up, we have retreated to this beach to relax and take stock of the place we shall call home for the next year or more.

In one of the few photos of which I am in the picture I am standing on the edge of a quay in the Port of Lesconil.  One boy is perched near the edge of the dock.  I am holding the other on the seat of an adult’s bike.  Off to the side, an old-style dragger is coming alongside the dock.  The white-washed sides of stone houses are just visible across the harbor. While my presence is clearly expressed, the skipper of the dragger is barely a silhouette framed in the window of his wheelhouse.  The clues to his identity are locked within the silhouette of the boat and in its registration number. Much can be learned from a reading of the boat: age, rigging, gear-type, crew size, port of registry, etc….  However, these faceless and objective data push the skipper and his crew even further into the shadows.

My field work experience in Brittany mirrors the classic demarcation between away and home, the field and the place where one writes up one’s work.  Before and along side my Breton research I did work in my home community on the north coast of BC. My master’s degree focussed on industrial fisherfolk I grew up among. This work continued to work with family and community from my home First Nation, Gitxaała (see People of the Saltwater).

‘The field’ of my north coast research intersects with my family, friend, and life networks. Here, even when I stop writing I remain enmeshed in ways that I am not in my Breton work. For many decades the discipline of anthropology down-ranked research at home. I ended up doing my doctoral research in Brittany, not BC, based on the strong advice of my mentors (and they were right for a doctoral student at that moment of time). My professional research since being hired at UBC has, however, mainly focussed on work about my home (First Nation and non-Indigenous), the intersection between First Nations and the nation state, and on the people who study First Nations. So my field has become the university itself, not simply a place some distance away.

01/1/20

A Fathers’ Day Reading List for the New Year

When my own sons were young my partner gave me a copy of Patrimony by Philip Roth for father’s day. A little while later I came across an unexpected book by ecological anthropologist Ben Orlove, In my Father’s Study. These are books that have stayed with me.

The first is a tale of a son’s journey with a father at the end of his life.

The second is a story of a son coming to learn about his father, to come to an adult appreciation of him, after the father’s death.  It’s a touching memoire.  I’ve used it a few times in my teaching but my 20/30-something students respond to it rather differently than I. For them it is simply one more book on a reading list while for me it led me to think about my life as a father and as a son.

I’ve spent a great many hours with my own father. As a child following him around as he worked on his fishing boat. As a young adult working with him on the same boat. And later in life visiting with him, keeping each other company sometimes talking about the past, often about his health, and occasionally about my own work. Coming across Orlove’s book, almost by accident, has led me to gather over the decades an eclectic little library of books reflecting upon fathers and sons. Here, in sense of order, is a selection of my favourites.

  • In My Father’s Study. Ben Orlove. U.Iowa Press. 1995
  • A Life in the Bush: lessons from my father. Roy MacGregor. Viking, 1999. A loving tale of a northern Ontario father by one of Canada’s favourite journalists.
  • Waterline: of fathers, sons, and boats. Joe Soucheray. David R.  Godin, Publisher. 1996(1989). A memoire about restoring a boat, but its far more than that.
  • For Joshua. Richard Wagamese. Anchor Canada. 2003(2002).
  • To See Every Bird on Earth: a father, a son, a lifelong obsession. Dan Koeppel. Plume. 2006.
  • Lost in America. Sherwin Nuland. Vintage. 2004.
  • Patrimony. Phillip Roth. Touchstone. 2001.
  • My Father’s Wars. Alisse Waterston. 2013.
  • Fatherless. Keith Maillard. 2019.

There are more – but this is more than enough for a start.