Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories reviews the history of nineteenth and twentieth century American anthropology through the lens of the identities of and relationships between its practitioners. By centering these relationships and personal motivations, the volume invites reconsideration of anthropological disciplinary histories and genealogies. The book is a volume in the Histories of Anthropology Annual series, but deviates from some of the series’ norms. Most notably, chapters 7 through 13 are clustered into a section with its own title, Voicing the Ancestors, that engages with Native North American perspectives on the experience of being researched as anthropological subjects.
Franz Boas looms large in this text; almost all chapters engage him or his scholarly legacy in some regard. This makes sense given Boas’s influence on the field, but it also creates the impression that the few non-Boasian chapters, especially Federico Delgado Rosa’s chapter on Johannes Fabian (chapter 1), Deana L. Weibel’s reflection on the Igorot “human zoos” run by her great-grandfather (chapter 5), and Claudia Salomon Tarquini’s history of Indigenous studies in Argentina (chapter 6), feel like they belong in a different book, as compelling as they all are. The Boasian emphasis is not surprising given that both editors are in Boas’s lineage, and that editor Regna Darnell, in particular, has a rich scholarly history of engaging with Boas’s life and legacy. This focus does not prevent the book from feeling multivocal. The argument is that there is no argument; instead, there are many arguments, many versions of the story that got us to the present disciplinary-intellectual point.
With this in mind, central to this volume is the important consideration of who speaks, who is silenced, and who does the silencing in disciplinary histories. Rosa opens with a critique of Johannes Fabian’s concept of “allochronism” for its colonial overtones despite its intentional drive to the contrary. Rosa describes widespread application of Fabian’s theory as a new mode of totalitarian critique that replaces one imaginary intellectual hierarchy with another. Several chapters on Boas interrogate his strong-handed approach to research relationships. Chapter 8, wherein Ira Jacknis describes the conflicted relationship of dependency Boas had on his Tlingit research assistant for the development of his famous Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) work, was especially striking to me, recalling Sadhana Naithani’s study of the relationship between William Crooke and Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube in the 2006 work of documenting folktales in India. Deana L. Weibel’s revisiting of that most horrifying of pseudo-ethnographic nineteenth-century phenomena, the human zoo, shed light on the ways that despite the horrific framing of the events, Igorot zoo participants had great influence over the development of anthropology through their exaggerated and intentional performances for visiting ethnographers who studied at these zoos instead of doing in situ fieldwork.
Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories focuses on the history of anthropology, and as such will not be relevant to all folklorists. It will, however, be of interest to anthropological folklorists and folklorists interested in the history of the academic study of Native American cultures, as that is the corner of Boas’s work featured most prominently here. Those interested in the study of museums and material culture will also find several chapters useful. Reading through a folklorist’s lens, I was at times frustrated by the lack of attention given to specific performers, texts, or expressive traditions. I wanted to hear from a Diné weaver in Kathy M’Closkey’s chapter about the capitalist undervaluation of Diné weavers’ labor and museums’ complicity in that process, for example (chapter 4). Saul Schwartz’s chapter on Boas’s plan for American Indian language study and the emic interpretation of cultures is the most folkloristic (chapter 10). This book is of greatest value to folklorists for its insight into the methodologies and interpersonal relationships that informed many Boasian scholars who have influenced our field, not for its direct applicability to the field itself. The Voicing our Ancestors section feels less revelatory to folklorists who have long prized the foregrounding of participant voices and the application of ground-up “humble” theories, but the historiography of relationships, similar to Nancy J. Parezo’s account of James Harrington’s appropriation of Matilda Coxe Stevenson’s research data, or to Sharon Lindenburger’s reflection on Boas’s complex Jewish identification, would be of value to us. This kind of critical engagement with our own disciplinary genealogies would provide an expansive response to the call for multi-genealogical critique put forward by Charles Briggs and Sadhana Naithani in 2012.
Briggs, Charles L., and Sadhana Naithani. 2012. “The Coloniality of Folklore: Towards a Multi-Genealogical Practice of Folkloristics.” Studies in History 28: 231–70.
Naithani, Sadhana. 2006. In Quest of Indian Folktales: Pandit Ram Gharib Chaube and William Crooke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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[Review length: 778 words • Review posted on December 10, 2022]