Thread by @DrKillgrove

Me in August: Franz Boas was the father of modern American anthropology. He praised ethnography and participant-observation!
Students: ✍🏻

Me yesterday: Alright, let's talk ethics. Who wants to hear about all the shady shit that Boas did?
Students: 😳😬😮😧

If anyone wants a "Boas was shady af" story, you know what to do:

... that time Boas helped some grave robbers steal Native skeletons, and sell others.

... that time Boas imported 6 Inuit, 4 of whom died of TB, and 1 of whom he faked the burial of.

Story the First: Franz Boas and "My Inuit"

Boas was born & educated in Germany, obtaining his PhD in physics in 1881 but then returning to his love of cultural geography w/ a habilitation thesis defended in 1886 on Baffin Land and a book two years later on The Central Eskimo.

Baffin Island is in the Arctic, in the present-day Canadian province of Nunavut. Boas first traveled there in 1883 - self-financed and with just one other person (his servant, apparently) - w/ an interest in how people dealt with the harsh environment.

While there, Boas wrote that "I live like them [the Inuit], hunt with them,
and count myself among the men of Anarnitung." He was formulating his important idea of participant-observation as a key method in #anthropology.

Leaving aside all the ridiculously colonialist things he did on Baffin Island, Boas developed a longstanding interest in the Inuit, even as his own research moved to Canada's northwest coast, where he famously studied the Kwakiutl.

reddit.com/r/pics/comment…

By 1897, Boas had made his way to the US, where he was a professor of physical anthropology @Columbia as well as assistant curator of ethnology @AMNH. In this capacity, he asked the well-known explorer Robert Peary to bring back a native from Greenland.

Specifically, Boas requested a middle-aged man, writing that "this would enable us to obtain leisurely certain information which will be of greatest scientific importance”.

Peary obliged, bringing back 6 Inuit from northern Greenland. @AMNH created emergency living space for the Inuit in their basement. Rumor has it that, although they were not displayed publicly, the Inuits' arrival was a cause célèbre in NYC, with people paying for a glimpse.

The Inuit lived in the AMNH basement as subjects of study -- specifically, Boas gave his student Alfred Kroeber (who ended up being the father of @ursulaleguin) the project. Kroeber published his work as "The Eskimo of Smith Sound" in 1899.

It's very strange that Boas requested Peary bring Inuit to him, since he likely knew of the disastrous consequences of similar practices in 1893 for the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and the much earlier 1880 "living exhibit" in Germany.

In both of these cases, which both involved Inuit from Labrador, the vast majority of the people died, having not been immunized against smallpox and other diseases.

So you can probably imagine what's coming... the Inuit that Boas had living in the basement of the AMNH all got sick. Here's where the sources I've consulted vary -- one says everyone got pneumonia and 4 died; one says that 4 got tuberculosis and died.

Out of the six Inuit that Boas was in charge of, one left to head back home. Four died of disease. And one remained in New York -- Minik, a 7-year-old boy who had accompanied his father, Qisuk.

Qisuk died in February 1898 in New York. And immediately there was a contentious debate as to what should happen to his body (and the 3 others), which was of great scientific interest -- it was agreed that the hospital should do an autopsy, and the AMNH would get the remains.

But Minik remained, orphaned. He was adopted by one William Wallace, who recounted the mock funeral that Boas and colleagues put on for show. Wallace told the Evening Mail newspaper in 1909:

"That night some of us gathered on the museum grounds by order of the scientific staff, and got an old log about the length of a human corpse. This was wrapped in cloth, a mask attached to one end of it and all was in readiness. Dusk was the time chosen for the mock burial."

"The funeral party knew the act must be accomplished quickly and quietly, so about the time the lights began to flare up Minik was taken out on the grounds, where the imitation body was placed. The things worked well. The boy never suspected."

Even in 1909, people thought this was horrendously shady. The Evening Mail journalist talked to Boas, hoping to get an explanation for the funeral charade.

Boas was all: Yeah, we totally did that. The reporter pushed, asking Boas why he felt he had a right to Qisuk's body when he had a living descendant.

Boas replied: "Oh, that was perfectly legitimate. There was no one to bury the body, and the museum had as good a right to it as any other institution authorized to claim bodies."

Minik was understandably upset, both when his father died and eventually when he learned of the deception. (Minik soon after arriving in NYC.)

Minik's adoptive father, William Wallace, was a curator at the AMNH -- and super creepily was the one responsible for defleshing Qisuk's body and preserving his skeleton. It wasn't until 1906 that Minik learned about the deception.

Wallace, in talking to the reporter in 1909, recounted that, after learning the truth, Minik "was never the same boy. He became morbid and restless... his heart was broken."

So Minik, with Wallace's help, tried to petition the AMNH to return the bones of his father, so that he could bury them in Greenland. The director of the museum at the time, the amazingly named Hermon Bumpus, refused to even admit that the museum had Qisuk's skeleton.

Boas had moved on, Wallace had quit, and Bumpus was stonewalling, so Minik never did get what he wanted.

Minik did convince Peary to bring him back to Greenland around 1910. He'd forgotten his native language, but his countrymen welcomed him back and got him up to speed.

Minik decided to return to the US in 1916, and ended up working odd jobs around the northeast. He died during the 1918 flu pandemic, though, at age 28 and is buried in New Hampshire.

What happened to Qisuk's bones, you may ask? After increasing pressure in Canada and the US in the 1980s surrounding indigenous rights, the skeletons of Qisuk and three of his compatriots were found in the collection of the AMNH and repatriated to Greenland in 1993.

We could say that Boas's ethics were a product of his time. It's possible to explain why he did what he did, as Boas was clearly a proponent of scientific and ethical utilitarianism -- anything is OK as long as it's a means to a scientific end.

But what Boas (and everyone else involved) did with Minik and his fellow Inuit is in no way defensible.

As Friedrich Pöhl writes in an essay on Boas's ethics:

"It appears that Boas’ conviction and fight for freedom of science implies a 'dangerous' separation of science and ethics. The ethically indefensible consequences of this attitude manifest themselves first and foremost in his field research in the Canadian Northwest."

Or, as Minik told a reporter in 1909, "You’re a race of scientific criminals. I know I’ll never get my father’s bones out of the American Museum of Natural History. I am glad enough to get away before they grab my brains and stuff them into a jar!” [Qisuk's brain was in a jar.]

So. Franz Boas did some amazing things for American anthropology. And his research --even the unethical parts (especially the unethical parts?) - paved the way for a new understanding of cultural and biological differences that disavowed biological race and other insidious ideas.

But Boas was the worst kind of "means to an end" researchers. He pushed anthropological understandings forward while trampling on the rights of indigenous people and any sense of ethics.

Boas's is a complicated history, as is the history of American #anthropology.

For more, see the works of Boas's biographer, the late historian Douglas Cole.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_C…

Postscript: Forgot to link the Pöhl article -- erudit.org/fr/revues/etud….