Indigenous Visions
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Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas
Edited by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner
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Format: PaperPrice: $35.00
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A compelling study that charts the influence of Indigenous thinkers on Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology
In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on relationships with a global circle of Indigenous thinkers who used Boasian anthropology as a medium for their ideas. Contributors also examine how Boasian thought intersected with the work of major modernist figures, demonstrating how ideas of diversity and identity sprang from colonization and empire.
In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on relationships with a global circle of Indigenous thinkers who used Boasian anthropology as a medium for their ideas. Contributors also examine how Boasian thought intersected with the work of major modernist figures, demonstrating how ideas of diversity and identity sprang from colonization and empire.
Ned Blackhawk is professor of history and American studies at Yale University and author of Violence over the Land. Isaiah Lorado Wilner is postdoctoral fellow in the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
"With fresh perspectives, this superb collection delves deep into Boas’s mind and method and sheds new light on the influence of his relationship with Indigenous peoples on his world-shaping ideas."— Taiaiake Alfred, University of Victoria
"Stunning. A revelatory and transformative volume for our understanding of what Boas became, thanks to the instruction of his indigenous compatriots and what anthropology might aspire to. No ethnographer should be allowed out the door without having taken its lessons to heart." —James C. Scott, Yale University
"This landmark collection offers a pioneering model for all intellectual historians, showing native peoples to be “agents of their own forms of globalization” who shaped some of our most distinctive commitments."— Samuel Moyn, coeditor of Global Intellectual History
“Readers of Boas will delight in this excellent and varied collection of essays.”—Publishers Weekly
“An impressive assemblage that discloses the influence of Boasian ideas in political science, anthropology, history, literature, American Studies, and philosophy . . . Essential.”—Choice
“Wilner begins his paper with a stirring proposal for a major—a monumental—'new narrative,’ a reorientation of thinking about world history and modernity.”—Herbert S. Lewis, Reviews in Anthropology
“An important contribution toward deepening work on native intellectual history, in its influence on Euro-American ideas and on its own terms. . . . Along with benefiting from the individual essays in this impressive volume, scholars from a number of fields in the humanities and social sciences, including historians focusing on native people, colonialism, the U.S. Progressive Era, and social-scientific thought, should grapple with the editors’ argument.”—Sean P. Harvey, Journal of American History
“An altogether marvelous volume that pulsates with insightful and urgent scholarship. . . . Undoubtedly a milestone in Boas studies and the history of anthropology, its chapters also make varied contributions to Indigenous, colonial, imperial and global history, [and] Africana studies.”—Geoff Bil, History of Anthropology Review
Winner of the 2019 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection
ISBN: 9780300196511
Publication Date: April 24, 2018
Publication Date: April 24, 2018
416 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
28 b/w illus.
28 b/w illus.
