When Tomás Ó Criomhthain penned his memoir in the early twentieth century, he could hardly have imagined the worldwide impact of his life story. Tomás Ó Criomhthain (anglicised O’Crohan ) was born in April 1855 (possibly 1856) as the last of eight children to Dónal Ó Criomhthain and Cáit Ní Shé. He was an ordinary, everyday fisherman and small farmer who lived on a small island off the western seaboard coast of Ireland. People on the Great Blasket Island lived unremarkable lives and communicated with one another in a language that was not the mainstream in the wider world. Tomás had not witnessed any particularly extraordinary events. In fact, his was a regular lifestyle, and his life story was that of an everyday Irish-Gaelic islander.
Yet, it was that very ordinariness that was to capture the imagination on an international scale. When retelling this story , Kanigel (2012, 7–8) said: “The Blasket story, I came to realize, wasn’t only about one little corner of Ireland. In telling it, I could get at a bigger, more urgent story, as central to this century as to the last, about how we live now, what we’ve left behind, and at what cost.” A well-told life story can shed light on a society far beyond the experiences of that individual (See, e.g. Shostak’s (1983 (1981)) biography of a hunter-gatherer woman or Oakdale and Course’s volume (2014) on lowland South America ). Tomás’s story is a universal one. People worldwide can empathise with a way of life that was being wiped out by the unremittent progress of Western civilisation. The fact that it was a Celtic story located on a small Irish island enhanced its appeal. This was a story that needed to be told. The likes of these islanders would not be there again. Here were traditions that needed to be salvaged before extinction.
Salvage Ethnography
Salvage ethnography is commonly associated with Franz Boas and his academic colleagues who engaged in a quest to collect the languages and the lore of “vanishing” Indian tribes . Clifford (2002) outlines some of the ideological conceptions that lay behind salvage ethnography in general. The first of these was a particular concept of time and space. Evolutionist theory commonly assumed that history was linear, and that as Western civilisation progressed, some “primitive” cultures were doomed to extinction. “There is no going back, no return, at least in the realm of the real ” (Clifford 2002, 160). The impending death of a way of life was not just inevitable, nor simply a consequence of marginalisation. It was a result of primitive people’s incompatibility with modernity. While white people might progress from barbarity to civilisation in a linear manner, that was not the destiny of people like the American Indian. The stereotypical perspective was that the American Indian “cannot be himself and be civilized; he fades away and dies. Cultivation such as the white man would give him deprives him of his identity. Education, strange as it may appear, seems to weaken rather than strengthen his intellect ” (Custer 2009 [1876], 17).
It is commonly assumed that anthropologists were complicit in re-enforcing this hierarchical framework of cultures and peoples. Indeed, anthropology has frequently been accused of aiding colonial encounters (Asad 1973; Said 1978, 1989; Deloria 1969; Fabian 1983). Anthropologists have been reproached for “othering” colonised peoples, thereby aiding the process of subjugation. Stasch (2014, 200) suggests: “In doctrines of social evolution elaborated by anthropological thinkers of the 19th century, for example, the primitive other is unambiguously inferior to the civilized self.” Yet they also retained something that the modern was felt to have lost—authenticity . Those at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder were an authentic people whose way of life was about to disappear—hence, there was a need to record their lifestyle before it completely expired.
If one returns to the original publications of anthropologists engaged in salvage ethnography, one finds a more nuanced perspective. In 1871 (the year when Darwin ’s Descent of Man was published), Primitive Culture by the anthropologist Edward P. Tylor was also published. While Darwin ’s thesis emerged from a biological perspective, Tylor was analysing the cumulative heritage of human knowledge that was passed on from one generation to the next. His title was deliberately provocative, since it implied that even primitive people have culture and his definition of culture was wide ranging. (This was possibly a reaction against Mathew Arnold’s (1869) Culture and Anarchy, which focused primarily on high culture or what one might call “theatre culture.”) Given that Tylor was working within the context of Victorian anthropology, which was evolutionary in its outlook, his work had enormous impact. Tylor is regarded as the first to use the term survival to explain seemingly irrational practices and customs, which had evolved from earlier rational habits.
Boas brought an anti-evolutionary perspective to bear on the concept of culture. He proposed that differences between peoples were not a consequence of progress in one place and arrested development in another. Instead, the local conditions and context were hugely influential in the emergence of particular customs or habits. He argued: “the term ‘primitive’ has a double meaning. It applies to both bodily form and culture. We are accustomed to speak both of primitive races and primitive cultures as though the two were necessarily related ” (Boas 1938 [1911], 3). This message was re-enforced in his volume The Mind of the Primitive Man, in which he reasoned: “Our globe is inhabited by many races, and a great diversity of cultural forms exists. The term ‘primitive’ should not be applied indiscriminately to bodily build and to culture as though both belonged together by necessity ” (Boas 1938 [1911], 31).
Boas noted that while some peoples had been led to civilisation, it could not be assumed that this was because they were more gifted than others who remained in a state of primitivism. Indeed, he was convinced that the gap between the “civilised” and the “primitive” was not that wide. He wrote: “Some Europeans live in a way not so very different from that of simpler people, for the mode of life of the agricultural Indians of North America at the time of Columbus, or that of some agricultural Negro tribes, is, so far as nutrition and occupation are concerned, quite similar to theirs” (Boas 1938 [1911], 87). Many of the differences between civilised and primitive peoples were “more apparent than real.” It was social conditions in the Western that gave “the impression that the mind of primitive man acts in a way quite different from ours, while in reality the fundamental traits of the mind are the same” (Boas 1938 [1911], 137).
While originally Boas was deeply involved with the collection of material artefacts for the American Museum of Natural History, his significance in the field of anthropology is due to his analysis of languages and oral traditions, which he regarded as the most critical data for issues concerning culture (Cruikshank 2000, 101). He did not view the languages of Native Americans as primitive or simple. On the contrary, he argued:
Many primitive languages are complex. Minute differences in point of view are given expression by means of grammatical forms; and the grammatical categories of Latin , and still more so those of modern English, seem crude when compared to the complexity of psychological or logical forms which primitive languages recognize, but which in our speech are disregarded. (Boas 1938 [1911], 172)
Boas rejected cultural evolutionism—that is, a linear view of evolution that placed the primitive at the beginning of the process or at least much further behind than their “civilised counterparts.” This theory of “parallel development … would require that among all branches of mankind the steps of invention should have followed, at least approximately, in the same order, and that no important gaps should be found” (Boas 1938 [1911], 179). He concluded that nothing in science has supported this perspective. People who regarded the primitive as “lower down” or “further behind” on the evolutionary ladder were engaging in ethnocentrism and imposing the standard of one cultural framework onto another. They were “using their own society as a standard for human evolution and were thus ranking other societies and cultures from a vantage-point which was deeply ideologically-biased, and which made no explanatory sense” (Eriksen 1993, 137). They did not recognise that other cultural traditions could be different but no less complex or valuable than the mainstream.
It was not “race” or “genetic inheritance” that determined one’s behaviour. Instead, one reacted from cultural experience. Where people participated in a common cultural framework, their reactions were similar.
Experience has shown that members of most races placed in a certain culture can participate in it. In America men like Juarez, President of Mexico , or the highly educated Indians in North and South America are examples. In Asia , the modern history of Japan and China ; in America the successes of educated Negroes as scientists, physicians, lawyers, economists are ample proof showing that the racial position of an individual does not hinder his participation in modern civilization . (Boas 1938 [1911], 179)In fact, were one to endeavour “to select the best of mankind …. all races and all nationalities would be represented ” (Boas 1938 [1911], 272). All languages and cultures were to be treasured—hence the need to document those that were disappearing.
The imminent disappearance of Native Americans motivated Boas and his colleagues to collect and record as much data as possible from Native Americans. Although the peoples themselves would not survive, a record of their languages and oral traditions would be available for future generations. Boas ’s students “sought to record Indian lives in print as part of the great and urgent project of ‘ethnographic salvage’ that sought to preserve, in the museum or the library, traces of lives and cultures that cou...