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In Search of Us
Adventures in Anthropology
Lucy Moore
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In Search of Us
Adventures in Anthropology
Lucy Moore
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***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick*** The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among civilisations that were first thought of as being primitive and savage. What they discovered, however, would change the way we think about ourselves. In the late nineteenth century, when non-European societies were seen as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how Western civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thrilling new discipline which attracted the brightest minds of the academic world. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonialism was recognised as being inextricably linked to exploitation and outdated labels like 'savage' were inconceivable when so-called 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars.Focusing on twelve key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss in Brazil fifty years later, Lucy Moore explores the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study with all its insights and ambivalence. In Search of Us tells the story of the men and women whose observations of the 'other' would transform attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated. In an enthralling, perceptive narrative, Moore shows how these radical anthropologists were inspired by their time in the furthest-flung reaches of the known world, becoming pioneers of a new way of thinking. In the end, their legacy is less about understanding foreign cultures and more about their attempts to persuade human beings to look at one another with eyes washed free from prejudice. Their intention may have been to explain what they saw as the primitive world to the civilised one but they ended up changing the way people viewed themselves - at least for a time.
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Frauen in der GeschichteCHAPTER ONE
The Pioneer
Franz Boas on Baffin Island, 1883
âIt is funny how everybody thinks I am making this trip for fame and glory,â wrote the young geographer Franz Boas to his fiancĂ©e, Marie Krackowizer, in July 1883. It was a letter he hoped she might receive one day; he had no expectation of seeing her again for at least a year, possibly ever. Unable to land, his ship was hovering in the icy seas beyond fog-shrouded Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. âYou know that I strive for a higher thing and that this trip is only a means to that goal ⊠Empty glory means nothing to me.â
That April, Boas had left Marie behind in Stuttgart without declaring himself to her. They had met initially on a walking holiday in the picturesque Harz Mountains two years earlier and Boas, conscious that he was about to set off for the edge of the world, had feigned an appointment in Stuttgart to see her again. They had only a few weeks together and he thought it unfair to ask her to become engaged to a man about to embark on a long and perilous journey. But, unable to depart without confessing his feelings, he had written to her. After three weeksâ passionate correspondence, she had accepted his proposal. Now he travelled with the dreamy strains of the song he had played for her in Stuttgart when they fell in love, one of Robert Schumannâs four melancholic NachtstĂŒcke, echoing in his head, and his loneliness was eased knowing she was waiting for him.
The expedition he hoped would make his name was a yearlong geographical exploration of the area around Cumberland Sound in the north-east of Canada; the United Kingdom had just transferred its claims of sovereignty over the Arctic region to the newly established Dominion of Canada. Christian missionaries, harbingers of Western âcivilisationâ, wouldnât arrive until ten years later but the areaâs indigenous inhabitants were already in contact with European whalers and dying from the syphilis they had brought with them. Accompanied by Wilhelm Weike, a family servant paid by his father, Boas was considered (and considered himself) âaloneâ. This type of detailed study of a limited region over such a long period of time, by one man living largely off the land, was entirely new.
In July, three months after bidding Marie farewell, he could see his destination but the frozen sea was almost impassable and he was struggling in vain against seasickness. At one point it took four weeks to travel fifteen nautical miles. âAll we can see, looking landwards, is a desert of ice, shoal after shoal, field upon field, broken only by an occasional iceberg.â It must have been hard to sight glory, empty or otherwise, in the white distance, but Boas was undaunted.
At last they landed in Kekerten, a small island just off Baffin, having rocked offshore for two months, and Boas settled into the rough Scottish whalersâ station that would be his base for the next year, making his first contact with the Eskimo,* as he called the Inuit people. Heâd brought gun cartridges, needles, tobacco and molasses, which he knew they valued highly, to trade for information and guiding. He had also brought basic medical supplies (opium, quinine, ammonia and turpentine) and he was delighted when his new companions began to call him Doctoraâdluk, or Big Doctor. During the day, he focused on charting and cartography (âalmost the whole of Kekerten is drawing maps for meâ); at night, his new friends sang, told him stories and taught him gambling and games. He noted that the women especially were skilled at string games or catâs cradle, making âfigures out of a loopâ.
But Boas found it hard to accustom himself to some aspects of his new life. He was repulsed by the strong smell of the caribou-hide tents and the taste of the Inuitsâ staple foods, seal meat and gullsâ eggs. His attitude was patronising; he wrote, in his first months in Kekerten, of looking after his Inuit hosts as if he was the adult and they his children, forcing himself to eat the same food as them âso that I could always say, I have it no better than youâ.
Marie was constantly in his thoughts. âOpposite me rose the steep and threatening black cliffs, the rapids we had crossed that afternoon rushed and roared at my side, and in the far distance shone the snow-covered mountains. But I saw only you, my Marie. You and the noble beauty of my surroundings made me conscious of the immensity of our separation.â The immensity of their separation, the wild romance of his uncharted environment, the rigours of his work and his soaring ambition: Boasâs letter-diaries to his beloved reveal the relish with which he faced the challenges ahead of him. At twenty-five years old, he saw this expedition, which he had planned for a year and dreamed of since childhood, as his chance to prove himself to the world.
Franz Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, one of six children but the only boy in his family to survive to adulthood. His parents were prosperous merchants, selling, importing and exporting high-end millinery, part of a small, long-standing Jewish population in the ancient town. Secular, intellectual and idealistic, they had supported and been disappointed by the revolutions of 1848, after which Sophie Boasâs brother-in-law, Abraham Jacobi, had been exiled. Uncle Jacobi, a friend of Karl Marx, became a doctor in New York, specialising in public health and paediatrics. His nephew, the young Franz, was gifted, particularly in mathematics, but he gave up his hopes of becoming a professional pianist only reluctantly to focus on his academic work.
Laurels shimmered ahead of him, tantalisingly out of reach. For a young Jewish boy in nineteenth-century Prussia, no matter how talented, a public career of any kind was an impossible dream unless he openly renounced his faith and converted to Christianity. Aged sixteen, he wrote to his sister, who had chided him for his ambition, âIt seems terrible to me to have to spend my life unknown and unnoticed by people. But I am afraid that none of these expectations will ever be fulfilled. I am scared myself of such thirst for glory, but I cannot help it.â
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Boas moved between three universities â starting at Heidelberg and ending in Kiel, via Bonn â where he studied mainly physics, philosophy and geography but also attended courses in mathematics, chemistry, botany, comparative anatomy, astronomy, folklore, geology and biology. He wrote his dissertation on the perception of the colour of water, an early expression of his lifelong intellectual âdesire to understand the relation between the objective and subjective worldsâ. On leaving Kiel (the least well-regarded academically of the three universities he attended but where one of his sisters was living), he received the second highest grade of his year.
At least five times he met fellow students in duels. The first incident was almost frivolous, a dispute over an overplayed rental piano, but later he challenged anti-Semitic students seeking to exclude Jews from university life â âthe damned Jew baitersâ, as he called them in a letter home after one bout, warning his parents to expect him scarred by âa few cuts, one even on the nose!â Duelling, or Mensur, was a craze in German universities at the time, with established conventions including padded clothes and goggles for both insulter and insulted, seconds, an umpire, and a surgeon on hand, and Boas was far from the only student proudly to boast facial scars, or Schmiss, from an opponentâs Ă©pĂ©e, but his impatience to defend his honour reveals the depth of his internalised feelings of inferiority as a second-class citizen. Later, in his declaration to Marie of his desire to âlive and die for ⊠equal rights to all, equal possibilities to learn and work for rich and poor alikeâ, it is not hard to attribute the roots of his egalitarianism to this ingrained and unwelcome sense of inadequacy; its scars, at any rate, were there for all to see.
The empty Arctic might seem an unlikely place to prove oneself, but Boasâs childhood had coincided with a period of German polar exploration and, with Alexander von Humboldt a childhood hero, he had always yearned to travel. The geographical expedition he planned appealed to him partly because it was interdisciplinary, requiring talents across a variety of subjects, but also because it was for him alone: his challenges to be faced and his glory to be achieved. He spent a year applying for grants and writing articles to raise funding and teaching himself everything from meteorology and the new technology of photography to Inuit language and linguistics, to ready himself for the journey that would decide his fate.
When winter came to the Cumberland Sound, Boas travelled with the Inuit, researching their hunting and migration routes. That year the snow was unusually soft and deep (it is to Boas that we owe the fact that the Inuit have fifty different words for snow), so he and his companions sweated through the day in their reindeer-fur coats and boots as they pulled the sleds â the dogs they would normally have used were ill â and each morning woke in their igloos to find their clothes frozen solid. It was impossible, he told Marie, to express the joy with which they would greet the sight of a distant igloo after a march sometimes of more than twenty-four hours through -45° Celsius cold, and âhow comfortable and beautiful it seems when one enters into these dirty, narrow spaces, at the appearance of which I at first turned away in horrorâ.
He blushed, he wrote, âto remember that during our meal tonight I thought about how good a pudding with plum sauce would taste. But you have no idea what an effect privations and hunger, real hunger, have on a person ⊠the contrast is almost unbelievable when I remember that a year ago I was in society and observed all the rules of good taste, and tonight I sit in this snow hut with Wilhelm and an Eskimo, eating a piece of raw, frozen seal meat which first had to be hacked up with an axe, and greedily gulping my coffee.â
Gradually his ideas of superiority, as a European, began to wear away. The condescending parentâchild relationship he had assumed only a few months earlier was replaced by a growing sense that he and his Inuit friends were equals. âI am now a true Eskimo,â he exulted on that first expedition in December. âI live as they do, hunt with them, and belong to the men of Anarnitung.â When Oxaitung, one of his guides, harpooned two seals, they were divided between the settlement families amid celebration. âIs it not a beautiful custom among these savages [wildun] that they bear all deprivations in common, and are also at their happiest best â eating and drinking â when someone has brought back booty from the hunt? I often ask myself what advantages our âgood societyâ possesses over that of the âsavagesâ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them. We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We âhighly educatedâ people, relatively speaking, are much worse.â
It was as if he had entered an icy Garden of Eden and he was enthralled as much by the way he rose to meet his challenge as by the challenge itself. Many years later, recalling this first expedition of his career, he remembered âdays of the most joyful feeling of freedom, of self-reliance: ready to meet the dangers of the ice, sea, and wild animals; on the alert to meet and overcome difficulties; no human being there to hinder or helpâ. No human being, of course, except his servant, Wilhelm Weike, and his Inuit guides and companions. Class and education were tighter chains from which to escape than âcivilisationâ.
Weike, who also kept a diary of his time in Canada, was less interested in the ethnographic and scientific endeavours that so fascinated Boas but arguably interacted more directly with their hosts and, by having an Inuit girlfriend, was better integrated into the society Boas observed as an outsider. Emotionally and culturally, Boas still held himself apart, writing constantly to Marie and his family and spending his evenings in the igloo reading Immanuel Kant in the light from an oil lamp improvised from a butter tin. Thoughts of Marie and their future together sustained him. âAnd you, dear girl, will always help me. If my strength should weaken, you will give me renewed strength â just as you give me new strength here.â He held her farewell words close to his heart: âVorwĂ€rts [Onwards], I wait for you!â
Boas may have seen his time in Canada as an adventure as well as a scientific expedition but, from the Inuitsâ point of view, the winter he stayed with them was notably more difficult than usual and they associated him with their hardship. Their sledge dogs were plagued by disease, so hunters and traders had to pull their sleds themselves, seals were scarce and the temperatures were unusually cold. For Boas, this meant his ink froze and he was forced to take notes and write his âchicken scratchingsâ (as he called his tiny, almost illegible handwriting) to Marie in pencil; for his companions, it meant even more dangerous efforts to move around and find food and deaths that might otherwise have been avoided. Without fully comprehending it, the uninvited guest was a burden to his hosts.
Tragically, diphtheria (previously unknown there) and pneumonia also stalked the Inuit that winter and, although the Doctoraâdluk had medicines to relieve fever and pain, not until the advent of penicillin in 1928 could these deadly infections, passed on by contact with the âcivilisedâ world, effectively be cured. âMany Eskimo blamed me for it [the diseases], as it really seems as though sickness and death follow my footsteps. If I were superstitious, I really would believe that my presence brought misfortune to the Eskimo! Many are supposed to have said that they did not wish to see me in their iglu [sic] again.â Bitter hostility to Boas bubbled up; people were forbidden by the shaman from allowing him into their huts or igloos and from lending him dogs. Boas noted the distrust but remained resolutely positive, determined that this ill-will towards him âshould not be allowed to prevailâ.
Not until March, having threatened to withhold trade of his valuable ammunition from Napekin, the shaman who had accused him of bringing bad luck, was Boas able to repair his relations with his unwilling hosts. At last healthy dogs were found and, in May, Boas, Weike and a guide, Sanguja, set off to chart Davis Strait, the central geographical aim of the expedition. It was a terrible journey: soft, heavy spring snow fell, the thawing sea ice was treacherous, they suffered from snow blindness and toothache, and provisions were so scarce they thought they would have to shoot and eat the dogs. âI do not think I shall ever in my life forget horrible Home Bay!â exclaimed Boas. He and Weike began to long for home.
Having packed up their kit and notes, they waited for a ship in the tiny settlement of Idjuniving for several weeks. âWith longing I picture the time when nothing shall separate us,â Boas wrote to Marie. Not until late August 1884 were he and Weike able to embark on a whaler for New York via Newfoundland. Having borrowed clothes from the captain â they had only their caribou-hide Inuit outfits â they landed in New York on 21 September, to be greeted by various members of the Jacobi and Krackowizer clans, and Boas raced upstate to Lake George, where Marie was waiting for him. While they announced their engagement officially then (at Boasâs request, the announcement was backdated to 30 May 1883, the date on which Marie had accepted his epistolary proposal), it would be nearly a decade from when they met before her family considered him stable enough, financially and professionally, to marry her.
Boas dressed up as an Inuit to pose for studio photos to illustrate The Central Eskimo. He is wearing a seal-fur parka, an Inuit word he introduced to the rest of the world.
It took Boas four years to publish his account of his expedition to the Cumberland Sound. Although his delayed arrival in Keke...