Boas and the Northwest Coast Indians
The work of Franz Boas and his students provides another major theoretical perspective in anthropology developed through the ethnographic study of North American Indians. Field research on the Eskimo (Inuit) of Baffin Island in 1883, and, from 1886 onwards, on the Indians of coastal northwest Canada, particularly the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, convinced Boas that the hypothetical stages which Morgan and others believed depicted the course of societal evolution everywhere were misguided and unconvincing. In the case of the Baffin Island work, Boas's studies put in train discussion of the relation between ecology and social organization which has dominated Inuit studies to the present day (e.g. Riches 1982). It also set the standard for the subsequent field research on the Inuit and other Eskimo-speaking peoples in the Arctic, especially that emanating from the Fifth Thule Expedition of the 1920s, which is particularly noted for its classical descriptions of the shamanistic religion (e.g. Rasmussen 1929). It is only in recent years that anthropologists
have begun systematically to propose that it may be factors other than the natural environment, such as deep-rooted cultural ideas, which shape the form of Inuit social organization and customary practices (e.g. Fienup-Riordan 1990). As to Boas's studies on the 'Northwest Coast Indians', these are a monumental achievement, yet the systematic description of their social organizations, which Morgan's methods would have helped provide, eluded him. Satisfying accounts, using structuralist methods, were indeed forthcoming only in the 1970s (e.g. Rosman and Rubel 1971).
The category 'Northwest Coast Indians' refers to a remarkable series of 'societies', with broad cultural similarities and coastal adaptations, stretching from southeast Alaska (including the Tlingit and Haida) through to northern California (for example, the Yurok). These societies have in common that their economies are based on hunting, fishing and collecting (for example, of wild plants, nuts, acorns, seeds), and that their social organizations include developed systems of social ranking, the exchange of food and wealth objects (shells, coppers, bark blankets), and (in the case of most of the societies) the potlatch ceremonial. Yet these features apart, they exhibit enormous diversity, notably in language, mythology, kinship organization and art (which in the northern societies includes the totem pole). Boas addressed the complexity of Northwest Coast societies by attending in great detail to historical connections and geographical distributions concerning elements of culture within local regional areas, a perspective which subsequently came to be labelled 'historical particularism'. Whatever the theoretical shortcomings of this perspective, thanks to Boas the wealth of data now available on the Northwest Coast Indians is unparalleled, and many later theoretical approaches in anthropology have drawn on this material as their testing ground.
As well as his fine-grained approach in tracing particular cultural elements, Boas also developed the concept of a people's culture as an integrated whole. Among famous developments of this notion, again drawing on North American Indian material, was Ruth Benedict's idea, published in 1934, that cultures thus construed manifest distinct 'patterns' or 'configurations' which could compellingly be described through psychological idioms. Thus Benedict contrasts the Northwest Coast Indians with the various Pueblo Indian societies, peoples whose historical achievements in stone architecture and urban organization (including cliff dwelling) rank them as among the best known Native North Americans. With regard to the characters of the Northwest Coast Indian and the Pueblo Indian cultures, Benedict particularly attended to their developed ceremonial and cultic lives and to their ^secret societies and, drawing on Nietzsche, labelled them as respectively 'Dionysian' (Northwest Coast Indians) and 'Apollonian' (Pueblo Indians). These labels depict differing orientations of members of society to personal ambition and the constraint of tradition. The Dionysian is individualistic and passionate: thus among the Northwest Coast Indians, ecstasy is the aim in religious ceremonial; and in political life, in the context of social ranking, there is arrogant competition for ^status, mainly through accumulation and gifting (in the ceremonial potlatch) of economic wealth such as coppers and blankets. In turn, the Apollonian is committed to tradition and decries individualism: among the Pueblo Indians, for example, there is a cultural emphasis on emotional restraint and the ideal is placidly to submit oneself to the interests of the group. Benedict's writings, though reducing these various societies to crude stereotypes, certainly brought the North American Indians to the attention of a very wide readership.
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