Culture areas and the mapping of Native North America
A Short Work Attributed to Wissler and Boas
North America Indians is a brief English-language work on the indigenous peoples of North America, attributed in its book listings to two anthropologists, Clark Wissler and Franz Boas. Boas was the German-born American scholar whose name is bound up with historical particularism and cultural relativism and who spent decades arguing that human groups differ through learned culture rather than through ranked biological or evolutionary endowment. Library cataloguing for the work places it under Indians of North America, folklore, Indian mythology and legends, and gives British Columbia among its geographic headings. Its most clearly documented concern, however, is a problem of classification: how the continent’s many separate peoples should be grouped and pictured for anthropological study.
Ten or Eleven Culture Areas
The book approaches North America through the framework of the “culture area,” a way of organizing the continent’s native peoples by geography and shared custom rather than by supposed stages of development. Its account observes that anthropologists working across North America as a whole generally recognize somewhere between ten and eleven more or less clearly defined culture areas, and that the approximate borders of these areas are set out on an accompanying map. A culture area, in this sense, is a region in which a particular set of characteristic cultural traits tends to cluster and prevail; the term names a recurring combination of practices and objects rather than a tribe, a language family, or a political unit.
Notably, the book presents this scheme as something anthropologists already customarily employ rather than as a new proposal of its own. The ten-to-eleven divisions are described as the ordinary working vocabulary of the field, which is itself a measure of how firmly the culture-area idea had taken hold in North American anthropology by the time the text was written.
Why the Boundaries Are Relative, Not Absolute
What gives the book its distinctive emphasis is its insistence that these divisions are provisional. The areas are described as relative rather than absolute, because it is rare to find any group of Indians, however small, that shows none of the cultural traits of its immediate neighbours. Constant intergradation of traits is identified as one of the most striking features of culture distribution: only in exceptional cases can the cultures of even two neighbouring groups be considered exactly alike. Any line drawn on a map therefore cuts through a continuum rather than separating clearly bounded worlds.
The map still has a purpose, on the book’s account. Its divisions mark off the limits within which the respective sets of characteristic traits appear to predominate. Where groups do share a highly characteristic body of traits, they can be said to belong to the same general type. The Plains Indians serve as the illustration: a number of peculiar traits, found together in more or less complete association, are taken to indicate the geographical extent of a type of culture. The unit of analysis is thus a characteristic assemblage of traits and its distribution, not a fixed list of members.
Description Without Ranking
Framed this way, the culture-area approach works as an instrument of description. It allows differences between neighbouring peoples to be registered, and shared traits to be traced across a continent, without sorting anyone into higher and lower stages. That restraint is consonant with Boas’s wider programme, which rejected the evolutionary schemes of nineteenth-century anthropology that placed Western Europe at the summit and treated living peoples as survivals of earlier stages, and which held that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as better or worse. The book’s own caution — that its areas are convenient approximations rather than natural compartments — belongs to the same habit of mind: classification is a tool for understanding, and its boundaries should not be mistaken for facts about the people they describe.
Catalog metadata records a first publication date of 2001 and adds Canadian subject headings alongside those already noted, including “Indians of north america, canada” and “Legends, canada,” as well as the French-language heading “Indiens d’Amérique.” A retail listing describes a multi-format English e-book dated 12 April 2018, running to 94 pages, with ISBN 978-2-36659-602-1 and EAN 9782366596021. A Google Books listing separately records a 98-page paperback published on 28 March 2018 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, with ISBN 9781986926553 and ISBN-10 1986926559.
Biographical Background
A biographical account gives Boas’s full name as Franz Uri Boas and his dates as July 9, 1858–December 21, 1942; he was born in Minden, Westphalia, the son of Sophie Meyer and Meier Boas. It describes him as an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist and as a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the “Father of American Anthropology.” Studying in Germany, he was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying geography. He then took part in a geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit, and he later did field work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, and in 1899 he became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology; among those students were A. L. Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gilberto Freyre.
Scientific Racism and the Four-Field Division
The same biographical account identifies Boas as one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism — the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of studies of skeletal anatomy, he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. He also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning, posing culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups and as the central analytical concept of anthropology. By uniting archaeology and the study of material culture and history, physical anthropology, ethnology, and descriptive linguistics, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.
