Founded In    1956
Published   quarterly
Language(s)   English, German
     

Fields of Interest

 

literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies

     
ISSN   0340-2827
     
Publisher   Winter
     
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General Editors:
Carmen Birkle
Birgit Däwes

Review Editor:
Anke Ortlepp

Editorial Board:
Christa Buschendorf
Ingrid Gessner
Anke Ortlepp
Heike Paul
Marc Priewe
Boris Vormann

Associate Editors:
Cedric Essi
Johanna Heil
Kathleen Loock
Connor Pitetti

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Amerikastudien / American Studies
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Amerikastudien / American Studies

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Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies. It started as the annual Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1956 and has since developed into a quarterly with some 1200 subscriptions in Europe and the United States. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies. It covers all areas of American Studies from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Special-topics issues alternate with regular ones. Reviews, forums, and annual bibliographies support the international circulation of German and European scholarship in American Studies.
(https://amst.winter-verlag.de/)
Editors: Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes
Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp
Address: Amerikastudien/American Studies
Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle
Philipps-Universität Marburg
FB 10 Department of English and American Studies
Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6f
35032 Marburg, Germany
Phone: +49 6421-2824-345
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de
or
Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes
Europa-Universität Flensburg
Department of English and American Studies
Auf dem Campus 1
24943 Flensburg, Germany
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de

 

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Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 63, No. 4

Introduction: Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology


American Popular Social Science: The Boasian Legacy


This essay considers the Boasian legacy in relation to popular social scientific writing. Franz Boas is widely remembered as a founder of academic anthropology in the United States. Yet his wider historical impact rests with his lifelong battle against scientific racism, which he waged both in his more specialized academic work and in publications directed to a readership of nonspecialists. Many of his students followed Boas in writing for, and reaching, a broad reading public. Indeed, some of the best-known figures in American anthropology -- Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston -- achieved their fame through their popularly accessible writing. I argue that popular social science is its own genre, with a distinctive aesthetic appeal that rests with presenting "interesting" and sometimes useful information. Through an analysis of some notable Boasian examples of this popular social science genre, including Hurston's 'Mules and Men', I identify a distinctively modernist version of this aesthetic, which I call the aesthetics of cultural relativism.

Voices and Vices of the Ancestors: Reading and Teaching the Boasians in the Twenty-First Century


More than most disciplines, anthropology teaches its practitioners to be mindful of their ancestors. By training and temperament a Boasian, I have throughout my career listened to the voices of Franz Boas and his students, in particular, Edward Sapir. This paper examines some of their writings intended to bring the central messages of their anthropology -- antiracism and cultural relativism -- to a wide audience. I focus on their use of the words "primitive" and "savage" as they deploy them in writing about literature, philosophy, and culture in relationship to language and, in particular, grammatical categories. My reading aim is to recuperate the Boasians for twenty-first-century graduate students who, offended by Boasian terminology, may not be able to hear their message.

Boasian Soundings: An Interrupted History of the Senses (and Poetry) in Anthropology


This essay traces the long, if interrupted, history of the life of the senses and poetry -- the most sensuous form of writing -- in anthropology. It begins by documenting the fascination with the measurement of the senses of the "'savage races'" in the British and French anthropology of the late nineteenth century. It then delves into the rupture with psychophysical methods of investigation introduced by the great pioneer of American anthropology, Franz Boas, and how his example inspired a new focus on the cultural logistics of sensation that is apparent in the work of his students -- Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir. Significantly, all three of these sensuous scholars also experimented with writing poetry. There followed a dark period during which the interest in sensation was eclipsed by a new focus on interpretation -- or treating cultures as 'texts' to be 'read', following Clifford Geertz. Interest in the senses and sensation was further sidelined as a result of the mutation of the idea of 'reading culture' into 'writing culture', following James Clifford and George Marcus, and the redefinition of the anthropological endeavor as a 'process of textualization.' The prevailing notion of textualization was woefully prosaic. Then, as the new millennium dawned, anthropologists awoke from the sleep of the senses, and the focus shifted from representation to sensation (again) -- that is, from 'writing culture' to 'sensing cultures.' The method of sensory ethnography, which depends on 'participant sensation', emerged as the method of choice, and this shift tied in with a revalorization of poetry. This article includes an unpublished letter by the late Clifford Geertz by way of rejoinder, which casts the textual revolution in anthropological theory in a different light, and a letter by the poetanthropologist Roseline Lambert that extolls the virtues of poetry as sense-making practice.

Ethnographic Art Worlds: The Creative Figuration of Art and Anthropology


Between the 1920s and the 1940s, cultural anthropology in the United States -- and Boasian anthropology in particular -- appeared as a collaborative field connected to a social milieu of writers, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and scholars from a variety of disciplines. My article focuses on this broad network of people who worked on projects, discussed broader social questions, and developed methodological concepts. This collaborative field stemmed from a cultural milieu of intellectuals and artists who used the interdisciplinary space to reflect upon their own work and the society they lived in. I employ and widen Norbert Elias's concept of figuration to focus on reciprocal relationships and exchange in order to understand the dynamic networks of art and anthropology between the 1920s and 1940s. By analyzing the entanglements between art and design, anthropology, sociology, literary culture, and pragmatist philosophy, we can gain an understanding of the protagonists' notions of aesthetics as a sensory, practical, and educative way of knowledge production. My figurational examination of the motif of anthropological gesture in the filmic work of Maya Deren, in Mead and Bateson's picture-ethnography 'Balinese Character' (1942), and in Bateson's and Xanti Schawinsky's MOMA exhibition 'Bali, Background for War' (1943), illuminates how art and anthropology become inextricable.

Franz Boas and Anthropology in the Age of Technical Media


For Franz Boas, the art of describing cultures exceeds the mere surveillance of people's behavior as visual phenomena. Instead, all anthropological research requires a constant reflection of possible rules inherent not only in the cultures observed but also in the observers' cultural techniques. Technical media, which Boas took into the field from his first excursions onward -- photography, wax cylinder phonography, and cinematography -- not only record or transmit information, but have to be considered as a fundamental reorganization of perception and a redistribution of the senses. These processes of transformation concern the culturally formed bodies of researchers and informants, as well as mutual transformations between cultures. Boas's approach, which fundamentally criticizes classification and universalism in anthropology, is thus based on that kind of critical reflection that aesthetics conceives of as culturally formed perception. Boas's use of media, my essay argues, discovers a third space of mutual transference between media techniques and ritualistic forms. The article takes its cue from Boas performing for a diorama series, personifying a figure that, in a critical moment, escapes the cannibalistic spirit Baxbaxalanuxsiwae. In following this figure through a series of media transformations, anthropology is, according to Boas, conceived of as a permanent negotiation of values and power relations. The specific virtue of technical media is to integrate bodies and the senses as archives of singular historical and cultural experiences.

Ways of Knowing: The Aesthetics of Boasian Poetry


This essay surveys one of the less explored Boasian legacies: the significant body of over 1,000 poems written by the three major Boasian anthropologists Margaret Mead, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Edward Sapir. Over 380 of these poems were published, some of them in renowned magazines such as 'Poetry', 'The Dial', 'The Measure', 'The Nation', and 'The New Republic'. Focusing on what I call their "ethnographic poems" -- poems that engage with subjects and issues they encountered in their ethnographic work -- I draw on two understandings of the word "aesthetics" (as the Baumgartian "science of sensuous cognition" and as the philosophy of art and beauty) to probe what ethical, political, and epistemological differences it makes whether one writes about other cultures in verse or scientific prose. The essay offers close readings of one poem by each: Mead's "Monuments Rejected" (1925), Benedict's "In Parables" (1926), and Sapir's "Zuni" (1926).

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Amerikastudien / American Studies 2018: Digital Scholarship in American Studies, Vol. 63, No. 2
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