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A Wealth of Thought
In the nineteenth century, scholars who wrote about art of native peoples assumed that all art lay on a continuum from primitive to advanced: artworks of all nonliterate peoples were therefore examples of early stages of development. Boas was familiar with evolutionary theory in both the European and American art literature, and he set about to dispute much of what his contemporaries held as truths. Case studies from his own fieldwork on the Northwest Coast of North America demonstrated different tenets: the variety of history, the influence of diffusion, the symbolic and stylistic variations in art styles found among groups and sometimes within one group, and the role of imagination and creativity on the part of the artist. Aldona Jonaitis has chosen fourteen articles, written during the period from 1889 to 1916, to reveal Boas's intellectual development as an art historian. The...
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