Franz Boas

This work by Franz Boas was originally published in 1888 and it is now republished with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Central Eskimo' was his first monograph and details his time spent on Baffin Island studying the Inuit people.

"This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work...

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...