2.
Modernism, Irony, Anthropology:
The Work of Franz Boas

That ethnographic and literary concerns currently converge strikes me, as I have tried to indicate in the preceding chapter, as an encouraging development—but not at all because, to pick up David Porush's capitalist metaphorics in a gently satiric vein, as a specialist in literature, I rejoice that my literary stock, in a postmodern epistemological (and disciplinary) market, has appreciated in value. Rather, I am pleased to have the anthropologists closely attending to what the literary specialists are doing because, as I have just said, I believe we literature professors increasingly need them to help us achieve varieties of "multicultural literacy." This is to say that we will need to become more sophisticated in understanding how the cultural concerns of Others, formerly marginalized, inform a proliferating number of new texts, and, additionally, how those concerns bear upon and can illuminate the canonical texts we may now have to reread in a new light.

So far as this is the case, it becomes natural enough for the would-be practitioner of ethnocriticism to study not only the general history of anthropology, but, on occasion, the careers of particular anthropologists. And I think it is reasonable to say that, in the twentieth century, the pre-

eminent anthropologist in America was Franz Boas. If the basic foundation of American anthropology was laid by Morgan, and its edifice initially raised by the likes of Mooney and Cushing, among others, it was elaborated by such powerful figures as Kroeber, Sapir, Radin, Benedict, Lowie, and Mead—all of whom were Boas's students. From the last years of the nineteenth century until almost the mid-part of the present century it is virtually impossible to discuss American anthropology without reference to the work of Franz Boas.

Boas began his academic career with interests in physics and geography. After an arduous field trip to Alaska as a young man (with a manservant—whose story remains to be told!), Boas came to America and to anthropology as a profession. I have already indicated aspects of his contribution and will comment further on this later. His work, as Thomas Jefferson foresaw would be true for any American anthropologist, would focus on the peoples indigenous to this continent, and the data he gathered are simply mind-boggling in their quantitative richness. But what has always seemed difficult to understand was the potential use and theoretical implications of that data, both in terms of their sheer quantity, and, as well, in the "raw," uninterpreted quality of them. How does Boas's work fit into the history of anthropology as a science , and how does it fit into the intellectual context of literary and critical modernism in which it developed?^[1]

[1] In an early version, this essay first appeared in Social Text 19/20 (1988), 105–18. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint parts of it. A later version, one fairly close to what I give here, appeared in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text , ed. Marc Manganaro. I am grateful to Princeton University Press for permission to reprint.

1

Born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, Franz Boas was clearly an extraordinary figure, not only a teacher, but a maître in the grand sense, whose students often became disciples, and, in several cases (Kroeber, Mead, Sapir, Benedict, Radin), virtual masters themselves. Boas published extensively on linguistics, folklore, art, race and, of course, ethnography, a fabled "five-foot shelf" of materials on the Kwakiutl. Yet, Boas did not, like his contemporaries Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure, found what Foucault refers to as a field of discursivity, a written discourse which gives rise to the endless possibility of further discourse, or a discipline, like psychoanalysis or structural linguistics. The exact nature of Boas's achievement yet remains to be specified.

In 1888, Boas went to Clark University where he taught anthropology until 1892. He held positions with the World's Columbian exposition in Chicago and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before moving, in 1896, to Columbia University as a lecturer in physical anthropology. He received promotion to a professorship in 1899, a position he held until his retirement in 1936. Boas died in public—in the arms of Lévi-Strauss—in 1942. From his academic base at Columbia, Boas's influence was enormous. By 1926, for example, as I noted earlier, every academic department of anthropology in the United States was headed by one of Boas's students. That the Winnebago were studied by Paul Radin or the Pawnee much later by Gene Weltfish, that Edward Sapir and, after, Melville Jacobs gathered Native texts is largely due to Boas.

Both Boas's admirers, who are many, and his detractors—

they have been fewer—have agreed only on the issue central to their disagreement, the question of Boas's contribution to a science of culture. No one can doubt that Boas did much of worth. But can what he did properly be summed up as serving to found anthropology as a scientific discipline—moving it, as it were, from impressionism to realism, as Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and others have insisted?^[2] Or is it, rather, as Leslie White and Marvin Harris, foremost, have claimed, that Boas's practice was, finally, no more "scientific" or "realistic" than that of his predecessors, the accidental "men on the spot," and the so-called "armchair anthropologists"; no more "scientific" than his contemporaries, the "museum men," and the fieldworkers of the government bureaus?^[3] Moreover, what is one to think when one considers Boas in the context of that cultural development broadly called "modernism," a literary development for the most part. Is modernism in literature or in anthropology consistent with that "realism" generally taken as consistent with claims to scienticity, or, rather, a break with a realist/scientist past?

I read Boas, as I do literary modernists, against the backdrop provided by what has been called the epistemological

[2] See, for example, Ruth Benedict, who writes that "having found anthropology a collection of wild guesses and a happy hunting ground for the romantic lover of primitive things; [Boas] left it a discipline in which theories could be tested" (93). Or Alfred Kroeber who claims that Boas "found anthropology a playfield and jousting ground of opinion; he left it a science" (in L. White 67). Or Margaret Mead who affirms that Boas was "the man who made anthropology into a science" (in L. White 67).

[3] See, for example, Leslie White, who finds that "Boas came fairly close to leaving [anthropology's] 'chaos of beliefs and customs' just about where he found it" (in Rohner and Rohner xiii). Or Marvin Harris who judges Boas's achievement most impressive for "the amount of effort lavished in proving that chaos was the most salient feature of the sociocultural realm" (1968 282).

crisis of the late nineteenth century, the shift away from apparently absolute certainties—in religion, linguistics, mathematics, physics, and so on—in the direction of relativity. "In the twenty years between 1895 and 1915 the whole picture of the physical universe, which had appeared not only the most impressive but also the most secure achievement of scientific thought," as Alan Bullock has observed, "was brought into question" (34). To recall some well-known contextual markers, I note that these are the years of work in the direction of Godel's proof that certain mathematical problems cannot be solved in terms of the system in which they are formulated; of the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle; and finally, of Einstein's relativity equations. These are the years when more than once Freud would speak of psychoanalysis as the third wound to human narcissism, for its demonstration, after the Copernican and Darwinian wounds (e.g., that we are not only not the center of the universe, nor only a little lower than the angels), that we are also not even masters of our own minds. No wonder that de Saussure could look back upon the nineteenth century's solid accumulation of philological data and conclude that in language there are no positive quantities but only differences.

This is also the period in which Thomas Hardy's sense of the haphazardness of fate would be most fully developed (the last novel dates from 1896, but what is ostensibly Hardy's masterwork, The Dynasts , was issued from 1903 to 1908). It is the time when Nietzsche's scorn for the unfounded pretenses of religion, logic, or history is felt; the time of fictional experiments with point of view in Conrad, James, and Ford Madox Ford. Consider as a telling image Stephen Crane's "open boat" bobbing precariously in an

infinity of ocean, its weary passengers trying to survive and to be good, as all the past had instructed them to do, but as the present made most difficult.^[4]

Now, the anglophone writers I have named were almost surely not direct influences on Boas (if they were at all), as, indeed, Nietzsche was probably not. It seems reasonable, however, to suggest that the epistemological and discursive climate in which Boas's work took shape was one in which there was a strong sense of the relative rather than the absolute; of an absence of fixity, of all in flux; of certainty nowhere, uncertainty everywhere. What attitude other than one of scepticism could claim to be appropriate to such a worldview? Irony is the trope identified by the West for the expression of scepticism as a response to uncertainty, and one may imagine either that Boas (1) somehow founded a science entirely against the grain of the ironic temper of his time, (2) founded a science in the ironic mode, or (3) operated according to an ironic paradigm of a sort that was inconsistent with the establishment of any kind of science whatsoever. These latter two possibilities (I reject the first of these as theoretically unlikely and in practice untrue) are what I shall explore in the remainder of this chapter.

I take irony to be the central trope of modernism. But just as "modernism" is no monolith, neither is irony; there are many modernisms and many ironies to consider as well. Among ironic figures, let me name four: antiphrasis or negation, aporia or doubt, oxymoron or paradox, and catachresis or misuse. The figure of aporia (it was not invented by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, or J. Hillis Miller, but was well known to classical and Renaissance rhetoricians)

[4] "The Open Boat" was first published 1895–6, when Boas came to Columbia (I wouldn't guess, however, that Boas read it).

is, as I have said, the ironic figure of doubt; the aporitical text, then, is one filled with "doubts and objections" (OED). Antiphrasis is the ironic trope of negation, the central trope, for example, of satirical writing in which prior assertions are denied in the interest of promoting opposite or alternative assertions. The figure of the oxymoron presents apparently absurd or incongruous linkages, but oxymoronic figures may be distinguished from catachrestical figures in that the absurdity or incongruity of the oxymoron is only apparent, not real; however paradoxical the statement on the face of it may be, a fully coherent, rational point may be extracted—e.g., in such phrases as coarse gentleman, or noble savage. The figure of catachresis is one whose force is particularly difficult to convey. The OED defines it as "misuse with a sense of perversion." According to Henry Peacham in his 1593 Garden of Eloquence , "Catachresis in Latine is called Abusio," and Peacham gives as one of his examples of catachresis the "water runnes," the abuse consisting in attributing animate capacity to something which does not have life. For us this figure seems, I believe, purely metaphorical. Curiously, the OED describes, but does not provide examples of, catachresis. Would Milton's "blind mouths," or Dylan Thomas's "the long friends" resonate as indicating perverse or abusive misuse? Or perhaps we must turn to something from popular culture, a phrase such as "jumbo shrimp" (some would add "military intelligence")—which might have more catachrestical than oxymoronic force—might present, in Spivak's sense, a metaphor with no adequate referent.

The first three of these figures (antiphrasis, aporia, oxymoron), I suggest, are tropes for the sort of scepticism which founds the "realist"/"modernist" work of writers like Hardy and Stephen Crane, of the early Pound and Eliot,

of Joyce at least through some of Ulysses . And these tropes may also be found nonfictional writing of a sort that may generally be considered "scientific." The fourth one of these figures (catachresis) I see as the central trope of "modernist" work of a more radical nature, work such as Nietzsche's, perhaps of Henry Adams's Education , of Henry James's The Sacred Fount , possibly of Joyce's Finnegans Wake , and of Virginia Woolf's The Waves . The catachrestical text cannot be considered "scientific" according to any of the usual understandings of the term to the extent that it seeks to sustain and amplify the disparity between metaphor and adequate referent (not the case, as I have said, with ethnocriticism which, perhaps impossibly, seeks to close the gap). It is catachrestical modernism of this gap-sustaining type, I believe, which most current forms of postmodernism (as I understand them) may be taken to continue or extend, while it is aporitic (to choose one of the terms possible here to stand for all others) modernism that postmodernism rejects and rebels against, constituting itself by means of a break.

It is my contention that Boas's work is rich in irony, but it remains unclear which type of irony—the doubtful, paradoxical, and negational, consistent with some sense of realism and of science, or the perverse-absurd, subversive of any sense of science—dominates in it. On the one hand, essay after essay may be cited as instantiating just the sort of hearty scepticism that clears the field for more securely founded hypotheses; on the other hand, the work as a whole either perversely insists upon conditions for scienticity that are in no way attainable, or asserts positions that so thoroughly contradict one another as abusively to cancel each other out, moving beyond the oxymoronic to the catachres-

tic, and thus subverting the conditions of possibility for any scientific hypotheses whatsoever.

The case for Boasian anthropology as constituted by the kind of aporitic irony that founds what I will call a modernist realism consistent with science, might focus on the meaning and function of the new relativism in Boas's work. Unlike the late-nineteenth-century historians who, in Hayden White's account, saw the specter of relativism as serving to "undermine confidence in history's claim to 'objectivity', 'scienticity', and 'realism'" (White 1973 33), Boas and his students seemed to find the new relativity not the foreclosure but the promise of "objectivity," "scienticity," and "realism." Relativism, for Boas, was understood primarily to mean cultural relativism, and a stance of cultural relativism (which was not taken, as I have noted, to imply a general epistemological relativism) as enabling a satiric method by which to expose the abundant undocumented generalizations indulged in by practitioners of "the comparative method in anthropology."^[5] In page after page of his writing both early and late, Boas shows a real delight in his ability to expose or deconstruct, as we might now say, generalizations that could not stand up to his aggressive ironic scepticism. In its historical moment, this aspect of Boas's intervention most certainly seems to have advanced the project of a scientific anthropology.

But then there is the famous Boasian hostility to theory and to laws. For there are, indeed, many passages in Boas's writing where he warns against the dangers of interposing aprioristic theory between the putatively innocent eye of

[5] See Boas's 1896 essay, "The Limitations of the Comparative Method in Anthropology," in Race, Language, and Culture .

the observer and the facts or data in themselves (his view of these matters seems positivist in a largely discredited manner).^[6] Boas also seems to have given many of his students and readers a strong impression that he was implacably opposed not only to theory but to all statements of phenomenal lawfulness, that for him anthropology was the sort of inquiry that best limits its view to the singularity or particularity of cultural phenomena. Nonetheless, as I shall try to show in only a moment more, one can also cite essays in which Boas asserts that the statement of general laws is, indeed, the ultimate aim of anthropology, as of any science. These latter assertions permit one to wonder whether there is not, at a deep level of Boas's thought, a commitment to sustaining contradiction, a refusal of closure as somehow a violation of the way things "really" are: a refusal, of course, that denies the possibility of science. This seems all the more likely when one considers that even in Boas's explicit remarks approving the possibility of scientific generalization, he insists again and again on impossible conditions for such generalization, for his contention is that laws will legitimately be "discovered" only when "all the 'facts' are in."

So far as there was to be a Boasian science of anthropology, then, its achievement required the collection of "facts" in the interest of the "discovery" of "laws." Facts, for Boas, are not conceptual constructs or even choices on the part of the researcher, but simply out there. And laws, for Boas, in the generalization of his understanding of facts, do not

[6] E.g., Marion Smith: "Boas taught his students statistics and phonetics as tools for handling biological series and language, but the greatest lesson we learned was that data had an order of their own" (in Goldschmidt 51). Or, most recently, Irving Goldman, "If I am remembering correctly from 50 years ago or more, this is how the [Boasian] legacy was transmitted in the classroom. First, minimum theory, then hardly anything on methodology, and just about no global statements [?] on anything but race and culture" (in Schildkraut 552).

either have to be formulated or constructed; rather, once all the facts are in, laws will simply announce or dis-cover themselves to the assiduous observer. Boas would not abandon the goal of stating laws because that would be to abandon the project of a scientific anthropology in the strong sense; but he also would not abandon his adherence to impossible conditions for the actual achievement of a strongly scientific anthropology. Inasmuch as it is obvious that all the "facts" never will be in, it is not possible ever to satisfy Boas's ironic scepticism, not possible ever to achieve exactly the science he is after. Such a position, I suggest, is not aporitic, but is best figured by the trope of catachresis. But it is surely time to do some reading.

2

In an 1887 text called "The Study of Geography," Boas distinguished between sciences as they derive from one or the other of two apparently invariant tendencies in the mind—or at least the Western mind. The natural sciences, like physics, Boas claimed, spring from what he calls the "aesthetic" impulse, while those like "cosmography," or history, what we would term the social sciences, are the expression of what he calls the "affective" impulse. The first, a sort of "rage for order," is concerned with stating the general laws governing the phenomena under consideration, while the second is more particularistically concerned with the individual phenomenon itself. For the cosmographer, the historian, or, as Boas spent most of his life insisting, the anthropologist, "The mere occurrence of an event claims the full attention of our mind, because we are affected by it, and it is studied without any regard to its place in a system" (644). As opposed to the physicist, who seeks to generalize from "mere occurrences," the cosmographer, Boas writes,

"holds to the phenomenon which is the object of his study, . . . and lovingly tries to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear. This occupation with the object of his affection affords him a delight not inferior to that which the physicist enjoys in his systematical arrangement of the world" (645). It is hard to resist noticing the erotic dimension of Boas's description of the cosmographical romance. But can such a conception be compatible with an anthropological science ? Boas characteristically answers yes—and no. "Physicists," he writes, "will acknowledge that the study of the history of many phenomena is a work of scientific value" (642), and, near the end of his essay, Boas pronounces both cosmographical and physical inquiry to be—and it would seem equivalently—"two branches of science" (646).

What Boas says here of history and cosmography he would say again and again of anthropology, that it was to study its object of affection "without any regard to its place in a system." But he would also say again and again that anthropology, in this regard now quite like physical science ("aesthetic" as distinguished from "affective" science), must, indeed, search out systematic laws. Just a year after the publication of "The Study of Geography," in an 1888 text called "The Aims of Ethnology," we find Boas writing that "the human mind develops everywhere according to the same laws," and that "the discovery of these [laws] is the greatest aim of our science" (RLC 637). As I have noted, to the end of his life, Boas continued to insist upon the necessity of reducing the multitudinous phenomenal data of culture to some kind of lawfulness—to a commitment to finding its "place in a system"—while appending the condition that more and ever more data would first have to be

examined before the formulation of explanatory generalizations might legitimately begin. Anthropology must ultimately discover general laws of some sort, just as any proper science must, but such laws cannot be discovered until all the evidence is in. Since all the evidence never will be in, the anthropologist, now a kind of "connoisseur of chaos," had best stick to particularities and defer concern for pattern or for general lawfulness—although the discovery of laws is, indeed, the goal of ethnology. It is a simple matter to quote Boas on both sides of what seem to me antithetical and—in the form in which they are stated—irreconcilable positions. But further quotation would not be especially helpful—nor, indeed, is it necessary, once we note that Boas himself chose just these two essays—"The Aims of Ethnology" and "The Study of Geography"—with their conflicting positions, to conclude the last major book of his lifetime, Race, Language, and Culture , published in 1940.

Writing when he was more than eighty years old, Boas announced that these two papers, composed some fifty years earlier, were chosen to conclude his book "because they indicate the general attitude underlying [his] later work" (vi). Boas's "attitude" is such as to offer firm support for both sides of a great many questions, and such an attitude, I suggest, goes beyond the aporitic ironic scepticism compatible with science to the catachrestical irony that would subvert any pretense to science.

Now, Race, Language, and Culture is a volume of six hundred forty-seven pages, comprising sixty-three essays written over a period of forty-nine years. It is a wartime book, and Boas's preface states his intention that the essays to come may show anthropology's bearing "upon problems that confront us" (v). A section called "Race," consisting of

twenty essays, is the first in the book; "Language," with five, is the second; the third section, "Culture," the category of Boas's most substantial contribution, has thirty-five essays.

One might well expect that Boas chose these divisions, representing the three main areas of his work over a long lifetime, and arranged the essays in them in some kind of ascending or progressive order; one might expect, that is, that this large book was organized in such a way as to permit some sort of climactic or at least clear statement of Boas's position. But any such expectation is undercut by the presence of a fourth section, one, that in its structural and thematic effect, is decidedly anticlimactic. For Boas does not end the book called Race, Language, and Culture with the section on "Culture" (or, for that matter, with an afterword or conclusion), but instead follows it with something called simply "Miscellaneous." And it is in "Miscellaneous" that Boas places the texts that are indicative, as he states in his preface, of his final position on matters central to his understanding of anthropology. The texts in "Miscellaneous" are not recent writing, but, instead, three nineteenth-century essays that work backward, from 1898 and "Advances in Methods of Teaching," to 1888 and "The Aims of Ethnology" (in which there was a call for the discovery of laws), to "The Study of Geography" of 1887 (in which the discovery of laws was announced as not the aim of social science at all).

To conclude his final book this way is to reveal a deeply ironic sense of structure (which irony, again, remains to be seen). For what is true of irony thematically, as an "attitude," is true of irony structurally, as a form, as well: ironic structures achieve their effects by frustrating conventional expectations for climax and closure. Ironic texts may seem to work according to the familiar Western patterns of trag-

edy, comedy, and romance, but in the end they always subvert them. Rather than the revelation and resignation of tragedy, the reconciliation and reintegration of comedy, or the idealistic transcendence of romance, the ironic ending suggests that things just happen as they happen, to no special point, or at least to no clear one. Think of a play like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot , with its last lines, "Well? Shall we go?" "Yes, let's go," and its final stage direction, "They don't move." Nothing moves for the ironist; plus ça change, plus ça reste le même . Even more radically, moving again from aporitic to catachrestic irony, there is the suggestion that the very idea of an ending is an absurdity or paradox; no text can ever end . Think of Kafka's Castle , or of Finnegans Wake whose final words lead back to its first words. Does the apparently contradictory juxtaposition of "The Aims . . . " and "The Study . . ." really have its oxymoronic point? Or is it Boas's ultimate instantiation of the catachrestical figure of perverse misuse, abusio that has the last word?

At this point, I can well imagine that the scientist reader, if not so hotly the literary reader, may well be asking, what, after all, do the essays themselves have to say ? Speaking from outside the disciplinary borders of anthropology, I would repeat that the essays on "Race" seem ironic only insofar as they are sceptical of entirely undocumented, unscientific, and self-serving statements about race. Throughout his long career, as I remarked earlier, Boas insisted on the cultural explanation of cultural differences and profoundly intervened against German racist theories directed against Jews, and American racist theories directed against blacks, and these essays lend themselves more readily than usual in Boas's work to rather direct application and use.

I am not sure what to make of the few (five) essays on

language, although it seems difficult to read them without the double sense of, first, Boas's clear insistence on the importance for the ethnographer of learning Native languages, and, second, of the uncertainty surrounding Boas's own knowledge of Kwakw'ala, the language of the Kwakiutal: of Helen Codere's statements, for example, that Kwakiutl people she interviewed in 1951 remembered Boas speaking their language,^[7] and Ronald Rohner's conclusion in 1969 that Boas had learned Chinook jargon but not Kwakw'ala, nor any other "indigenous Northwest Coast language" (xxiv). In a recent essay, Judith Berman accepts Codere's estimate that Boas did, indeed, speak the language of the Kwakiutl—while demonstrating that his translation of at least one story he was told in Kwakw'ala, while it "may not be the worst conceivable, . . . is still a very bad one" (in press).^[8]

The many essays on "Culture" divide into more nearly general, theoretical pieces and specific ethnographic pieces. I will look briefly at the major theoretical piece in just a moment. As for the ethnographic work, it seems mostly an immense, even celebratory record of randomness: Boas was there when he was there, he saw what he saw, he left us whatever he happened to leave us. Even Helen Codere, for all her enormous respect for Boas, acknowledged that "it is not possible to present a synthesized account of Kwakiutl culture based upon Boas's works" (in Harris 1968 314–5). Whether Boas purposely worked in such a way as to forestall what he would have considered an inevitably premature "synthesis," or, rather, worked in such

[7] See Codere, p. xxiv.

[8] See "Oolachan-Woman's Robe: Fish, Blankets, Masks and Meaning in Boas' Kwakw'ala Texts."

a way as to obstruct any synthesis whatsoever, must remain, I believe, undecidable.

Ronald Rohner, who found his own attempt to work in the field with Boas's Kwakiutl materials beset with difficulties, has noted that even when Boas "was aware" that some of his texts and ethnographic "materials over time contain[ed] many inaccuracies and inconsistencies . . . he never corrected them in print" (1969 xiii), an observation that reaffirms Alfred Kroeber's statement of 1959 that Boas knew he was wrong in his account of how the Kwakiutl potlatch functioned "but that he never took the time to re-explain the system" (L. White 1963 56). Here, too, it might be that he just "never took the time"; but it also might be that this lack of concern to reconcile conflicting views was a consequence of a radically ironic, catachrestical set of mind.

I turn now to the essay Boas placed first in the section on "Culture," his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932, called "The Aims of Anthropological Research." Both the occasion of its original delivery and its placement in this book are such as to suggest it may fairly be taken as representative of Boas's mature thought. What we find all through this text is irony's ability to doubt and deny; the question for science is whether the doubt and denial are, once again, in the interest of alternative affirmations or whether they go so far as to deny affirmative statements of any kind.

Boas begins with a sketch of anthropology's beginnings from a variety of sources; next, he defines "our objective as the attempt to understand the steps by which man has come to be what he is, biologically, psychologically and culturally" (RLC 244). It appears, Boas says, that "our material must necessarily be historical material, historical in the widest

sense of the term" (244). Having announced the need for historical data, however, Boas then goes on to show how unlikely it is that sufficient data will ever be forthcoming, and to list the errors and dangers of a variety of positions. He next passes from considerations of race and psychology to those of "cultural anthropology." I will catalog some of his negational figures, without, to be sure, providing sufficient context to understand each of his remarks in itself. My claim is that the sheer number of these figures does the work of establishing Boas's commitment to ironic scepticism. Boas writes: "The material needed for the reconstruction of the biological history of mankind is insufficient on account of the paucity of remains" (250); "Even this information is insufficient" (251); "For these reasons it is well nigh impossible" (252); "This method cannot be generalized" (252); "It may be admitted that it is exceedingly difficult to give absolutely indisputable proof" (252); it "hardly admits of the argument that . . ." (252); "this view is not admissible without proof that . . ." (253); "It is not a safe method to assume that . . ." (254); "Even the fullest knowledge of the history of language does not help us to understand" (255); "The phenomena of our science are so individualized, so exposed to outer accident that no set of laws could explain them" (257); and so on and on.

For all that aporia and antiphrasis structure Boas's text, still, the doubts and negations may yet imply some positive recommendations. Nonetheless, even if this first essay on "Culture" is useful for the project of an anthropological science, Race, Language, and Culture will still present us, as its conclusion, the "miscellaneously" juxtaposed and contradictory final essays of the book.

And it does indeed seem to me that Boas's writing, taken as a whole, has a kind of abusive perversity that, as with

Nietzsche, undermines the foundations for any claims to scienticity. At the furthest horizon, I believe Boas was rather anxiously fascinated by cultural and epistemological chaos of the sort with which Richard Rorty, Jean-François Lyotard, and Stephen Tyler, among other postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers today, are quite comfortable. If I am at all correct, he did, indeed, engage a kind of abysmal ironic vision, which I have tried to link to the figure of catachresis. And it is the figure of catachresis, as I have said, which marks postmodernist subsumptions of logic to rhetoric, science to narrative or conversation, as it marks a sense of the constant inconstancy of figure/ground, signal/noise relations.

If this is so, then, to the extent Boas may have become "unreadable" in the present moment, he might well be recuperated as a sort of precursor of postmodernism. But if I seem here to have conducted Boas to just the place Marilyn Strathern, in a recent essay, brought Boas's English contemporary, Sir James Frazer, I want to warn even more strongly than she against any attempt actually to reread these complex figures as postmodernists.^[9]

For all that I have claimed to find a powerful attraction to the chaotic possibilities of freeplay and undecidability (to use more or less current terms) at some deep level of Boas's work, nonetheless, it seems to me that for the most part Boas was attracted to the study of phenomena which he probably felt to be more orderly (whatever their order) than chaotic, phenomena which, looked at particularly and carefully, at least were probably coherent in themselves. This sense of cultural things was tropologically figured in varieties of what I have called aportic irony, the central trope,

[9] See Strathern, "Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology."

to repeat, of a sort of realist/scientist modernism: distanced and distancing, sceptical, tough-minded, sensitive to paradox, self-conscious, and so on.

Like a number of writers of the modernist period—and I think this is true in a historically specific way of writers of the modernist period and not just of writers in general—Boas's work is difficult to characterize as a whole, the whole not at all comprehensible as the strict sum of its parts. In somewhat similar fashion, the Eliot of the "Preludes" or "Prufrock" is not fully consistent with the Eliot of the "Four Quartets," or, to cite an author not always considered as a modernist in manner, the D. H. Lawrence of The Rainbow may not be fully consistent with the Lawrence of Aaron's Rod, The Plumed Serpent , or the Studies in Classic American Literature . The same, as I have noted, is true of Henry James, whose Sacred Fount of 1901 cannot be understood as simply the "mature" work of the author of the Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Yet I will say that for all the powerful contradictions a careful reading of his work may discern, I think Boas today, in our moment, as indeed in his own, is much more useful for the project of a scientific anthropology (however modest and circumscribed current claims for scienticity must be) than for either Geertzian semiotic anthropologies or Tylerian postmodern anthropologies. I, at any rate, would like to see him recuperated for such a project, for all that we must allow to his work its catachrestical component.