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.