SOURCE: "Irony in Anthropology: The Work of Franz Boas," in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, edited by Marc Manganaro, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 133-45.

Boas near the end of his life.

Krupat is an American critic and scholar who has written extensively on Native American cultures. In the following excerpt, he discusses elements of modernism in Boas's thought, noting the varieties and degrees of irony present in his writings.

Born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, Franz Boas was clearly an extraordinary figure, not only a teacher, but a maltre 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, on 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...