The Pivotal Role of the Northwest Coast in the History of Americanist Anthropology

Abstract

THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY, including much of my own work (Darnell 1988, 1990), has emphasized the explanatory potential of biography. Intellectual historians are inclined to attribute a considerable degree of agency to individual academics who have been influential in their chosen fields. Autobiography, for many historicist purposes, has the added advantage of revealing the motivations and intentions of the actor whose life experience structures the telling of a disciplinary story. Such unexamined privileging of the autonomy of key individuals in creating institutions, social networks, and theoretical paradigms might lead us to re-examine the canonical work of Franz Boas on what Americans refer to as the Northwest Coast or of Edward Sapir on what Canadians of his time called the West Coast. Despite the fact that 95 percent of the Northwest Coast is located in Canada, the American-centred geographic term has persisted in both countries. We might expect the two founding fathers to represent American