Ira Stuart Jacknis was born on March 25, 1952, in New York City; he died on September 29, 2021, in Oakland, California. Ira was a dear friend and colleague of mine. Because he was so brilliant, organized, and generous, he was a person who often solved intractable historical and bibliographic mysteries for me in my research on Franz Boas. Ira was kind, gentle, and a sweet spirit. There was a collective cry of anguish when his friends across the country heard of his passing.In 1974, Ira received his BA in Anthropology and Art History summa cum laude and with departmental honors from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on “The Japanese Tea Ceremony: A Study of Ritual and Traditions.” From Yale, Ira went to the University of Chicago, where he received his MA degree in Anthropology in 1976, with a thesis titled “Savage Icons: Victorian Views of Primitive Art.” Ira completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1989; his dissertation was published in 2002 by the Smithsonian Institution Press as The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl Art, Anthropologists, and Museums, 1881–1981. At Chicago, Ira studied with anthropologists Nancy Munn (1931–2020) and Raymond D. Fogelson (1933–2020), and with historian of anthropology George W. Stocking, Jr. (1928–2013).Following my presentation at the Alan Dundes Lecture in 2015, which was on Alan Dundes and the formation of the folklore program at the University of California, Berkeley, Ira approached me and told me with pride that he had been a member of the American Folklore Society (AFS) for many years. I am grateful to Jessica Anderson Turner, the executive director of the AFS, and Meredith McGriff, AFS's director of membership and information services, who traced his membership back to 1985 when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.Ira's academic path was paved with honors. He held a Yale University scholarship (1970–1974) and a University of Chicago scholarship (1974–1977). The research specializations that he listed on his CV emerged early and remained central to his work throughout his life: “art and aesthetics; museology; media anthropology (still photography, film, sound recordings); history of anthropology; American Indians (Northwest Coast, California, Southwest).”1 As the recipient of a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participation Award, he researched and planned an exhibition of Northwest Coast Indian Art, Boxes and Bowls, at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery (1972). At the Field Museum of Natural History, he held the Thomas J. Dee Fellowship and worked on the exhibition Kwakiutl Masks in Performance Context (1977). In 1979, with a grant from the Phillips Fund, Ira conducted research at the American Philosophical Society on “Historical Contextualization of Boas’ Kwakiutl Fieldwork.” In 1980, he held the Melville and Elizabeth Jacobs Research Fellowship for his work in Bellingham, Washington, on “Native Museums and the Image of Traditional Kwakiutl Culture.” The same year, he also was awarded a grant from Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for “The Influence of Anthropologists on Art and Culture of the Kwakiutl.” In 1995, with a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Ethnic Art, Ira worked on “Carving Traditions of the Klamath River Indians.”In 1991, Ira assumed his position as a Research Anthropologist at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, which remained his professional home until his retirement in 2021—sadly, the same year as his death. In tribute to Ira Jacknis, the staff of the Hearst Museum lists the following as his major exhibits at the museum: Back Roads to Far Towns: Folk Art of Rural Japan (1994–1995); The Carver's Art of the Indians of Northwestern California (1995–1996); Food in California Indian Culture (1997–2000); and In the Land of Kings: Aspects of Artistry in Rajasthan, India (2006–2007).2Throughout his career, Ira also held positions as a research associate in the following institutions: the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (2012–2018); the American Museum of Natural History in the Division of Anthropology (2014–2017); and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (2014–2017). In 1991, Ira served as curatorial assistant for the traveling exhibit Objects of Myth and Memory, organized at the Brooklyn Museum.3Ira's work was brilliant, creative, and energetic. I quote from an email I sent to him in 2013 about an article that he later told me was his first publication: “Dear Ira, I wanted to let you know how spectacular your article on ‘Franz Boas and Photography’ is! It is stunning! The detail, the precision, the insight! I think it is one of the best articles I've read on Boas.”4 From this first publication, Ira published books such as Objects of Myth and Memory: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, with Diana Fane and Lise Breen (1991), Getemono: Collecting the Folk Crafts of Old Japan (1994), Carving Traditions of Northwest California (1995), and Food in California Indian Culture (2004).Ira was especially prolific in his publication of articles. I once asked him why he didn't reprint all his articles on Boas in book form, and he responded that he was too busy moving forward on new projects to think about looking back at what he had done. At the time of his death, Ira had completed writing a manuscript that represented the culmination of many years of research on anthropology museums and their collections; it is listed in his CV under the working title of “Miniature Worlds: Model Dioramas at the Peabody Museum.” It remains to us to read carefully and broadly in the expansive scholarship of Ira Stuart Jacknis—and to hope his treasured works-in-progress will be brought to publication.
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Nov 7, 2023
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