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Franz Boas and the Discovery of Culture 19
national union of the Burschenschaften. 47 Using a word he picked up from Marie, Boas
wrote that he had the “blues.” 48
There were still no jobs in America, and so Boas settled on habilitation at the
University of Berlin. Habilitation turned out to be an excruciating process, as Boas had to
spend a year writing his thesis, to satisfy Heinrich Kiepert, who was intent on not being
satisfied. Kiepert was the only geographer at Berlin, and was stubborn and dry, strictly a
physical geographer, with low regard for the new historical geography, and probably
wary of the new, young competitor. Though Kiepert tried to block his entry, eventually,
through the help of Kirchhoff and Bastian, Boas successfully defended his habilitation
thesis, Baffin-land, before a highly distinguished colloquium of thirty professors,
including Dilthey and Helmholtz. The pay for his position was low, however, and Boas
worked in the meantime as an assistant in Bastian’s museum. It was exciting work, and
Boas made friends among the young anthropologists that Bastian employed and trained.
It was there that he became interested in the Indians of British Columbia, as his job was
to catalog a collection of their artifacts brought in by J. Adrian Jacobsen. He was struck
by “the wealth of thought… hidden behind the grotesque masks and elaborately
decorated utensils of these tribes.” 49 Even more exciting was the troupe of Bella Coola
Indians that Jacobsen brought with him. Boas spent his free time studying their dances
and language. Their fascination was partly due to their not being Eskimos. He desparately
wanted to move beyond his “eternal Eskimo,” 50 as the long struggle to write his book,
much of which he tried to accomplish in his inadequate English, left him spent, and bored.
Boas wrote an article about the Bella Coola troupe for the American Science journal, and
kept his fingers crossed, hoping for a new challenge.
He decided to tour London and America before his lectures at Berlin were to
begin, to look for better opportunities. He didn’t find jobs, but he managed to secure
research work in the Pacific Northwest, with the aid of a loan from his uncle, Jacobi. And
so, he canceled his lectures and left for the town of Victoria in British Columbia. Quickly,
though, he was overwhelmed by the complexity of life there, the sheer number of entirely
different languages he would have to learn. In town, he met speakers of Tlingit,
Tsimshian, Haida, Bella Coola, Kwakiutl and Salish. To acquire some artifacts in order to
pay back his loan, he traveled north to a Kwakiutl village where some feasts were being
organized. His primary organizational criterion was mythology, and so most of his work
involved collecting stories. It was frustrating work, as his informants were not very
talkative, for various reasons. One Comox woman even tried to invent a story to please
him. 51 Nevertheless, Boas was relatively successful, due to the effort he made to follow
local custom. Arranging his own potlatch won him much respect. He returned to New
York with many rare artifacts, and three hundred edited pages of myths and stories,
vocabulary and grammar tables. He also discovered a new Salish language, Petlatch. He
hoped to use this collection to get a job as a museum curator, but none in New York
seemed especially interested in anthropology exhibits. And then, his luck changed.
Science magazine offered him a job as its Berlin correspondent, but Boas was wary of
47 Cole, p. 87
48 Cole, p. 88
49 Cole, p. 97
50 Cole, p. 97
51 Cole, p. 101