Sat May 8 detailed schedule

The Seeing and Unseeing of George Hunt

Abstract

Although George Hunt is reasonably well known today as the long-time collaborator of Franz Boas, and a prolific ethnographer in his own right, the history of how anthropologists have represented him is by no means a straightforward one. Despite the high profile of Boas’s Kwakwaka’wakw publications, and despite Boas repeatedly (if not fully) acknowledging Hunt’s contributions in print, from 1905 onwards Hunt's role in their production became progressively less well known. The erasure appears to have been the result of an active process among Boas’s students. By the 1950s, Hunt had been almost entirely effaced from anthropological discourse about Boas’s ethnographic research. A renewed recognition of his role began only with the arrival of a new generation of anthropologists, many with research connections to BC, who had never studied with Boas. 

Presenter(s)

Judith Berman, University of Victoria

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