Before Cultures
The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920
In this work, Brad Evans weaves together the histories of American literature and anthropology. His study brings alive not only the regionalist and ethnographic fiction of the time but also revives a range of neglected materials, including the Zuni sketchbooks of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; popular magazines such as Century Illustrated Monthly, which published Cushing's articles alongside Henry James's; the debate between Joel Chandler Harris, author/collector of the Uncle Remus folktales, and John Wesley Powell, perhaps the most important American anthropologist of the time; and Du Bois's polemics against the culture concept as it was being developed in the early twentieth century.
Written with clarity and grace, Before Cultures will be of value to students of American literature, history, and anthropology alike.
“In Before Cultures, Brad Evans argues for the productive dissensus surrounding the contemporary concept of ‘culture.’ This lively and well-researched study returns us to the emergence of the disciplines of anthropology and literary study when the contemporary understanding of the concept was forged to address the irresolvable ‘problem’ of human difference. One of the achievements of this book is to show how the definition of the problem has been more productive and generative than any resolution could be. Disciplines and fixed positions break down in Brad Evans’s analysis as he chronicles the achievements—creative, philosophical, intellectual—that have emerged from the efforts to understand human diversity.”—Priscilla Wald, Duke University
“A fascinating work, bringing anthropology to bear on literary studies and giving American literature a new and hitherto undertheorized frame of reference. Evans argues that there is a definitional tension between ethnographic cultures, referred to in the plural, and humanistic culture, referred to in the singular. That tension haunts us still.”—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“Before Cultures deals not only with American literature but also with American letters in the broadest sense—drawing on material that ranges from anthropological theory and reports of fieldwork through folklore to fiction, poetry, and books as material objects. The book’s combination of theoretical sophistication, historical knowledge, and interpretive sensitivity makes it persuasive and satisfying.”—June Howard, University of Michigan
“Students of history and cultural and literary theory have learned much in recent years about the emergence of the concept of culture as a master explanatory term (and ideological weapon) in American modernist literature. In this new book, Brad Evans provides a brilliant genealogical account of the prehistory of ‘the culture concept’ in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century ethnography, imaginative literature, and aesthetic theory. In doing so, Evans proves himself to be as astute a scholar of anthropology and the cognate human sciences as he is of literary history and theory. Before Cultures performs an invaluable labor of elucidation: read it and never use the term ‘culture’ anachronistically again!”—Michael Moon, The Johns Hopkins University
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Failed Genealogies of Culture
1. Eccentricity
Cushing's Zuni Sketchbooks and American Notions of Culture
2. Circulating Culture
Reading the Harris-Powell Folklore Debate
3. The Object-Life of Books
Collecting Local Color
4. Howellsian Chic
The Local Color of Cosmopolitanism
5. The Ends of Culture
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Legacy of Boasian Anthropology
Notes
Index
Anthropology: General Anthropology
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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