Skip to main content

Before Cultures

The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920

The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the American lexicon with force until after 1910—more than a century after Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention. Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America.

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.

256 pages | 26 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2005

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Culture Studies

Folklore and Mythology

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Native American Studies

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
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

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press