Silvy Chakkalakal: “A Moment There! Don’t Move!” – Boasian Aesthetics and the Phenomenon of Historicity

Between the 1910s and 1940s, early North American cultural anthropology—and Boasian anthropology in particular—appears as a collaborative field connected to a social milieu of writers, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and scientists from a variety of disciplines. The entanglements between the artistic and anthropological fields were characterized by a constant crossing of disciplinary, generic, media, cultural, as well as personal boundaries. Following the first lines of Edward Sapir’s poem in the title, “time” and “temporality” appear as a motive in the poetry and in the ethnographic research of Franz Boas’ students such as Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. The talk sheds light on this phenomenon of historicity in early cultural anthropology which emerges in the assembling of past, present, and future.

Silvy Chakkalakal
To the biography...

Part of the conference Deep Time and Crisis, c. 1930