Antarctica, Art and Archive by Polly Gould

Author:Polly Gould [Gould, Polly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781350158344
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Typology

It was Boas’s journey from “sea-water empiricism” to the study of people and their environment and his self-reflexive methodology of participant observation that led him to his arguments against typology as a pre-existing formal set of categories applied to ethnographic others by a detached observer. Boas’s critique of typological formalism was based upon its provision of categorization in advance in order to establish boundaries between fugitive material realities. It brings to mind Wilson’s complaint about his ship-tossed palette of watercolors as he crossed the ocean on his first expedition: “everything wanders if it isn’t chained up” (see chapter 2, Everything Wanders).16 Here I should like to set out what was at stake for Boas in his argument with typology.

The archaeological and ethnographic collector Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, who claimed to have coined the term “typology”, noted with admiration that “the only instance of scientific arrangement that has been seen within the walls of a Government Building in England” was in an example of typological display hosted by an American museum. He noted:

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