Each year, UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting the breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal and professional interests.
We invite you to ex
plore the new title The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism, edited in part by University of Victoria alum and faculty member, Robert Hancock. Robert Hancock recently appeared as a panelist at the Spring 2016 UVic Author Celebration event and spoke about the process of editing this text.
About the Book
The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1 examines Boas’s stature as a public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography, and activism. The volume’s contributors move across many of the disciplines within which Boas himself worked, bringing to bear their expertise in Native studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology, museum studies, comparative literature, English, film studies, philosophy, and journalism. This volume demonstrates a contemporary urgency to reassessing Boas both within the field of anthropology and beyond.
About Robert L.A. Hancock
Robert L. A. Hancock (Metis) is LE,NONET Academic Coordinator in the Office of Indigenous Affairs and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. He earned a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UVic, and held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in the First Nations Studies program at the University of Western Ontario. His teaching and research is centred on Indigenous–state relations, Metis political thought, and Indigenous education.
Other Editors
Regna Darnell is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Nebraska, 2001). Michelle Hamilton is an associate professor and director of public history at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Collections and Objections: Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario. Joshua Smith is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Western Ontario.
Praise for the Book
“As a stand-alone piece and as a first step in the grand Boas project, this volume is an important and fascinating contribution toward the understanding of a man who, if he did not heroically invent anthropology single-handedly, certainly did have a disproportionate influence on its formation and early direction.”—Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database
“Highly recommended.”—CHOICE
“This pathbreaking book transforms our understanding of Franz Boas as both scientist and citizen, going far beyond commonly accepted views of this influential figure of American cultural life. Presented from a firmly contemporary perspective, these important and well-researched essays will surely be the foundation of much future study.”—Ira Jacknis, research anthropologist at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley
