Indigenous Visions: A Franz Boas Centennial at Yale

INDIGENOUS VISIONS: REDISCOVERING THE WORLD OF FRANZ BOAS

A Centennial Symposium at Yale, Sept. 15-17, 2011

One hundred years after his landmark treatise, scholars from across the disciplines will gather at Yale to rediscover Franz Boas as a major mind of the twentieth century. This centennial symposium brings together two dozen international thinkers to discuss the scientist, explorer, and public intellectual whose ideas shaped a global America.

Subjects include: W. E. B. Du Bois, William James, Margaret Mead; frontier encounters from Vancouver to Baffin Island; the relationships between indigenous people and anthropologists; and wide-ranging conversation on THE MIND OF PRIMITIVE MAN, Boas' landmark treatise on race, culture, and modern life.

The Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders will present the meeting, co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center, the MacMillan Center, the Beinecke Library, and many more Yale organizations. [Register here:

      

www.yale.edu/glc/boas]

Speakers include: Elizabeth Alexander (Yale), America's inaugural poet in 2009, who will discuss the relationship of Franz Boas and Zora Neale Hurston and the origins of interdisciplinary race studies; David A. Hollinger (Berkeley), the recent president of the Organization of American Historians, who will talk about anthropologists, missionaries, and the man who shot Liberty Valance; and the language theorist Michael Silverstein (Chicago), who will discuss 1911 as an "annus mirabilis" in thought.

James Tully, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Law, Indigenous Governance and Philosophy at the University of Victoria -- who served as a special advisor to Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and received the prestigious Killam Prize in 2010 for his contributions to Canadian public life -- will deliver the Stanley T. Woodward Lecture, "Diversity and Democracy After Boas," at 7 p.m., Friday, Sept. 16, in Luce Hall Auditorium (34 Hillhouse Avenue).

There will be wine and cheese before the lecture at 6 p.m.

The symposium begins with a reception at the Beinecke Library (121 Wall Street), Sept. 15 at 5:30 p.m. Dean of Yale College and Sterling Professor of History of Art Mary Miller will offer welcoming remarks. To reserve a place, sign up online at www.yale.edu/glc/boas. Also online: a full list of talks and key readings, including the 1911 edition of The Mind of Primitive Man.