Leonard Lopate at Large: Aaron Glass

Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, the curator of, The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology, Aaron Glass, associate professor at Bard, joins Corrine Hunt for a conversation on this important work in the early days of anthropology as we now know it.

A new exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center entitled The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology explores the hidden histories and complex legacies of one of the most influential books in the field of anthropology, Franz Boas’s 1897 highly influential “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians.”

Groundbreaking in its holistic detail, this portrait of a Native North American society was the result of Boas’s fieldwork with the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw of British Columbia and collaboration with his Indigenous research partner, George Hunt.

The exhibition—with includes designs by artist Corrine Hunt, a great-granddaughter of George Hunt—features ceremonial objects as well as rare archival photographs, manuscripts, and drawings that shed new light on the book and advance understanding of the ongoing cultural traditions it documents.