Follow the Thread: A Mandarin Coat

Friday, January 14 3:39 pm

Catalog no. 70/2280. Photo Credit: (c) AMNH/D. Finnin

In 1901, budding anthropologist Berthold Laufer sent a brilliant blue silk robe he had bought in Shanghai to the American Museum of Natural History with a simple note: “Coat of a mandarin, for the summer.”

Within a few years, fakes would flood the market, says Curator Laurel Kendall, chair of the Division of Anthropology, but the time and place of this purchase indicates that it is “the real thing,” a coat that could only have been worn by a scholar-advisor to the Imperial Court during the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911.

Part of the Museum’s extensive collection of textiles, this coat exemplifies the rigidly defined rules of Imperial Court dress in which an elaborate system of colors and motifs telegraphed rank. The dragon, for example, is the ultimate “yang” or male symbol, and a sign of the Emperor’s power. The water represented at the bottom of the robe reflects the legendary role of dragons in East Asia’s traditional agrarian societies as denizens of lakes, rivers, and seas who once a year ascend to the heavens to bring on the rain. Overall, the decoration suggests a mandarin of the fourth to sixth rank.

Laufer, who would go on to become the premier Sinologist of his generation, was sent to China by Franz Boas, then director of the Museum’s Anthropology Division and the acknowledged father of the field in America. Boas had secured a grant of $18,000 (about $400,000 today) from New York banker Jacob H. Schiff to cover Laufer’s expenses for three years to gather “collections which illustrate the popular customs and beliefs of the Chinese, their industries, their mode of life.” Laufer set about buying the stuff of everyday life, completing what is still the most extensive ethnographic collection from pre-revolutionary China in North America.

“Nobody was doing that kind of work at that time,” says Kendall. “He gave us a picture of daily life…And that’s us! We’re all about the time capsule, the trunk in the attic, trying to imagine how people lived.”

Go behind the scenes of the Division of Anthropology’s ethnographic collections on February 24 on a Members-only tour.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter issue of Rotunda, the magazine for Museum Members.

Marking Franz Boas’s Birthday

Friday, July 23 4:25 pm

This month marks the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Franz Boas, a prominent Museum curator who is often called the father of American anthropology. During his 10-year tenure at the Museum and later as the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Boas established anthropology as a recognized branch of scientific inquiry and debunked prevailing beliefs about the superiority of Western civilization.

Supported by several museums, Boas led research expeditions along the North Pacific Coast of North America and trained a new generation of anthropologists, including future Museum Curator Margaret Mead.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Boas’s birth in 2008, Museum Curator Peter Whiteley – who studies the cultures and histories of Native North America from the 17th century to the present — commemorated this bold pioneer in apaper presented at a colloquium on Engaged and Public Anthropology at the Museum.

Check out a few excerpts below.

On Boas’s early interest in anthropology

“Boas’s attraction to what was to become “anthropology” emerged from a coalescence of interests in physics, mathematics and physical geography, as well
as a deep-rooted family background in social justice… In consequence, Boas’s take on the interpretation of culture was both rigorously
empirical, and assiduously attentive to the discourses and practices of his Native American interlocutors.”

On how Boas transformed anthropology

“Although a few scholars had used the term “culture” in the plural before, it was Boas who truly transformed scientific and, in time, popular understanding by his insistence on individual cultures as opposed to a great, monolithic plod of social evolution from lower to higher forms of culture.”

On Boas’s legacy

“…A paradigm shift in the understanding of human cultures that over time has transformed all global thought on the subject…an explicitly collaborative record of Native American cultural and linguistic forms that in its range and depth is almost incredible…a bottom line commitment to human rights enacted in his own life and practice…[and] a fierce defense of the sanctity of academic freedom to inquire and to speak out as a public intellectual…

Boas’s anthropology, as that of many of his students, notably Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, went against the grain of conventional wisdom and conventional practice, to produce a truly liberating discourse celebrating the varieties of the human condition that has now spread to all corners of the globe and multiple forms of social discourse.”