Making the familiar strange: NYC through an athropological lens

A white, middle-aged person recently told me she is a true New Yorker, being born in NYC. However, what makes a "true" New Yorker appears more complicated than that. The island of Manhattan, which later developed into the New York City (NYC), was in fact bought by Peter Minuit (1580- 1638), a Dutch director of the Dutch North American colony of New Netherland in 1626. He is alleged to have “bought” the island for $24 from the Lenape, the indigenous peoples living in the area at the time. This encounter is recorded in a letter written by Peter Schagen. Despite this record, there was a great misunderstanindg about the land. Whereas Lenape thought they will share the land with the Dutch, the latter taught they "bought" it. However, who would give up rights to the territory for some beads and cloth? I would agree that “That doesn’t make sense”, a thought taken from the short documentary on show at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

The depiction of purchasing the island by the Dutch is also depicted in a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). This diorama, which was unveiled in 1939, was to inaugurate the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall and celebrate the family’s Dutch ancestry.  However, the diorama erroneously depicts Lenape women as subservient and only engaged in physical labor. In contrast, women in Lenape society hold leadership roles, are knowledge keepers, and maintain cultural continuity. Moreover, the Lenape female leader Mamanuchqua was active in treaty negotiations during the mid-1600s.

The AMNH reopened the revitalized, co-curated exhibition between the museum staff and the Indigenous communities in the Northwest Coast Hall in May 2022. Consulting Curators from the Coast Salish, Gitxsan, Haida, Haíłzaqv, Kwakwakaw'akw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Nuxalk, Łingít|Tlingit, and Tsimshian communities shaped the exhibition that contains approximately 1,000 restored cultural treasures and new interpretation. Among the consulting curators was also the grandson of George Hunt, the indigenous ethnologist and a consultant to the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas.

The Northwest Coast Hall exhibition at the AMNH is of particular importance to anthropology. Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, used this material to support his theory of cultural relativism. A theory that maintains cultures must be understood on their own terms, without applying the standards of one’s own culture. Boas was also a founder of the American four-field anthropology, which united the disciplines of cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics, to study human diversity. Below is a photo of Franz Boas’s model of a settlement among Kwakwakaw'akw (Kwakiutl), whom he studied.

Before moving to New York, Franz Boas’s career in North America started in Chicago. On invitation by Frederic Ward Putnam, the head of the Department of Ethnology and Archaeology for the Chicago Fair in 1883, also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, Boas curated the physical anthropology section. In 1896, Boas was appointed Assistant Curator of Ethnology and Somatology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1899, Boas became a full professor of anthropology at Columbia University and played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as an umbrella organization for the four-filed anthropology he envisioned. At Columbia, Boas also established the first program that offered a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in anthropology in America. The program was set in the Schermerhorn building that bears an inscription, For the advancement of natural science: speak to the earth and it shall teach thee.

Apart from Franz Boas’s important contribution to anthropology as a discipline, he also mistreated his position as a museum curator. For example, he ordered to bring six Inuit to New York in 1897 who then lived in the cellar of the AMNH. Soon after, most of them died of pneumonia, including the father of 7-year-old Minik Wallace. Boas and other curators staged a mock funeral for Minik’s father and had the father's remains dissected and placed in the museum. More about this can be read in Kenn Harper’s book Give me my father’s body: the life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. These are the dark yet important pieces of anthropological colonial legacy that are continuously being addressed and remain to be critically addressed.

Today, many Indigenous people still live and play in New York, Manahatta, which means “hilly island”. For example, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) ironworkers helped build Manhattan’s iconic skyscrapers. The exhibition Native New York at the National Museum of American Indian is only a reminder that stories of Native New Yorkers provide an expanded understanding of the region’s history and reveal that New York is – and always has been – a Native place.

Out of NYC, I concluded my year with a presentation at the 8th Symposium of Slovenian researchers abroad, organized by Drustvo VTIS (Association of Slovenes Educated Abroad). The event took place in Ljubljana and virtually between 20-21 December, 2023. In a panel on archaeology and an excellent company of Nik Petek-Sargeant, Brina Zagorc, and Katharina Zanier, I talked about No place like home for metalworkers. My presentation was based on the recently published article in which I discuss metalworking during the Early Bronze Age Anatolia and beyond in multifunctional and all-gender spaces, such as households, rather than (male) workshops. Beyond the commonality of being trained abroad, Brina, Nik, and myself share framing our research in interdisciplinary ways, more or less resembling Boas's idea of anthropology.

I believe looking at New York through an anthropological lens is no less fascinating than the city's fame for Christmas lights, shopping on the 5th Avenue, iconic architectural pieces, and fabulous museums. By making the familiar strange compels us to see and think about the NYC differently. Not to disappoint, I have included the more familiar photos, with glowing Christmas lights and decorations, in a gallery below. Happy New Year everyone!