Research - Jesup Centenary Celebrated

Jesup Centenary Celebrated in New York
- by Igor Krupnik

As almost everybody knows by now, 100 years ago, in the spring of 1897, an American railroad tycoon-turned-museum director, Morris Jesup, financed the 'Jesup North Pacific Expedition' - an international research and museum project directed by Franz Boas. This resourceful venture launched the first anthropological study into the early origins of Native Americans and the interactions of native peoples, cultures, and environments at the North Pacific crossroads of Siberia and North America.

In 1992, in anticipation of the forthcoming centennial of the original Jesup Expedition, the ASC unveiled its 'Jesup-2' initiative as a novel cooperative effort to document native cultures and modern lives on the two sides of the North Pacific. As it turns out, things were done much faster one hundred years ago. In less than six months Boas was able to solicit funding for the expedition from Jesup to cover five field seasons for 16 people and even to run to the field in British Columbia with his first crew. In contrast, after three years of preparation, the mighty institutional support of the American Museum of Natural History, and all the resolution of its Asian curator, Dr. Laurel Kendall, an international conference Constructing Cultures: Then and Now was produced to celebrated the centennial of the Jesup Expedition (1897-1902) and of Franz Boas' career at the American Museum and Columbia University.

The conference was hosted by the American Museum in New York (which sponsored the original Jesup Expedition) and opened on November 13, 1997. The Conference Steering Committee of Laurel Kendall, William Fitzhugh, Igor Krupnik, Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (Georgetown University), and Nikolay Vakhtin (European Universtity at St. Petersburg, Russia) invited some 50 speakers from the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, France, Britain, and Germany. Five days of sessions were packed with presentations, video and film festivals, visits to the AMNH ethnographic collections, and various public events. Anne Fitzgerald and Alexia Bloch from AMNH contributed their energy to the challenges of conference preparations and logistics that probably matched Boas' field hardships in British Columbia (though not those of Bogoras and Jochelson in Siberia). The beginning of the Jesup centennial conference coincided with the opening of AMNH's historical photo exhibit Drawing Shadows to Stone, featuring the unique ethnographic photography collected by the Jesup Expedition members in both North America and Siberia. The exhibit curators, Barbara Mathé and Thomas Ross Miller, produced a 112-page catalog coauthored with Laurel Kendall and published by the University of Washington Press. So the conference and the exhibit, like the original expedition, was a true cooperative venture.

This centennial conference generated enormous enthusiasm among its 50-some speakers and almost 150 participants. Contacts were established and old ties were strengthened, from which several new projects are certain to follow. Preparations are currently under way to publish conference proceedings in two issues of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, under general editorship of Laurel Kendall. These will focus on the historical legacy of the Jesup Expedition (under Igor Krupnik) and the modern status of native cultures in the 'Jesup area' (under Marjorie Balzer).

One more piece of good news: the University of Washington Press in Seattle has formally accepted for publication our earlier collection of Jesup-2 papers, Gateways to Jesup-2 (edited by Bill Fitzhugh and Igor Krupnik). So, we are indeed building a centennial Jesup Program -- slowly but steadily. One wonders whether Boas would have ever succeeded in his efforts one hundred years ago had he to contend with today's bureacracies! He certainly displayed a lot of endurance as the original Jesup Expedition publications dragged for almost 30 years after the field work was completed. So, we still have some time left to match the Jesup score-card.

Other Research Articles | Arctic Studies Center Home Page