The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the
American lexicon with force until after 1910--more than a century after
Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B.
Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention.
Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture
concept and its relation to the description of difference in late
nineteenth-century America.
In this work, Brad Evans weaves together the histories of American
literature and anthropology. His study brings alive not only the
regionalist and ethnographic fiction of the time but also revives a
range of neglected materials, including the Zuni sketchbooks of
anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; popular magazines such as
Century Illustrated Monthly, which published Cushing's articles
alongside Henry James's; the debate between Joel Chandler Harris,
author/collector of the Uncle Remus folktales, and John Wesley Powell,
perhaps the most important American anthropologist of the time; and Du
Bois's polemics against the culture concept as it was being developed in
the early twentieth century.
Written with clarity and grace, Before Cultures will be of value to
students of American literature, history, and anthropology alike.