Transmission difficulties : Franz Boas and Tsimshian mythology

Summary: Boas's original misrepresentations of the over 2,000 pages of material he received from Henry Tate have been denied by the ethnographic establishment for over eighty years. His distortion of Tate's stories has been rationalized, to date, as "cultural relativism" -- any loss of Tate's original material in this ethnographic "collaboration" between Native informant and European scientist was "unavoidable," due to the presumably equal "cultural differences" between them. This, Maud argues convincingly, is not the case at all. The fact that Boas paid Tate for his stories by the page, and furthermore instructed Tate specifically on what stories, and even on what kinds of stories he was to gather and submit, created a profoundly unequal relationship between these two men, which resulted in an inevitable and pre-determined "authentication" of the Native material by the European ethnographer. --publisher's website.