Expressive Enlightenment: Subjectivity and Solidarity in Daniel Garrison Brinton, Franz Boas, and Carlos Montezuma

This chapter considers Franz Boas's affiliations with American ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton and Yavapai doctor, pamphleteer, and founding member of the Society of American Indians, Carlos Montezuma. Boas saw Brinton as having fostered a project known as “the philosophy of expression.” He also credited Brinton's attempt to conduct the human sciences from a first-personal perspective with putting their common discipline on a “firm footing.” Montezuma's efforts to make expressive enlightenment the basis of a pan-Indian social movement led to his adoption of an ethical attitude toward history and language that faced the same direction as that of Boas. For both Boas and Montezuma, the main obstacle facing the global community they envisioned was the widespread conception of human history as an unending race war.