Conspicuous consumption: An intercultural history of the Kwakwaka-wakw Hamat’sa
Aaron Glass
Aaron Glass is a cultural anthropologist dabbling in visual art, film, exhibitions, and digital media. Since finishing the PhD, he has engaged in a series of collaborative projects with First Nations in British Columbia, including the restoration of Edward Curtis's silent film from 1914, the creation of a digital database for a nineteenth-century museum collection in Berlin, and two exhibitions in New York with extensive websites and catalogues. His current project is to produce a critical edition, in print and digital media, of Franz Boas's 1897 monograph on "The Kwakiutl." Glass's books include: "The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History" (with Aldona Jonaitis; University of Washington Press, 2010); "Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast" (BGC/Yale, 2011); "Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema" (with Brad Evans; University of Washington Press, 2014); and "Writing the Hamat'sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance" (UBC Press, 2021).
Associate Professor
Bard Graduate Center