Ira Jacknis 1952-2021; Personal Tribute by Joanna Cohan Scherer
Personal Tribute to a friend of the Society of Visual Anthropology
Ira Stuart Jacknis March 25, 1952 – Sept. 29, 2021 (age 69)
Ira was born in New York City. He received a B.A. in anthropology and art history in 1974 from Yale University. Ira became a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1976 where he specialized in Native American studies, ethnology, and history of anthropology with professors George Stocking, Jr., Michael Silverstein, Nancy Munn, and Raymond Fogelson among others. His Ph.D. thesis was: The Storage Box of Tradition: Museums, Anthropologists, and Kwakiutl Art, 1881-1981 (1989). This was revised and published in 2002. Ira’s ethnographic fieldwork was primarily in the Northwest Coast area among the Kwakwaka‘wakw of Alert Bay but he also explored the history of the Japanese tea ceremony as well as Japanese folk crafts.
Ira was a research anthropologist for 30 years at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology from 1991-2021. Before that he was assistant curator for research, African, Oceanic and New World Art at the Brooklyn Museum. His primary interests were history of visual anthropology, especially photography and films by anthropologists and Indian photographers (of whom there were many). He was a board member of the SVA in the 1990s and a member of the AAA Council of Museum Anthropology.
One of his first publications in 1984 was on Franz Boas and Photography in the SVA series Studies in Visual Communication. Other articles and books relating to visual anthropology subjects include a 1988 article on Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson use of Photography and Film in Bali, an article on Franz Boas and anthropological filming in Visual Anthropology 1987, another article on George Hunt, Kwakiutl Photographer (1992), another on the films of William Heick (2000) as well as an article on James Mooney as an ethnographic photographer in 1990 in Visual Anthropology (to name a few of his more than 34 papers).
Since 2013 he had assisted volume editor Igor Krupnik as an associate editor and contributor to the Smithsonian Institution, Handbook of North American Indians Volume 1, Introduction (in press). Ira was the author of the chapter on California in the regional section and lead author for the final chapter: a retrospective assessment of the entire Handbook project. In 2020 as a result of being forced to remain at home (something he was upbeat about) because of the pandemic he was able to finish his manuscript on anthropological models that he had worked on for more than a decade. The working title: Miniature Worlds: Model Dioramas at the Peabody Museum is now with the Peabody Museum Press for review. I was able to assist in this manuscript on the section on Alice C. Fletcher’s early dioramas of Winnebago house types including a photo of Fletcher setting up a model in 1888 taken by Jane Gay. To Ira’s dismay, the models were subsequently lost but he was thrilled that photographs survived. We were supposed to have a drink together next time we met to celebrate this joint research effort. Sadly, this will not happen. Finally, Ira was actively working on an article on the history of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and returning to research on Alfred Kroeber’s collections and research in Zuni with materials at the American Museum of Natural History and Hearst Museum. He was a devoted, meticulous scholar and never was without a research project of significance.
Ira was a longtime friend and associate. I first met him in the early 1970s when he came to the Smithsonian as a summer fellow working at the Center for the Study of Man on the Handbook of North American Indians project. When his Ph.D. thesis was published in 2002 he autographed it for me “For Joanna: To my teacher and longtime friend, best wishes, Ira.” Truthfully, he was more my teacher as time went on but we had so much in common it was always a pleasure being with him. One of our favorite meeting places was the book displays at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings where we would cruise and view the newest publications sharing what we had already read and our opinion of said books. At one of these AAA meetings there was a cutout figure of Franz Boas that participants could put their own faces into and I persuaded Ira to do this for a snapshot. Unfortunately, I cannot any longer find that image! If anyone remembers the date of that AAA meeting, please let me know…. maybe I can find this photo. Kwakwaka‘wakw masks are often rich in visual transformations in which the mask is altered during the ceremony to reveal an alter image. To have an image of Ira in a Franz Boas cutout is to this reviewer a fitting way to remember him.
By Joanna Cohan Scherer
Selected bibliography:
1984 Franz Boas and Photography in Studies in Visual Communication 10 (1):2-60.
1988 Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film. Cultural Anthropology 3(2):160-77.
1990 James Mooney, Ethnographic Photographer, in special double issue of Visual Anthropology 3(2-3): Picturing Cultures: Historical Photographs in Anthropological Inquiry. (Joanna C. Scherer, ed.)
1992 George Hunt, Kwakiutl Photographer. In Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Yale University Press.
2000 Visualizing Kwakiutl Tradition: The Films of William Heick, 1951-1963. BC Studies, nos. 125/126:99-146.
2002 The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl Art, Anthropologists, and Museums, 1881-1981. Smithsonian Institution Press.
