ABSTRACT
On April 4th, 1895, Captain John G. Bourke wrote an admonishing letter to American ethnologist Jesse Walter Fewkes regarding Fewkes's recently published comparative study of the Snake Dance observed by the Hopi Indians of Arizona and "similar rites" practiced at Zia Pueblo in New Mexico. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the Hopi Indian Snake Dance was among the best-known and most photographed American Indian ceremonies practiced in the United States. Sensationalistic accounts of the Snake Dance circulated nationally in newspapers, magazines, travel guides, popular books, and ethnographic studies. According to social evolutionary theory, the principle on which nineteenth-century American anthropology was founded, the Hopi and the photographic medium were imagined as occupying a similar state of development. By the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific efficacy of social evolutionary theory was vehemently contested, and anthropologists have long since discarded its ideas.
