boasians

On Boas and the Boasians

1. Race
a. Excerpts from a section on “Franz Boas and Attempts to Transform the Meaning of Race” from Audrey Smedley 1993 Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, pp. 276-7.

    As early as 1897 Franz Boas began to question some of the elements of nineteenth-century thought on race. He argued... that races should not be characterised by linguistic criteria because “the laws according to which anatomical types are preserved are not the same as those according to which languages are preserved.” He persisted in this stance in other articles and reviews. But his most significant contribution to the crystalization of this view of race stems from his anthropometric studies of children and adults. Following the then customary activities of his discipline, Boas conducted anthropometric studies on school children in such places as Worcester, Mass.; Puerto Rico; Oakland, Cal.; New York; and New Jersey. He studied the children of Italian and Jewish immigrants and the offspring of French-Italian “mixed” marriages, native Americans, “half-blood Indians”, and mulattoes, among others. His concerns were with mental and physical growth patterns and the influences of heredity and environment on growth. What he discovered was to startle the scientific and intellectual communities and to dislodge many of the basic assumptions of anthropometry.
    Boas found that children of immigrants in a single population varied significantly from their parents in anthropometric measurements, that head form [cephalic index] could change in one generation from round heads to long heads, and that stature, facial width, and a number of other features thought to have been fixed, stable, and unvarying due to heredity underwent sometimes drastic changes in different environments. These findings challenged and eventually undercut the notion of fixity and permanence of physical racial characteristics as measured by anthropometric techniques and demonstrated the plasticity of the human skeleton [within limits]. Boas reintroduced the importance of environmental influences, particularly nutrition and climate, as major determinants of the final expression of many physical traits.
    Until then, such external influences had been largely ignored...

b. Kenan Malik 1996 The Meaning of Race, pp. 159-60, with quote from Stocking 1968 Race, Language and Culture, pp. 265-6.

...Given the changing ideological, social and intellectual assumptions of the time, cultural theories triumphed. The new anthropological concept of culture, Stocking has noted, 'provided a functionally equivalent substitute for the older idea of "race temperment":

It explained all the same phenomena, but it did so in strictly non-biological terms, and indeed its full efficacy as an explanatory concept depended on the rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
...All that was necessary to make the adjustment...was the substitution of a word. For 'race' read 'culture' or 'civilization', for 'racial heredity' read 'cultural heritage', and the change had taken place. From the Lamarckian 'racial instincts' to an ambiguous 'centuries of racial experience' to a purely cultural 'centuries of tradition' was a fairly easy transition -especially when the notion of 'racial instincts' had in fact been largely based on centuries of experience and tradition.

The discourse of culture, then, reconceived the concept of race in an egalitarian manner. It expunged the notion of a hierarchically-ordered humanity according to its differences, a classification which, as in classical racial theory, the fluidity and constant transmutation of distinctions between human groups was seen as so much mere 'noise' in contrast to the immutable differences that human intercourse supposedly revealed.

2. “Culture” and “cultures” Excerpts from George Stocking 1968 Race, Culture, and Evolution, pp. 202-4.

    What is involved here is precisely the emergence of the modern anthropological concept [of "culture"].... Preanthropological culture is singular in connotation, the anthropological is plural. In all my reading of Tylor, I have noted no instance in which the word culture appears in the plural. In extended researches into American social science between 1890 and 1915, I found no instances of the plural form in writers other than Boas prior to 1895. Men referred to “cultural stages” or “forms of culture”, as indeed Tylor had before, but they did not speak of “cultures.” The plural appears with regularity only in the first generation of Boas’ students around 1910.
    It is tempting to interpret this change largely in terms of the field experience -especially tempting for modern anthropologists, for whom fieldwork is at once both a subcultural rite de passage and the methodological cornerstone of their discipline. In this context, one sees on the one hand the Victorian ethnologist, sitting in his armchair rearranging the fragmented elements of cultures into evolutionary sequences leading from the lowest savagery to the very doors of his own study. Posed against him is Boas, who “must be understood, first of all, as a fieldworker.” On this basis it has been suggested that the Tylorian view of culture could not withstand extended fieldwork....
    ...[But things are more complex than this, as Boas himself indicated, and] we might say that a modern anthropological concept of culture developed out of the interaction of Boas’ prior personal attitudes and intellectual orientation, the theoretical issues posed by contemporary anthropology, his experience in the field, and his own library and armchair interpretation of that experience. In this context, aspects of historicity, plurality, holism, behavioral determinism, and relativism which were present in his thought from the beginning were elaborated and the evolutionary elements were either rejected or minimized.

3. Excerpt from Elvin Hatch Culture and Morality, pp. 52-3.

     ...something that the Boasians were not fully aware of. It is that the term “culture” had undergone a very significant change in meaning.
    The crux of the change was this: the critical element of culture as the term was used by the Victorian anthropologists was intelligence, whereas to the Boasians it was learning. To nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists, the artificial cultural milieu in which human beings live is a more or less conscious creation of rational minds. When faced with a need, say, to secure protection from cold and damp weather, the mind devises a solution. This version of culture did not deny the importance of learning, of course. It was assumed that children should go to school to become well educated and to enjoy civilization to its fullest. There is no need for each generation to re-discover what others already knew. Yet in the final analysis, learning itself was thought to be a matter of intelligence. Children may be taught things at school that they would not invent on their own (such as the concept of zero), but once these subjects are presented, the youngsters accept them because they have the good sense to see their usefulness and value.
    The twentieth-century Boasian view of culture construed learning very differently. At least two
innovations underlay this difference, the first of which is that learning was now thought to be as much a matter of emotion as reason. However rational and sensible our beliefs and practices may be, according to Boas, once learned we have an emotional attachment to them, so that an important accompaniment of all learning is a strong devotion to the patterns that are acquired. Boas made this point by saying that cultural beliefs and practices have emotional associations, in that deviations become intolerable to the members of society (1938)....
    The second innovation underlying the new version of culture was the notion of the unconscious, or more accurately of unconscious patterns or processes. Nineteenth-century anthropologists operated
largely without the idea of an unconscious dimension to human behavior. If they had given any thought to the matter they would have said that the process of learning takes place at the conscious level, or that people think when learning: little or nothing enters the mind unless it passes through the conscious intellect. Similarly, culture consists of ideas and practices that are held at the level of conscious thought so in principle it should be possible to elicit a culture in its entirety simply by asking people to describe their way of life. It would not have occurred to Victorian anthropologists that they needed subtle techniques for eliciting deep-seated patterns that are beyond people’s awareness. Boas was one of a number of turn-of-the century writers who helped changed this. In his view customs are habitual patterns of thought and behavior (most of which we learn as children), and once we acquire them they become “automatic” and “unreflective” like the rules of grammar. He did not necessarily imply the existence of an unconscious system in the modern sense, but he was clear that much of what goes on in human behavior springs not from conscious thought, but from obscure patterns in the mind.

4. Excerpt from Boas 1908 “Anthropology” (a lecture delivered at Columbia U).

The fact which is taught by anthropology,--that man the world over believes that he follows the dictates of reason, no matter how unreasonably he may act,--and the knowledge of the existence of the tendency of the human mind to arrive at a conclusion first and to give reasons afterwards, will help us to open our eyes; so that we recognize our philosophic views and our political convictions are to a great extent determined by our emotional inclinations, and that the reasons which we give are not the reasons by which we arrive at our conclusions, but the explanations which we give for our conclusions. [frequently, he referred to these rationalizations as “secondary interpretations of customary actions”]

5. Cultural relativism Excerpt from Elvin Hatch Culture and Morality, pp. 38-9.

...Boas is especially important here in that he was largely responsible for developing cultural relativism in American anthropology.
    Both the controversy and the eventual victory of the Boasians should be seen from a wider perspective than that of the struggles of a single discipline. This perspective is the changing views about modern civilization and about the nature of the universe in general that were associated with the growing pessimism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A reaction was taking place against what Henry F. May calls “the main tenets of traditional American faith”, including the beliefs about the moral superiority of Western civilization and about the importance of good manners, taste, and so on. There was growing doubt “that right and wrong were the most important categories, that all good citizens knew one from the other, and that when a choice between them was pointed out the people would act.”
    The Boasian assault on evolutionism was part of this general intellectual movement, for the attack was directed not only toward the notion of progress, but also toward the traditional beliefs about our moral and cultural superiority and toward the use of our values as absolute standards of judgment. Early in the century Boas argued that anthropology had “rudely shattered some of our cherished illusions” (1908). He had already disputed the idea that races must be different in mental ability (1894): the blacks in Africa and elsewhere could not be assumed to be intellectually inferior to light-skinned peopIe. By early twentieth century he was challenging the superiority of modern civilization itself. He wrote of “the possibility of lines of progress which do not happen to be in accord with the dominant ideas of our own” (1908)--which is to say that there may be other criteria for measuring progress than the ones stressed by our own civilization. He argued that our vision is obscured by an emotional, subjective bias “which leads us to ascribe the highest value to that which is near and dear to us” (1904). He wrote:
          It is somewhat difficult for us to recognize that the value which we attribute to our own
        civilization is due to the fact that we participate in this civilization, and that it has been
        controlling all our actions since the time of our birth; but it is certainly conceivable that there
        may be other civilizations, based perhaps on different traditions and on a different equilibrium
        of emotion and reason, which are of no less value than ours, although it may be impossible for
        us to appreciate their values without having grown up under their influence. The general theory
        of valuation of human activities, as taught by anthropological research, teaches us a higher
        tolerance than the one which we now profess. (1901)
Boas’ name belongs on the list of intellectual revolutionaries along with William James, Charles A. Beard, and Thorstein Veblen.

6. Lowie on Incoherence & the Lack of Functional/Evolutionary Laws
Final passages from Robert Lowie 1920 Primitive Culture.

...History records a transfer of power from one mystically sanctified source of authority to another, from a church to a book, from a book to a state, or to an intangible public opinion. But with unfailing tenacity every society from the simplest to the most complex has adhered to the principle that the one unpardonable sin consists in setting up one’s private judgment against the recognized social authority, in perpetrating an infraction of tribal taboos. When, therefore, Sir Henry Maine points out the growing importance of contractual instead of status relations in modern society, his argument is of formal rather than of substantial significance for the history of individual freedom. In the disposal of his property an Ewe is not so free as an American, in other regards he is freer; and both are hedged about by a set of conventions whose breach may subject them to indignity, ostracism, and death. Neither morphologically nor dynamically can social life be said to have progressed from a stage of savagery to a stage of enlightenment.
The belief in social progress was a natural accompaniment of the belief in historical laws, especially when tinged with the evolutionary optimism of the ‘seventies of the nineteenth century. If inherent necessity urges all societies along a fixed path, metaphysicians may still dispute whether the underlying force be divine or diabolic, but there can at least be no doubt as to which community is retarded and which accelerated in its movement toward the appointed goal. But no such necessity or design appears from the study of culture history. Cultures develop mainly through the borrowings due to chance contact. Our own civilization is even more largely than the rest a complex of borrowed traits. The singular order of events by which it has come into being provides no schedule for the itinerary of alien cultures. Hence the specious plea that a given people must pass through such or such a stage in our history before attaining this or that destination can no longer be sustained. The student... will recognize the historical and ethnologic absurdity of this solemn nonsense. In prescribing for other peoples a social programme we must always act on subjective grounds; but at least we can act unfettered by the pusillanimous fear of transgressing a mock-law of social evolution.
Nor are the facts of culture history without bearing on the adjustment of our own future. To that planless hodgepodge, that thing of shreds and patches called civilization, its historian can no longer yield superstitious reverence. He will realize better than others the obstacles to infusing design into the amorphous product; but in thought at least he will not grovel before it in fatalistic acquiescence but dream of a rational scheme to supplant the chaotic jumble.

7. Old Habits Die Hard Excerpt from Kenneth E. Bock 1956 The Acceptance of Histories, pp. 98-9.

    As Boasians frequently argued, old habits die hard, even for Boasians themselves.
    Alexander Goldenweiser stands out among anthropologists as perhaps the most perspicacious critic of cultural evolutionism and the comparative method. He recognized clearly that the comparative method could be applied only after evolutionism had been accepted as a postulate and, consequently, that the method could be used only to illustrate and not to test the theory. He realized that evolutionists had to make the assumption that change was gradual and that this notion was derived from the biological analogy. He saw the mistake in identifying diffusion phenomena with the irregular, the accidental, and the disturbing in culture change. He pointed out that parallelism was an axiom necessary to the common use of comparative materials to illustrate evolution. And, what is most unusual in the critical literature of anthropology, he saw that concern with the problem of cultural origins was dictated by the classical belief that origins carried within them the potentialities of what was to follow and so could be examined in order to reveal an otherwise obscure process of development.
    It is disturbing to notice that many of these criticisms appear in Goldenweiser’s Early Civilizations, a work in which no chronologically “early” civilization is studied. Early civilization is depicted instead by data recently gathered on the Eskimo, Tlingit and Haida, Iroquois, Baganda, and Central Australian -to whom he refers as “primitive” peoples. A picture of primitive mentality is derived from an examination of Negroes, American Indians, and Australians, and Goldenweiser makes it quite clear that this is “the concrete early man of history and of civilization” that he studies and not some phantom creature. That he sees in contemporary primitives a parallel to an early phase of contemporary modern civilization is evident....
    Aware of the dangers of assuming parallel development and of arranging different cultures to form an evolutionary series, Goldenweiser refrains from placing his five primitive peoples in a series and does not claim that they show parallel trends. Yet he does assume that the “primitive” yielded by an examination of these peoples parallels an early stage in the development of another contemporary segment of the human race which he calls “modern.” There is a habit of thought here that disregards simple chronology. When Goldenweiser observes that a certain idea is present in recently observed Polynesian myth and then notes that “in more recent times” the idea was entertained by Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity, he is displaying his casual acceptance of a notion that begs the whole historical question and that lies at the root of the evolutionist procedures he so skilfully attacks.
    New departures in theory are always menaced by the unconscious retention of a framework that restricts them and limits the results achievable to an old pattern. back to list of readings