Anthropology and Modern Life

FOLKLORE

INTRODUCTION

The American Anthropological Association repudiates statements now appearing in the United States that Negroes are biologically and in innate mental ability inferior to whites, and reaffirms the fact that there is no scientifically established evidence to justify the exclusion of any race from the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. The basic principles of equality of opportunity and equality before the law are compatible with all that is known about human biology. All races possess the abilities needed to participate fully in the democratic way of life and in modern technological civilization.

—Passed at the Annual Meeting of the

Council of Fellows of the American

Anthropological Association,

November 17, 1961.

ON NOVEMBER 17, 1961, the Council of Fellows of the American Anthropological Association meeting at Philadelphia, the cradle of American democracy, passed this resolution, thus once more providing scientific support for those fighters for equality and brotherhood for whom democracy is a moral issue. At this moment of history when the specter of racism is once more walking abroad, it is especially fortunate and appropriate to have reissued in a popular edition the definitive statement on race and culture by the man who more than anyone else was responsible for providing the conceptual framework and scientific underpinnings for the anthropological position on this important contemporary problem. Franz Boas wrote Anthropology and Modern Life as a declaration of faith after more than thirty years of research in the field of race and culture. An earlier publication on the same theme was translated into German (Kultur und Rasse, Leipzig, 1914) and was eventually honored by a prominent place in the Nazi auto-da-fé.

When Boas first turned to anthropology in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ethnography consisted largely of unsystematic observations of primitives by untrained observers and travelers, while ethnology consisted mainly of speculations on the history of civilization, with little reference to observed facts. Both approaches to the science of man were equally unrelated to the problems of modern life. So long as savages were regarded as a different species or an inferior and undeveloped branch of the human race, little could be learned from them, and the study of their strange customs had a purely antiquarian and collector’s interest. Boas, however, early recognized the broader implications of anthropological studies. Writing in 1889 he said, "Investigations [of the different forms of family structure] show that emotional reactions which we feel as natural are in reality culturally determined. It is not easy for us to understand that the emotional relation between father and son should be different from the one to which we are accustomed, but knowledge of the life of people with a social organization different from ours brings about situations in which conflicts or mutual obligations arise of a character quite opposed to those we are accustomed to and that run counter to what we consider ‘natural’ emotional reactions to those to whom we are related by blood. The data of ethnology prove that not only our knowledge, but also our emotions are the result of the forms of our social life and of the history of the people to whom we belong. If we desire to understand the development of human culture we must try to free ourselves of these shackles. . . . We must lay aside many points of view that seem to us self-evident, because in early times they were not self-evident. It is impossible to determine a priori those parts of our mental life that are common to mankind as a whole and those due to the culture in which we live. A knowledge of the data of ethnology enables us to attain this insight. Therefore it enables us also to view our own civilization objectively."

One of the first controversies of the many that filled Boas’ turbulent life was over the arrangement of museum collections, Boas staunchly defending his geographical and tribal classification against upholders of the more traditional arrangements by types of artifacts. He felt that one of the functions of a museum was to educate and entertain and that ethnological collections should be presented so as to illustrate ways of life rather than scientific typologies. His principles won out in all American museums (except the United States National Museum) as well as in many European museums. This was one of the many ways in which Boas sought to use anthropology to free men’s minds of the yoke of traditional patterns of thought by confronting audiences with different and coherent styles of life.

Boas was educated in the tradition of liberal romanticism that produced Carl Schurz and the philosophical anarchists of the nineteenth century. He was the essential protestant; he valued autonomy above all things and respected the unique potentialities of each individual. He believed that man was a rational animal and could, with persistent effort, emancipate himself from superstition and irrationality and lead a sane and reasonable life in a good society—although he was fully aware that humanity had a long way to go to achieve this goal. This partly explains his unalterable opposition to Freud and psychoanalysis with its essentially tragic view of life and its acceptance of irrationality as an essential part of the human condition. During the last years of his life (he died during World War II) a deep depression overwhelmed him as he watched the rising tides of hatred and war. But although age and illness made him feel helpless, his faith in man never wavered. "If I were young I would do something," he said to a colleague who had remarked how difficult it must be for their students growing up in the midst of the Depression and under the threat of war. Always the activist!

For Boas, doing something always meant using his science in the cause of man. His object was the enlightenment of mankind through anthropology. He was a tireless lecturer, although he disliked public appearances and partial paralysis made speaking difficult for him. He was an indefatigable contributor to scientific journals and mass media, and a constant writer of letters to the editor. As a teacher his influence was inestimable. He established anthropology as an academic discipline in America. Alexander F. Chamberlain, his student at Clark University, won the first doctorate in anthropology to be granted by an American university, and for more than forty years almost every anthropologist in America came directly or indirectly under Boas’ influence. Among his students in the early days at Columbia were such distinguished anthropologists as Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Alexander Goldenweiser, Edward Sapir, Clark Wissler, Paul Radin, and Leslie Spier. During the twenties Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Melville J. Herskovits and Otto Klineberg were all Boas students, as well as a host of less well-known scholars who set up departments and conducted research in all parts of the world. As a teacher Boas was a stern taskmaster; he made no concessions to ignorance. He gave students no reading lists or other aids; he opened his course in Biometrics with the statement, I assume that you all know the calculus. If not, you will learn it. In his seminar he assigned books in Dutch or Portuguese; no student would dare to say to Boas, I don’t read Dutch. Somehow or other the student learned to cope. Boas rarely suggested subjects for dissertations; a student who had been studying anthropology for two years and had found no problem he wished to pursue was not worth bothering with. He would discuss general problems with students, but would not criticize or look at unfinished work. His criticisms were terse—You have entirely missed the point—and he almost never praised. One had to be tough, independent, and dedicated to survive. He was a formidable teacher and a formidable man. Yet, in spite of his apparent aloofness he was deeply concerned about his students, their lives and their careers, but generally in terms of what he thought was good for them. Although he valued autonomy, he was frequently high-handed. He arranged field trips and wangled jobs for students without consulting them and was deeply hurt if they refused to accept his arrangements. But he never wavered in his loyalty to students, however much he might disapprove of them. And his students, on their part, though some of them quarreled bitterly with him on theoretical and personal grounds, never lost their respect and loyalty. An esprit de corps united the group that shared the struggle to establish their science and communicate their ideas. It would be hard to duplicate today the ties that bound student to teacher and student to fellow sudent.

One of the areas in which Boas felt enlightenment was needed was in the problem of race. In the early paper already quoted he was pointing out the need to distinguish between those characteristics of a people which were biological and inherited and those which were acquired as part of that people’s culture. This problem continued to occupy him throughout his life; it provides the unifying theme of Anthropology and Modern Life. Whenever he was examining the distribution of physical types of man, or national characteristics, or crime, or the rates of growth and maturation of children, he endeavored in carefully designed researches to separate man’s culturally acquired characteristics from his innate endowment. Calling on history as his witness, he always insisted that the burden of proof was on those who would attribute differences to biological causes. Boas was trained in the natural sciences; what he carried over to his anthropological studies from his training in physics was not a specific method, for he realized early in his career that the methods of one discipline could not be applied to another and that the formulations of a social science must be of a different order from those of a laboratory science. He brought to anthropology rigorous standards of proof, a critical skepticism toward all generalizations, and the physicist’s unwillingness to accept any generalization or explanation as anything more than a useful hypothesis until it had been clearly demonstrated that no other explanation was possible. This aspect of Boas’ theoretic approach especially irked those of his colleagues who would have liked more facile generalization and who regarded Boas’ standards of proof as a methodological strait jacket.

In the field of physical anthropology he was a great innovator; he was interested only in the study of living people. The study of fossils and skeletal materials, which constituted a large part of the physical anthropology of the nineteenth century, did not interest him. He was dissatisfied with current definitions of race based on the selection of extreme forms as pure types, or the equally unsatisfactory definitions based on crude statistical averages. He substituted populations, localized in space and time, for those vague entities, races, as the units of study, thus foreshadowing contemporary trends in genetics. His observations on the instability of human types (Changes in the Bodily Form of the Descendants of Immigrants, 1911) struck a body blow to theories of the immutability of racial characteristics. His conclusions aroused storms of criticism but were later fully corroborated. His studies of the growth of children had far-reaching results; not only did he introduce the concept of physiological as distinct from chronological age, with its influence on pediatrics and education, but his studies of children in different socio-economic backgrounds and especially his observations on the retardation of children in orphanages were instrumental in altering child-care programs and in the adoption of the foster-home plan.

In his emphasis on family lines, rather than race, as the mechanism of inheritance, he was establishing the scientific basis of individualism. Equality of races did not mean equality of individuals. Each individual human being is unique, the product of his own particular heredity, shared only by an identical twin, and of his life experience, including his culture. In a truly democratic society each individual, regardless of color, class, or sex is entitled to equal participation in the rewards of his culture, and the fullest development of his unique potentialities. Boas made his declaration of human rights in the name of science.

When Boas first visited the Eskimo he was confronted with the paradox of the unity and variety of human cultures—plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Of the Eskimo he wrote: After a long and intimate intercourse with the Eskimo, it was with feelings of sorrow and regret that I parted from my Arctic friends. I had seen that they enjoyed life, and a hard life, as we do; that nature is also beautiful to them; that feelings of friendship also root in the Eskimo heart; that, although the character of their life is so rude as compared to civilized life, the Eskimo is a man as we are; that his feelings, his virtues and his shortcomings are based in human nature, like ours.¹

These two aspects of cultural anthropology were always present in his thinking and writing—the unity of man as a species, the universality of the basic pattern of his culture—the human biogram, as it came to be called—and human ingenuity in finding solutions to the problems of living in the various situations in which the accidents of time and history had placed him.

But Boas was no cultural relativist in the sense of thinking that there were no ethical absolutes. Eating one’s neighbor is not a desirable or acceptable practice merely because the Eskimos do it from need and the Papuans from religious convictions. Such practices serve a function within the particular cultural settings in which they are found. The anthropologist must bring to the study of these phenomena the same detachment with which the biologist observes the predatory habits of tigers—who are not so predatory as the common stereotype would make them. But because anthropologists are studying human beings, and because we are involved with mankind and, in a deep sense, are our brothers’ keepers, this detachment is hard to achieve without confusing moral sensibilities. We have not had to live with the daily prospect of starvation; we have not been taught to believe that the earth must be fertilized with human blood if it is to bear. We can afford to value each human life.

One of the popular misconceptions about Boas was that he was an anti-evolutionist. True, he did oppose the ethnocentric nineteenth-century version of cultural evolution—that mankind had evolved in a uniform series of stages from savagery to mid-Victorian England, and that all existing forms of culture were to be evaluated in terms of their similarity or dissimilarity to this most highly evolved culture. But he believed, as must all who look at the long record of man’s life on this planet, in cultural evolution. It was the method and the ethnocentric bias that he sought to correct. He believed not only in evolution, but in progress—specifically in two fields of human activity; in the growth of knowledge with its corollary of technology and man’s increased control of his environment, and in man’s growing control of his aggression which has enabled him to live at peace with ever larger groups of his fellows. Boas did not have available to him the great mass of material on primate behavior now extant which documents the devices in the animal world for maintaining peace within the group and between groups. He shared the nineteenth-century tooth and claw view of the animal world and visualized early man as living in a state of constant conflict. But he was right in recognizing the constant trend toward integrating larger and larger groups that was not only the result but the necessary condition of the advance in technology. In 1928 he saw that the inevitable next step was the integration of all mankind into one fellowship, since the interdependence of nations was making national rivalry untenable. Boas died in 1942, before the bomb fell on Hiroshima and the development of man’s capacity to destroy himself made integration into one social system within which warfare was interdicted the very basis of survival.

Anthropology and Modern Life and its predecessor, The Mind of Primitive Man, are unpretentious books; they are written without jargon or pedantry; descriptive and illustrative material is cut to a minimum. But they are among the books which have changed men’s minds. If some of the ideas developed in them now seem self-evident it is because they have become part of our thinking in the course of the more than thirty years since they were written. But old ways of thinking die hard and lingering deaths. It was necessary in 1961 for the American Anthropological Association to reaffirm its stand on racial equality. There are many who feel that only social systems that resemble ours are deserving of support; that the riches with which nature has blessed this country should be shared only with those who share our views. As we face the emerging nations of Africa and Asia we must take a long look backward at man’s history on this earth and a long look forward to the next step in his evolution.

Columbia University

New York

January 15, 1962

RUTH BUNZEL

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY?

ANTHROPOLOGY is often considered a collection of curious facts, telling about the peculiar appearance of exotic people and describing their strange customs and beliefs. It is looked upon as an entertaining diversion, apparently without any bearing upon the conduct of life of civilized communities.

This opinion is mistaken. More than that, I hope to demonstrate that a clear understanding of the principles of anthropology illuminates the social processes of our own times and may show us, if we are ready to listen to its teachings, what to do and what to avoid.

To prove my thesis I must explain briefly what anthropologists are trying to do.

It might appear that the domain of anthropology, of the science of man, is preoccupied by a whole array of sciences. The anthropologist who studies bodily form is confronted by the anatomist who has spent centuries in researches on the gross form and minute structure of the human body. The physiologist and the psychologist devote themselves to inquiries into the functioning of body and mind. Is there, then, any justification for the anthropologist to claim that he can add to our fund of knowledge?

There is a difference between the work of the anthropologist and that of the anatomist, physiologist, and psychologist. They deal primarily with the typical form and function of the human body and mind. Minor differences such as appear in any series of individuals are either disregarded or considered as peculiarities without particular significance for the type, although sometimes suggestive of its rise from lower forms. The interest centers always in the individual as a type, and in the significance of his appearance and functions from a morphological, physiological or psychological point of view.

To the anthropologist, on the contrary, the individual appears important only as a member of a racial or a social group. The distribution and range of differences between individuals, and the characteristics as determined by the group to which each individual belongs are the phenomena to be investigated. The distribution of anatomical features, of physiological functions and of mental reactions are the subject matter of anthropological studies.

It might be said that anthropology is not a single science, for the anthropologist presupposes a knowledge of individual anatomy, physiology and psychology, and applies this knowledge to groups. Every one of these sciences may be and is being studied from an anthropological point of view.

The group, not the individual, is always the primary concern of the anthropologist. We may investigate a racial or social group in regard to the distribution of size of body as measured by weight and stature. The individual is important only as a member of the group, for we are interested in the factors that determine the distribution of forms or functions in the group. The physiologist may study the effect of strenuous exercise upon the function of the heart. The anthropologist accepts these data and investigates a group in which the general conditions of life make for strenuous exercise. He is interested in their effect upon the distribution of form, function and behavior among the individuals composing the group or upon the group as a whole.

The individual develops and acts as a member of a racial or a social group. His bodily form is determined by his ancestry and by the conditions under which he lives. The functions of the body, while controlled by bodily build, depend upon external conditions. If the people live by choice or necessity on an exclusive meat