Fade the Butcher
03-08-2006, 02:42 AM
I recovered some of my old research on the decline of 'race' within American physical anthropology. It belongs here in my archive.
More evidence will be provided here that the decline of the 'concept of race' within American Anthropology stems from ideological and political motives.
"The story I tell in these pages is how Americans like me, that is, students of human nature - social scientists - made the momentous shift from believing that biology explained some human actions to seeing culture or human experience - history, if you will -as the primary if not the sole source of differential behaviour of human beings. What kinds of evidence and argument were used to bring that shift in outlook, who made them, and why, are among the questions I seek to answer in the first part of the book. More is involved, of course, than identifying and explicating the crucial ideas or even the advocates of those ideas. As in any study of the acceptance of a new paradigm or way of thinking, the crucial historical question is why did others accept and then being to work within the new dispensation that some innovative leaders were propounding? Why did so many repudiate the traditional in favour of the novel?
That part of the story was not easy to find answers for. As all historians know, "why" questions on the grand scale are the most fundamental, but also the most difficult to document fully. I have made some suggestions and offer some supporting evidence, but much of the story, I fear, remains recalcitrantly undocumented; too much of it remains in the heads of the dead and the living alike. What the available evidence does seem to show is that ideology or philosophical belief that the world could be a freer and more just place played a large part in the shift from biology to culture. Science, or at least certain scientific principles or innovative scholarship also played a role in the transformation, but only a limited one. The main impetus came from the wish to establish a social order in which innate and immutable forces of biology played no role in accounting for the behaviour of social groups. Individuals certainly differed in ability and achievement, but those differences derived from their individual inheritances, not from the biology of the social group to which they may have belonged. To the proponents of culture the goal was the elimination of nativity, race, and sex, and any other biologically based characteristic that might serve as an obstacle to an individual's self-realization.
That an ideological purpose should thus shape the answers to what might otherwise seem to be a scientific question is not a novel idea. Scientists, social and natural, are human beings and for that reason alone, if no other, their investigations have been known to be initiated, even directed by unspoken values and hopes. Those scholars who have exposed and criticized the past misuse of biological ideas in social science have quite properly called attention to the large part ideology played in fostering those uses of biology. But much less widely acknowledged is the view that ideology also underpinned the repudiation of biology in social science and encourages the present widespread acceptance of culture as the alternative explanation fro the behaviour of human beings."
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,1991), pp.xii-xiii
This is damning. More on Boas' circular reasoning.
"In sum, Boas came to the United States with an outlook that emphasized equality of opportunity, freedom of inquiry, and openness toward people who were different and socially excluded. Racial explanations, as far was he was concerned, only closed off opportunity and acceptance. Many scholars might see people of different appearance as different in mind also. But, as Boas wrote in 1894, he was still waiting for the proof. In short, Boas approached the question of race with a defined ideological position that shaped his answer."
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,1991), p.74
More on Boas and his pseudoscience:
"Boas did not arrive at the position from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial question . . .There is no doubt that he had a deep interest in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological framework - racism - which he considered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society. . . .there is a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public."
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,1991), pp.82-83
Degler also notes in his study of the decline of Darwinism in American anthropology was caused not by any new empirical data, but by an ideological shift, a shift in which Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental (p.200). Derek Freeman also notes (Current Anthropology 32:322-330) that Boas was opposed to genetic research which he describes as Boas's "obscurantist antipathy to genetics." More on Boas' politicization of anthropology here:
"Stocking (1992a) argues that Boas's career linked science and politics in support of liberal-democratic ideals rooted in the anthropologist's identity and experiences as a German of Jewish descent. Quoting Boas, Stocking writes:
"Boas was born in 1858, a decade after the liberal revolution and thirteen years before the emancipation of German Jewry was finally formalized in the constitution of the German Empire in 1871. His family were assimilating Jews who had broken "the shackles of dogma" and embraced the "ideals of the revolution of 1848." In Boas' own version of those ideals, education and equality of opportunity, political and intellectual liberty, the rejection of dogma and the search for scientific truth, the identification with all humanity and devotion to its progress were all a single part of a left-liberal posture similar to that of his anthropological mentor Rudolf Virchow. [1992a:94-95]"
Gelya Frank, 'Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology', American Anthropologist 99(4): p. 731-745
Geyla Frank also discusses the Judaification of anthropology in American Anthropolgist, going into some detail:
"There has always been a lively, if sometimes hushed, in-house discourse about American anthropology's Jewish origins and their meaning. The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline. Jewish histories foreground the roles and deeds of Jews, actually a very small minority: less than 3 percent of the world and of this nation's population (Schmelz and Della Pergola 1995). From that vantage, the development of American anthropology appears part of Jewish history. This essay brings together strands of various discourses on Jews in anthropology for a new generation of American anthropologists, especially ones concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism.
The public silence or omission concerning anthropology's Jews is due mainly to the tone of liberal humanism and cosmopolitanism set by founder Franz Boas (1858-1942), himself a Jewish German immigrant, who in 1896 established the nation's first department of anthropology at Columbia University. There has also been a whitewashing of Jewish ethnicity, reflecting fears of anti-Semitic reactions that could discredit the discipline of anthropology and individual anthropologists, either because Jews were considered dangerous due to their presumed racial difference or because they were associated with radical causes. Any remaining silence should probably be chalked up to indifference."
Gelya Frank, 'Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology', American Anthropologist 99(4): p. 731-745
Is Boasian anthropology Jewish?
"Sandra Harding's multiculturalist question (1994) may also be applied here: Is anthropology in some sense a Jewish science? My phrasing is meant to be provocative, aiming both to recall and to subvert the basis for such modern historical phenomena as Freud's fear that psychoanalysis would be rejected if associated exclusively with its Jewish founders (Cuddihy 1974), "scurrilous attacks on Einstein's 'Jewish theory' of relativity in the name of German physics" during the Third Reich (Peukert 1987[1982]:94), the burning of Boas's works by the Nazis (Pathe 1989). The question is meant to underscore the fact that Boas, like other modern European Jewish intellectuals, lived in a Jewish condition. Therefore my answer is yes, but a qualified yes."
Gelya Frank, 'Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology', American Anthropologist 99(4): p. 731-745
More evidence will be provided here that the decline of the 'concept of race' within American Anthropology stems from ideological and political motives.
"The story I tell in these pages is how Americans like me, that is, students of human nature - social scientists - made the momentous shift from believing that biology explained some human actions to seeing culture or human experience - history, if you will -as the primary if not the sole source of differential behaviour of human beings. What kinds of evidence and argument were used to bring that shift in outlook, who made them, and why, are among the questions I seek to answer in the first part of the book. More is involved, of course, than identifying and explicating the crucial ideas or even the advocates of those ideas. As in any study of the acceptance of a new paradigm or way of thinking, the crucial historical question is why did others accept and then being to work within the new dispensation that some innovative leaders were propounding? Why did so many repudiate the traditional in favour of the novel?
That part of the story was not easy to find answers for. As all historians know, "why" questions on the grand scale are the most fundamental, but also the most difficult to document fully. I have made some suggestions and offer some supporting evidence, but much of the story, I fear, remains recalcitrantly undocumented; too much of it remains in the heads of the dead and the living alike. What the available evidence does seem to show is that ideology or philosophical belief that the world could be a freer and more just place played a large part in the shift from biology to culture. Science, or at least certain scientific principles or innovative scholarship also played a role in the transformation, but only a limited one. The main impetus came from the wish to establish a social order in which innate and immutable forces of biology played no role in accounting for the behaviour of social groups. Individuals certainly differed in ability and achievement, but those differences derived from their individual inheritances, not from the biology of the social group to which they may have belonged. To the proponents of culture the goal was the elimination of nativity, race, and sex, and any other biologically based characteristic that might serve as an obstacle to an individual's self-realization.
That an ideological purpose should thus shape the answers to what might otherwise seem to be a scientific question is not a novel idea. Scientists, social and natural, are human beings and for that reason alone, if no other, their investigations have been known to be initiated, even directed by unspoken values and hopes. Those scholars who have exposed and criticized the past misuse of biological ideas in social science have quite properly called attention to the large part ideology played in fostering those uses of biology. But much less widely acknowledged is the view that ideology also underpinned the repudiation of biology in social science and encourages the present widespread acceptance of culture as the alternative explanation fro the behaviour of human beings."
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,1991), pp.xii-xiii
This is damning. More on Boas' circular reasoning.
"In sum, Boas came to the United States with an outlook that emphasized equality of opportunity, freedom of inquiry, and openness toward people who were different and socially excluded. Racial explanations, as far was he was concerned, only closed off opportunity and acceptance. Many scholars might see people of different appearance as different in mind also. But, as Boas wrote in 1894, he was still waiting for the proof. In short, Boas approached the question of race with a defined ideological position that shaped his answer."
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,1991), p.74
More on Boas and his pseudoscience:
"Boas did not arrive at the position from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial question . . .There is no doubt that he had a deep interest in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological framework - racism - which he considered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society. . . .there is a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public."
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,1991), pp.82-83
Degler also notes in his study of the decline of Darwinism in American anthropology was caused not by any new empirical data, but by an ideological shift, a shift in which Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental (p.200). Derek Freeman also notes (Current Anthropology 32:322-330) that Boas was opposed to genetic research which he describes as Boas's "obscurantist antipathy to genetics." More on Boas' politicization of anthropology here:
"Stocking (1992a) argues that Boas's career linked science and politics in support of liberal-democratic ideals rooted in the anthropologist's identity and experiences as a German of Jewish descent. Quoting Boas, Stocking writes:
"Boas was born in 1858, a decade after the liberal revolution and thirteen years before the emancipation of German Jewry was finally formalized in the constitution of the German Empire in 1871. His family were assimilating Jews who had broken "the shackles of dogma" and embraced the "ideals of the revolution of 1848." In Boas' own version of those ideals, education and equality of opportunity, political and intellectual liberty, the rejection of dogma and the search for scientific truth, the identification with all humanity and devotion to its progress were all a single part of a left-liberal posture similar to that of his anthropological mentor Rudolf Virchow. [1992a:94-95]"
Gelya Frank, 'Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology', American Anthropologist 99(4): p. 731-745
Geyla Frank also discusses the Judaification of anthropology in American Anthropolgist, going into some detail:
"There has always been a lively, if sometimes hushed, in-house discourse about American anthropology's Jewish origins and their meaning. The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline. Jewish histories foreground the roles and deeds of Jews, actually a very small minority: less than 3 percent of the world and of this nation's population (Schmelz and Della Pergola 1995). From that vantage, the development of American anthropology appears part of Jewish history. This essay brings together strands of various discourses on Jews in anthropology for a new generation of American anthropologists, especially ones concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism.
The public silence or omission concerning anthropology's Jews is due mainly to the tone of liberal humanism and cosmopolitanism set by founder Franz Boas (1858-1942), himself a Jewish German immigrant, who in 1896 established the nation's first department of anthropology at Columbia University. There has also been a whitewashing of Jewish ethnicity, reflecting fears of anti-Semitic reactions that could discredit the discipline of anthropology and individual anthropologists, either because Jews were considered dangerous due to their presumed racial difference or because they were associated with radical causes. Any remaining silence should probably be chalked up to indifference."
Gelya Frank, 'Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology', American Anthropologist 99(4): p. 731-745
Is Boasian anthropology Jewish?
"Sandra Harding's multiculturalist question (1994) may also be applied here: Is anthropology in some sense a Jewish science? My phrasing is meant to be provocative, aiming both to recall and to subvert the basis for such modern historical phenomena as Freud's fear that psychoanalysis would be rejected if associated exclusively with its Jewish founders (Cuddihy 1974), "scurrilous attacks on Einstein's 'Jewish theory' of relativity in the name of German physics" during the Third Reich (Peukert 1987[1982]:94), the burning of Boas's works by the Nazis (Pathe 1989). The question is meant to underscore the fact that Boas, like other modern European Jewish intellectuals, lived in a Jewish condition. Therefore my answer is yes, but a qualified yes."
Gelya Frank, 'Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology', American Anthropologist 99(4): p. 731-745