easily find affinity with the academic advances taking place on Columbia’s campus.26 Boas began teaching at Columbia in 1896 as a lecturer in physical anthropology, and was promoted to professor in 1899. The position became permanent in 1901. He would usher in a sea change in the field from his perch at Columbia, transforming anthropology from a discipline that constructed and affirmed racist constructs to one that bolstered egalitarian notions, anti-racist activism and legislation, and integrationist social policies.27 The American school of anthropology, under Boas’s leadership, favored meticulous descriptions of cultures that represented the circulation of cultural traits among bordering groups through the exhaustive comparison of evidence from “material culture, ceremonial, social organization, recorded history, language, mythology, and folklore” (Deacon 149). In order to understand any culture, Boas argued, it had to be situated within its historical and geographic context, and its particular traditions had to be taken into consideration. This approach to understanding culture, he argued, challenged the idea that any culture possessed a higher or lower value than another.
Boas, born in Minden, Germany in 1858, was educated at the Universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, where he was trained in conducting empiricist and positivist research, methods that influenced his future scholarship.28 He retained throughout his career a commitment to empirical research. Boas rarely proposed grand theories and he rejected the notion that the social sciences should be used to engineer social policies or relations. Nonetheless, his progressive views on race and immigration were well known and his theories were enthusiastically taken up and appropriated by racial vindicationists29 like the New Negro intellectuals. Most likely, Boas’s radical racial politics arose from his personal struggles with anti-Semitism. Although born into middle-class privilege, as a Jew he suffered from political persecution, which caused him to migrate to the United States in 1886.30 Once in the States, Boas continued to experience anti-Semitic discrimination. For example after serving as assistant chief to Frederick Ward Putnam at the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, despite his impressive credentials, he had difficulty securing a permanent position in an American university until his appointment at Columbia.
From that point on he would begin to teach and extend his influence over an impressive range of individuals, many of whom gained stellar national reputations, including Alexander Goldenweiser, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Particularly during World War I, when the numbers of male graduate students were depleted by the demands of the war, Boas took an active role in educating and mentoring women in anthropology. His support of women’s participation in the field went against the much more common social opposition to women’s professional goals. By 1912, when he published The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas had achieved his highest standing within the profession.
In addition to teaching at Columbia, Boas also assumed a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), again in 1896; in 1901 he was promoted to curator. During this period, anthropology was primarily a museum-based profession. At the AMNH Boas undertook major research expeditions, including the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. He struggled to exhibit the material procured during these expeditions at the museum in a way that challenged ideas of racial inferiority, but he met resistance from the evolutionists who dominated the field. Baker describes the debates, ostensibly over exhibition styles, but really over the merits of scientific racism, that were conducted through letters to the editor of Science that Boas exchanged with Otis T. Mason, president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, and John Wesley Powell, director of the Bureau of American Ethnology. In one letter Boas argued, “It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes. I believe that this object can be accomplished only by the tribal arrangement of collections” (Baker, From Savage to Negro 104).
Boas mounted challenges to evolutionary anthropology and other forms of scientific racism like eugenics in a variety of venues, such as essays, editorials, and speeches. Giving his first public address in 1894 at the American Association of Anthropological Societies, he delineated the racism that governed anthropological discourse. He laid out the fundamental principles of the environmentalists by warning against evolutionary theories that tended to view certain traits as expressions of racial character rather than as an effect of social surroundings.31 Although he deferred to physical anthropologists who maintained that their findings proved racial inferiority, Boas contended that there was an overlap of supposedly racial traits among various groups. He concluded:
the fundamental difficulty of collecting satisfactory observations lies in the fact that no large groups of primitive man are brought nowadays into conditions of real equality with whites. The gap between our society and theirs always remains open and for this reason their mind cannot be expected to work in the same manner as ours. The same phenomenon which led us to the conclusion that primitive races of our times are not given an opportunity to develop their abilities prevents us from judging their innate faculty. (234)
Boas used arguments like this to contest methods of research that emphasized the comparison of cultures while refusing to study them holistically, and in relation to the total culture.
Boas viewed anthropological investigation, founded on empirical research and taking into consideration historical and social contexts, as a tool for proving the equal potential of the races. This approach, he argued, would demonstrate that societies, regardless of their racial makeup, all revealed cultural and artistic accomplishments. In an address delivered at the Second National Negro Conference in May 1910 called “The Real Race Problem,” Boas took up the fallacy of presumptions of racial inferiority, focused on the inevitable mingling of Black and White races in American society, and introduced some preliminary thoughts on solving the race problem.32 He began by acknowledging the “fact” of racial difference, announcing that “the anthropologist recognizes that the Negro and the white represent the two most divergent types of mankind” (22). Boas pointed to differences in color, hair, and facial features as easily recognizable. Yet despite these biological differences, he disputed the rationale for assigning superiority or inferiority to either race. “When we consider inferiority and superiority from a general biological point of view, it must be interpreted as meaning that one type is nearer to certain ancestral forms than another. In this sense, the anthropologist must say that in certain respects the Negro resembles the hypothetical ancestral forms of man more than does the European; while in other respects the European shows greater similarity to the supposed ancestral form …. On the whole, the morphological characteristics of the two races show rather a specialized development in different directions than a higher development in one race as compared with the other” (22). On the question of mental capacity, Boas again invoked a theory of diffusion arguing that differences in brain size and capacity between the two races “is exceedingly small” compared to the “range of variability” of brain size and form in either race (22).
Boas’s rejection of scientific racism was based on the strict application of anthropometrical statistics used to support his claims, or to refute the validity of others’ claims. But he also argued that any interpretation must take into consideration as well a “painstaking investigation of the social conditions with which the phenomenon is correlated” (22). Thus, an examination of the period of development of Black and White children must take into account the more favorable social situation of Whites. Boas concluded that between Whites and Blacks, “The existing differences are differences in kind, not in value” (23). In another essay, “The Negro and the Demands of Modern Life,” he cited similar statistics to argue that there is no proof that licentiousness, laziness, or lack of initiative are intrinsic characteristics of the race.33
Just as Boas argued that perceptions of African American inferiority were based on fallacious assumptions, so did he find that views of Africa frequently betrayed the biases of its commentators. Too often, he argued, Whites’ perception of Africa “is based altogether too much upon the condition of the uneducated descendant
