>From Culture of critique- MacDonald Chapter 2 2 The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences If . . . we were to treat Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa as uto-pia, not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate. (Robin Fox 1989, 3) Degler (1991, 188ff) notes that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the emer-gence of any new empirical data. He also notes that Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other biological perspec-tives in American social science since the 1930s (p. 200). The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to Darwinism has long been noticed (Lenz 1931, 674; see also comments of John Maynard Smith in Lewin [1992, 43]). In sociology, the advent of Jewish intellectuals in the pre–World War II period resulted in “a level of politicization unknown to sociology’s founding fathers. It is not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but also that the sense of America as a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of conflicting definitions” (Horowitz 1993, 75 Indeed, the ethnic conflict within American sociology parallels to a remarkable degree the ethnic conflict in American anthropology that is a theme of this chapter. Here the conflict was played out between leftist Jewish social scientists and an old-line, empirically oriented Protestant establishment that was eventually eclipsed: American sociology has struggled with the contrary claims of those afflicted with physics envy and researchers . . . more engaged in the dilemmas of society. In that struggle, midwestern Protestant mandarins of positivist science often came into conflict with East Coast Jews who in turn wrestled with their own Marxist commit-ments; great quantitative researchers from abroad, like Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia, sought to disrupt the complacency of native bean counters. (Sennett 1995, 43) This chapter will emphasize the ethnopolitical agenda of Franz Boas, but it is worth mentioning the work of Franco structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss because he appears to be similarly motivated, Lévi-Strauss interacted extensively with Boas and acknowledged his influence (Dosse 1997 I, 15, 16). In turn, Lévi-Strauss was very influential in France, Dosse (1997 I, xxi) describing him as “the com-mon father” of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. that he was “the very picture of a Jewish intellectual,” Lévi-Strauss stated, [C]ertain mental attitudes are perhaps more common among Jews than elsewhere. . . . Attitudes that come from the profound feeling of belonging to a national community, all the while knowing that in the midst of this community there are people—fewer and fewer of them I admit—who reject you. One keeps one’s sensitivity attuned, accompanied by the irrational feeling that in all circumstances one has to do a bit more than other people to disarm potential critics. (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon 1991, 155–156) Like many intellectuals discussed here, Lévi-Strauss’s writings were aimed at enshrining cultural differences and subverting the universalism of the West, a position that validates the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group. Like Boas, Lévi-Strauss rejected biological and evolution-ary theories. He theorized that cultures, like languages, were arbitrary collec-tions of symbols with no natural relationships to their referents. Lévi-Strauss rejected Western modernization theory in favor of the idea that there were no superior societies. The role of the anthropologist was to be a “natural subver-sive or convinced opponent of traditional usage” (in Cuddihy 1974, 155) in Western societies, while respecting and even romanticizing the virtues of non-Western societies (see Dosse 1997 II, 30). Western universalism and ideas of human rights were viewed as masks for ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide: Levi-Strauss’s most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. . . . [H]is elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be Europeans. . . . [H]e evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. . . . [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left . . . that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed alle-giance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference. (Lilla 1998, 37) Degler (1991, 61) emphasizes the role of Franz Boas in the anti-Darwinian transformation of American social science: “Boas’ influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” Boas engaged in a “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture” (p. 61). “Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science” (p. 71). 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 collect-ing evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological outlook—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. (Degler 1991, 82–83) As Frank (1997, 731) points out, “The preponderance of Jewish intellectu-als 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 identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate. Boas was reared in a “Jewish-liberal” family in which the revolutionary ideals of 1848 remained influential. He developed a “left-liberal posture which . . . is at once scientific and political” (Stocking 1968, 149). Boas married within his ethnic group (Frank 1997, 733) and was intensely con-cerned with anti-Semitism from an early period in his life (White 1966, 16). Alfred Kroeber (1943, 8) recounted a story “which [Boas] is said to have revealed confidentially but which cannot be vouched for, . . . that on hearing an anti-Semitic insult in a public cafe, he threw the speaker out of doors, and was challenged. Next morning his adversary offered to apologize; but Boas insisted that the duel be gone through with. Apocryphal or not, the tale absolutely fits the character of the man as we know him in America.” In a comment that says much about Boas’s Jewish identification as well as his view of gentiles, Boas stated in response to a question regarding how he could have professional dealings with anti-Semites such as Charles Davenport, “If we Jews had to choose to work only with Gentiles certified to be a hundred percent free of anti-Semitism, who could we ever really work with?” (in Sorin 1997, 632n9). When Margaret Mead wanted to persuade Boas to let her pursue her research in the South Sea islands, “She hit upon a sure way of getting him to change his mind. ‘I knew there was one thing that mattered more to Boas than the direction taken by anthropological research. This was that he should behave like a liberal, democratic, modern man, not like a Prussian autocrat.’ The ploy worked because she had indeed uncovered the heart of his personal values” (Degler 1991, 73). I conclude that Boas had a strong Jewish identification and that he was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism. On the basis of the following, it is reasonable to suppose that his concern with anti-Semitism was a major influence in the development of American anthropology. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ethnic conflict played a major role in the development of American anthropology. Boas’s views conflicted with the then prevalent idea that cultures had evolved in a series of developmental stages labeled savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The stages were associated with racial differences, and modern European culture (and most especially, I suppose, the hated Prussian aristocracy) was at the highest level of this gradation. Wolf (1990, 168) describes the attack of the Boasians as calling into question “the moral and political monopoly of a elite which had justified its rule with the claim that their superior virtue was the outcome of the evolutionary process.” Boas’s theories were also meant to counter the racialist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and American eugenicists like Madison Grant, whose book, The Passing of the Great Race (1921, 17), was highly critical of Boas’s research on environmental influences on skull size. The result was that “in message and purpose, [Boas’s anthropology] was an explicitly antiracist science” (Frank 1997, 741). An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution, such as those implying developmental se-quences, by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half century of its domi-nance of the profession (Stocking 1968, 210). Because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology may thus be characterized more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture (White 1966, 15). Boas also opposed research on human genetics—what Derek Freeman (1991, 198) terms his “obscurantist antipathy to genetics.” Boas and his students were intensely concerned with pushing an ideologi-cal agenda within the American anthropological profession (Degler 1991; Freeman 1991; Torrey 1992). Boas and his associates had a sense of group identity, a commitment to a common viewpoint, and an agenda to dominate the institutional structure of anthropology (Stocking 1968, 279–280). They were a compact group with a clear intellectual and political agenda rather than individualist seekers of disinterested truth. The defeat of the Darwinians “had not happened without considerable exhortation of ‘every mother’s son’ standing for the ‘Right.’ Nor had it been accomplished without some rather strong pressure applied both to staunch friends and to the ‘weaker breth-ren ’—often by the sheer force of Boas’s personality” (Stocking 1968, 286). By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Associa-tion and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board (Stocking 1968, 285). In 1919 Boas could state that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia (in Stocking 1968, 296). By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, . His protégé Melville Herskovits (1953, 23) noted that the four decades of the tenure of [Boas’s] professorship at Columbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to develop students who eventually made up the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists, and who came to man and direct most of the major departments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they trained the students who . . . have continued the tradition in which their teachers were trained. According to Leslie White (1966, 26), Boas’s most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier. All of this “small, compact group of scholars . . . gathered about their leader” (White 1966, 26) were Jews with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict, and Mead. Frank (1997, 732) In contrast to the ideological and political basis of Boas’s motivation, Kroeber’s militant environmentalism and defense of the culture concept was “entirely theoretical and professional” (Degler 1991, 90). Neither his private nor his public writings reflect the attention to public policy questions regard-ing blacks or the general question of race in American life that are so con-spicuous in Boas’s professional correspondence and publications. Kroeber rejected race as an analytical category as forthrightly and thoroughly as Boas, but he reached that position primarily through theory rather than ideology. Kroeber argued that “our business is to promote anthropology rather than to wage battles on behalf of tolerance in other fields” (in Stocking 1968, 286). Ashley Montagu was another influential student of Boas (see Shipman 1994, 159ff). Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, was a highly visible crusader in the battle against the idea of racial differences in mental capacities. He was also highly conscious of being Jewish, stating on one occasion that “if you are brought up a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic. . . . I think it is a good working hypothesis” (in Shipman, 1994, 166). Montagu asserted that race is a socially constructed myth. Hu-mans are innately cooperative (but not innately aggressive) and there is a universal brotherhood among humans—a highly problematic idea for many in the wake of World War II. Mention also should be made of Otto Klineberg, a professor of psychology at Columbia. Klineberg was “tireless” and “ingen-ious” in his arguments against the reality of racial differences. He came under the influence of Boas at Columbia and dedicated his 1935 book Race Differ-ences to him. Klineberg “made it his business to do for psychology what his friend and colleague at Columbia [Boas] had done for anthropology: to rid his discipline of racial explanations for human social differences” (Degler 1991, 179). It is interesting in this regard that the members of the Boasian school who achieved the greatest public renown were , Benedict and Mead. Boas devised Margaret Mead’s classic study on adolescence in Samoa with an eye to its usefulness in the nature-nurture debate raging at the time (Free-man 1983, 60–61, 75). The result of this research was Coming of Age in Samoa—a book that revolutionized American anthropology in the direction of radical environmentalism. Its success stemmed ultimately from its promo-tion by Boas’s students in departments of anthropology at prominent Ameri-can universities (Freeman 1991). This work and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture were also widely influential among other social scientists, psychia-trists, and the public at large, so that “by the middle of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace for educated Americans to refer to human differences in cultural terms, and to say that ‘modern science has shown that all human races are equal’ ” (Stocking 1968, 306). Boas rarely cited works of people outside his group except to disparage them, whereas, as with Mead’s and Benedict’s work, he strenuously promoted and cited the work of people within the ingroup. The Boasian school of anthropology thus came to resemble in a microcosm key features of Judaism as a highly collectivist group evolutionary strategy: a high level of ingroup identification, exclusionary policies, and cohesiveness in pursuit of common interests. Boasian anthropology, was highly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent. As in the case of Freud (see Ch. 4), Boas was a patriar-chal father figure, strongly supporting those who agreed with him and ex-cluding those who did not: Alfred Kroeber regarded Boas as “a true patriarch” who “functioned as a powerful father figure, cherishing and supporting those with whom he identified in the degree that he felt they were genuinely identifying with him, but, as regards others, aloof and probably fundamentally indifferent, coldly hostile if the occasion demanded it” (in Stocking 1968, 305–306). “Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charismatic teacher and master, ‘literally worshipped’ by disciples whose ‘permanent loyalty’ has been ‘effectively established’ ” (White 1966, 25–26). As in the case of Freud, in the eyes of his disciples virtually everything Boas did was of monumental importance and justified placing him among the intellectual giants of all time. Like Freud, Boas did not tolerate theoretical or ideological differences with his students. Individuals who disagreed with the leader or had personality clashes with him, such as Clark Wissler and Ralph Linton, were simply excluded from the movement. White (1966, 26–27) represents the exclusion of Wissler and Linton as having ethnic overtones. Both were gentiles. White (1966, 26–27) also suggests that George A. Dor-sey’s status as a gentile was relevant to his exclusion from the Boas group despite Dorsey’s intensive efforts to be a member. Kroeber (1956, 26) de-scribes how George A. Dorsey, “an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed.” As an aspect of this authoritarianism, Boas was instrumental in completely suppressing evolutionary theory in anthropology (Freeman 1990, 197). Boas was the quintessential skeptic and an ardent defender of methodo-logical rigor when it came to theories of cultural evolution and genetic influ-ences on individual differences, yet “the burden of proof rested lightly upon Boas’s own shoulders” (White 1966, 12). Although Boas (like Freud; see Ch. 4) made his conjectures in a very dogmatic manner, his “historical recon-structions are inferences, guesses, and unsupported assertions [ranging] from the possible to the preposterous. Almost none is verifiable” (White 1966, 13). An unrelenting foe of generalization and theory construction, Boas neverthe-less completely accepted the “absolute generalization at which [Margaret] Mead had arrived after probing for a few months into adolescent behavior on Samoa,” even though Mead’s results were contrary to previous research in the area (Freeman 1983, 291). Moreover, Boas uncritically allowed Ruth Benedict to distort his own data on the Kwakiutl (see Torrey 1992, 83). The entire enterprise may thus be characterized as a highly authoritarian political movement centered around a charismatic leader. The results were extraordinarily successful: “The profession as a whole was united within a single national organization of academically oriented anthropologists. By and large, they shared a common understanding of the fundamental significance of the historically conditioned variety of human cultures in the determination of human behavior” (Stocking 1968, 296). Research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists and racial theo-rists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport. By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of the cultural determination of human behavior had a strong influence on social scientists generally (Stocking 1968, 300). The followers of Boas also eventually became some of the most influen-tial academic supporters of psychoanalysis (Harris 1968, 431). Marvin Harris (1968, 431) notes that psychoanalysis was adopted by the Boasian school because of its utility as a critique of Euro-American culture, and, indeed, as we shall see in later chapters, psychoanalysis is an ideal vehicle of cultural critique. In the hands of the Boasian school, psychoanalysis was completely stripped of its evolutionary associations and there was a much greater ac-commodation to the importance of cultural variables (Harris 1968, 433). Cultural critique was also an important aspect of the Boasian school. Stocking (1989, 215–216) shows that several prominent Boasians, including Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir, were involved in the cultural criticism of the 1920s which centered around the perception of American culture as overly homogeneous, hypocritical, and emotionally and esthetically repressive (especially with regard to sexuality). Central to this program was creating ethnographies of idyllic cultures that were free of the negatively perceived traits that were attributed to Western culture. Among these Boasians, cultural criticism crystallized as an ideology of “romantic primitivism” in which certain non-Western cultures epitomized the approved characteristics Western societies should emulate. Cultural criticism was a central feature of the two most prominent Boasian ethnographies, Coming of Age in Samoa and Patterns of Culture. These works are not only erroneous but systematically misrepresent key issues related to evolutionary perspectives on human behavior. For example, Benedict’s Zuni were described as being free of war, homicide, and concern with accumulation of wealth. Children were not disciplined. Sex was casual, with little concern for virginity, sexual possessiveness, or paternity confi-dence. Contemporary Western societies are, of course, the opposite of these idyllic paradises, and Benedict suggests that we should study such cultures in order “to pass judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization” (Benedict 1934, 249). Mead’s similar portrayal of the Samoans ignored her own evidence contrary to her thesis (Orans 1996, 155). Negatively perceived behaviors of Mead’s Samoans, such as rape and concern for virginity, were attributed to Western influence (Stocking 1989, 245). Both of these ethnographic accounts have been subjected to devastating criticisms. The picture of these societies that has emerged is far more com-patible with evolutionary expectations than the societies depicted by Benedict and Mead (see Caton 1990; Freeman 1983; Orans 1996; Stocking 1989). In the controversy surrounding Mead’s work, some defenders of Mead have pointed to possible negative political implications of the demythologization of her work (see, e.g., the summary in Caton 1990, 226–227). The highly politicized context of the questions raised by this research thus continues unabated. Indeed, one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfare in 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boa-sians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples con-flicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual dis-course. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primi-tive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174). <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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