7 Introduction: Culture Against Race in the Early 20th Century

introduction to part IV: Culture against race in the early 20th century

In prior chapters, we have explored the invention of anthropology during the European Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment that followed, and its reinvention across the 19th century. We noted that during the long decade of the 1860s anthropological methods, issues, and theoretical frameworks coalesced into a recognizable pattern. By the end of the 19th century, anthropologists were working in museums and universities, endeavoring to bring the histories of all peoples everywhere into one grand narrative, and contributing to both sides of the critical issues of their era, informing debates on genocide, slavery, forced assimilation, and women’s rights. There were, as we discussed, serious ethical concerns surrounding 19th century anthropology, as well as methodological flaws and theoretical weaknesses.

In this chapter we will introduce a third era of reinvention: the early to middle 20th century. Our focus will be on the United States, Britain, and Germany (France also deserves discussion – hopefully in the next edition).

By the early 20th century a new generation of anthropologists were acutely aware of the limits of 19th century anthropology. They created new visions of anthropology that transcended the work of their predecessors. It’s important to note the plural: new visions, rather than a shared vision. As we discussed in the prior chapter, during the 19th century, the theories, methods, and political visions of anthropologists diverged dramatically. The contrasting methods are captured in the struggle between the polygenists and the monogenists. As new anthropologies emerged in the early 20th century, this debate continued in new forms. Polygenism was reborn as racial eugenics, terminating with Nazism and the Second World War. Monogenism was reworked with the arrival of a new concept: the concept of culture. The debate between polygenists and monogenists reemerged as a debate between racial thinking and cultural thinking.

In the early 20th century, race was assigned the heavy lifting of justifying political orders centered on segregation, deep social, political, and economic inequality and genocidal policies and actions. Culture was assigned the heavy lifting of defending human equality in the context of cultural plurality, a position that came to be known as cultural relativism.

In the United States, France, and Great Britain, new approaches to anthropology were developed that centered on the emerging principle of cultural relativism. In the United States, Franz Boas and his students built an anti-racist approach that they named cultural anthropology. In Great Britain, Bronislaw Malinowski developed social anthropology in a parallel direction, as did the students of Emile Durkheim in France. However, other developments moved in the opposite direction. In the United States, Britain, France, and elsewhere, the eugenics movement grew rapidly, offering a vision of unified science promising to eliminate social problems. This movement gathered the most traction in Germany, and with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, it produced the most tragic and devastating outcomes.

Although proponents of both perspectives could be found in all of the European colonial powers, as well as Japan and Russia, after 1933 racial eugenics was increasingly identified with Nazi Germany, and cultural relativism with the United States, Britain, and France. It is not the case, of course, that racism disappeared from the Allied powers, but for one brief shining moment, the promise of a world without racism seemed close at hand.

So far as anthropology and the social sciences were concerned, following the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, culture would emerge as the signature concept of 20th century anthropology, and the racial eugenics movement would be defeated.

It is important to stress that the victory of the concept of culture was not just a matter of realpolitik – it was not, that is, the necessary outcome of the fact that the United States, France, Britain, and Russia won the Second World War. The defense of culture started four decades before the war began. Intellectual victory required engagement in a fight running parallel to but separate from the battlefield struggles. The intellectual war was fought in universities and think tanks, in private letters, and in lecture halls. At its conclusion, cultural thinking became the fundamental framework for Western social science. As we will see in later chapters, that victory was incomplete, and cracks in the foundation of cultural thinking became apparent by the 1960s.

In this part of the book, we will examine the parallel rise of racial eugenics and cultural relativism, their collision, and the triumph of cultural thinking after the end of World War Two in 1945. Our discussion will be limited to three national traditions: cultural thinking will be represented by American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology, while Nazi Germany will represent racial eugenics. The situation was, of course, much more complicated than this. German anthropology, as we have seen, contributed much to cultural thinking and tolerance in the 19th century, at a time when American and British anthropology supported ethnic cleansing, segregation, and colonialism. But there was a great reversal in the aftermath of the First World War: Anglo-American polygenism, reinvigorated by eugenics, was embraced by growing numbers of anthropologists in Germany, while German critiques of race and celebrations of cultural diversity were adopted in American and British anthropology.

To say that British and American anthropology became anti-racist during this period, while German anthropology became racist, is both accurate and too simple. Importantly, while anthropologists did impact the larger society in the United States, Britain, and Germany, their influence was never decisive, and there were always other intellectuals representing other fields who had a similar or greater influence. Racism in the United States did not suddenly end, for example, when cultural anthropologists began attacking the idea on both scientific and ethical grounds. Nor did racism take hold in Germany in response to the work of Nazi anthropologists. Nazism had its own political dynamic and was broadly anti-intellectual.

Part IV is organized into four chapters.

Chapter 7 consists of this short introduction.

Chapter 8 introduces American cultural anthropology. Our account begins in 1896, when Franz Boas – the founder of cultural anthropology – began teaching at Columbia University in New York City. It concludes in 1952, when Julian Steward would ascend to the Chair at Columbia University, when evolutionary cultural materialism would transform American cultural anthropology. 1952 was also the year when Gene Welfish, a student of Boas who was teaching at Columbia, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for her anti-racist views. The world of American anthropology, of course, was much bigger than Columbia, but the university played a signal role in the initial emergence of cultural anthropology as a sub-field.

Chapter 9 introduces British social anthropology. We begin late, in 1922, the year when Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown composed their first major works. Our discussion concludes in 1954, when Ghana became the first African nation to win independence from the British Empire.

Chapter 10 introduces German racial anthropology, and, more precisely, Nazi racist anthropology. There was a difference. We begin in 1918, when Germany’s surrender at the close of World War One sends German anthropology down a special path or Sonderweg. Our discussion concludes in 1945, when Germany surrendered un-conditionally to the Allied forces. After 1945 German anthropology – after two centuries of notable contributions to anthropological theory – virtually disappeared as an intellectual force in anthropology.