1. AMERICAN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1896-1946

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, new developments transformed anthropology in the United States. The most important development was the emergence of cultural anthropology, a tradition that remains vibrant in the 21st century. What was cultural anthropology about? When and where did it emerge? Why does it matter? As with all things anthropological, there are multiple answers to these basic questions. In this chapter we will contrast cultural anthropology to 19th century unilinear evolutionism (or civilizational anthropology), consider its social foundations with respect to identity and ethics, and explore its core themes.

1.1 Culture and the End of 19th Century Civilizational Anthropology

Cultural anthropology emerged and matured in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. As its name implies, it centered on the concept of culture. As we have discussed in an earlier chapter, the roots of the concept of culture run very deep in Western thought, and grow out of ancient Greek and Roman thinking. The idea that culture was something added to nature – a product of human activity – was present in the ancient world. So was the identification of culture with groups of people or ethnos (in its most fundamental meaning, ethnos refers to a group of similar things, not just a group of similar people). But it was not until the emergence of cultural anthropology that the culture concept became an explicit foundation for anthropology. It is true that the English anthropologist Edward Bennett Tylor defined the concept of culture in 1871 at the close of the long decade of the 1860s (Tylor, 1871). Moreover, Tylor’s definition aligned in important ways with the perspective of cultural anthropology in the United States. Tylor insisted that culture was learned, a quality of groups rather than individuals, and uniquely human. Those three themes would persist across the 20th century. But there were numerous differences as well.

Most fundamentally, American cultural anthropology rejected the idea of universal Civilization and the doctrine of the unequal development of humanity that dominated 19th century anthropology. Cultural anthropologists instead stressed the relativity of different ways of life, and the equality of peoples and cultures. Specific features of cultures could be juxtaposed and compared to gain insights into the richness of human diversity, but they could not be ranked as higher or lower, or better or worse. Cultural anthropologists also stressed cultural particularity. Whereas Tylor viewed Culture as an attribute of Civilization, something singular and universal that you could have more or less of, but not differ in, American cultural anthropologists argued that culture only existed in plural. Culture comes only in cultures, much as language comes only in languages. There is no universal language, just thousands of mutually unintelligible languages, all equal as means of thought and expression.  In their emphasis on cultural relativism and particularism, American cultural anthropologists were heavily influenced by the German Romantic tradition. Thus their perspective was deeply at odds with Tylor and the generation of materialists who dominated anthropology during and after the long decade of the 19th century.

The big picture is this: as the 19th century ended, no practicing anthropologist anywhere in the world identified themselves as a cultural anthropologist. By 1930  – shortly before Robert Lowie published the first textbook capturing the new field in its title: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Lowie, 1934) – there were several dozen, and by 1940, when there were approximately 500 anthropologists employed in museums and universities in the United States (Cooper, 1947), two-thirds – or roughly 300 individuals – identified their profession as cultural anthropologists. The field continued to grow at a rapid pace after World War Two, and by 1970 there were several thousand cultural anthropologist, and textbooks and university courses introducing cultural anthropology became ubiquitous.

So what was cultural anthropology?

To answer that question we must first discuss Franz Boas and the Boasians, and consider the social foundations of cultural anthropology.

1.2 Franz Boas and the Boasians

Cultural anthropology was founded by Franz Boas (1858-1942). Throughout his long career, Boas firmly defended the proposal that we need not fear history repeating itself, because human history consists of complex, unique events that result from the interplay of so many unpredictable contingencies that replication is impossible.  Thus there can be no laws of culture, and cultural anthropology cannot be a generalizing science. The fact that cultural anthropology emerged in the United States is an accident of history that Boas would have appreciated.

Boas was born in Prussia, a Germanic state that dominated central Europe until German unification in 1871. Boas’s father was a merchant of Jewish heritage but secular orientation, who settled in the garrison town of Minden – which was located about as far to the west as one might be in the Prussian empire. The Boas family was very nearly the only Jewish family in Minden. In 1883-1884, Boas completed an adventurous journey to the Canadian Arctic, mapping the cultural geography of Baffin Land, and, along the way, revealed himself to be a talented ethnographer. His journey over, he made his way to New York City in pursuit of a love interest. He returned to Germany for a brief time, studying with eminent scholars, including the physical anthropologist Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902) and the ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), before returning to New York City in 1887 to marry. For the next decade he struggled to make a living doing anthropological work, mostly field research and museum work. He collected thousands of anthropomorphic measurements, hordes of artifacts, and recorded hundreds of pages of narratives with phonetic precision in the Native language. But this was not enough to live on. He was able to persist because he also received financial support from his father, and a prominent New York City medical doctor named Abraham Jacobi. Almost a decade later, in 1896, with another  financial boost from Jacobi – who agreed to pay half his salary – he was appointed lecturer at Columbia University.

Jacobi’s influence on Boas’s career is not without interest. Abraham Jacobi (1830-1919) had married Boas’s mother’s sister, and thus was his uncle by marriage. Jacobi emigrated to the United States two decades ahead of Boas, to escape fall-out from the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Germany. The 1848 revolutions had many aspects, including expanding Jewish emancipation (which included citizenship, removing barriers to education and entry into some professions, and ability to own land). The revolutionaries also sought to install democratic, electoral democracy in a Germany centered on the authoritarian Prussian monarchy. And it included as well efforts by nascent communist organizations to seize direct control and put the emerging German working class in charge. For his efforts, Jacobi was imprisoned for three years shortly after receiving his medical degree. On release, around 1860, he moved to New York City. In New York, he achieved prominence for his work developing pediatric medicine. Without Jacobi’s support, Boas could not have undertaken his arctic explorations, nor survived the decade prior to his appointment as lecturer at Columbia.

Thanks to Jacobi, Columbia University and the lower East Side became the epicenter of a revolution in American anthropology.

Because of the signal importance of Boas, early cultural anthropologists are commonly referred to as the Boasians. Without Boas, it is unlikely that cultural anthropology would have achieved importance in the United States. Indeed, had things worked out in ways consistent with 19th century precedents, early 20th century American anthropology would have centered on racial eugenics, and German anthropology would be associated with the rise of cultural anthropology, tolerance for differences, and cultural relativism. But as it happened, Boas brought a distinctive Germanic strain of liberal, cosmopolitan, romantic thinking to the United States around the same time that American racialism and eugenics reached Germany. As a result, today we associate 20th century German anthropology with Nazi racism, and American cultural anthropology with cosmopolitan tolerance and cultural relativism.

Like Boas, the majority of the first cohort of cultural anthropologists were either first generation immigrants, or the children of immigrants. Many of his students hailed from Germany, and many were of Jewish heritage, though all were secularists, and none embraced either Judaism or Zionism. They were drawn to anthropology after attending Boas’s lectures – first at at Columbia University, and later at Barnard College.  Boas had a powerful message: study humanity closely, with calm detachment and a firm focus on the facts, and you will realize that all societies alike mix the rational and the irrational, and that in the end our differences unite us.

Boas was a complex figure. He was profoundly influenced by the German Enlightenment, as well as the Counter-Enlightenment (Stocking, 1989, 1996). The latter led to cultural relativism, the former to confidence in the capacity of science to make the world a better place. He had an incredible work ethic, which, in the end, gave his work a piecemeal quality. He was one of a very small number of anthropologists who managed to publish across linguistics, physical anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology. He embodied four-field holism. He attempted to complete major projects spanning disparate disciplines, including folklore, art and aesthetics, anthropometry, statistics, historical linguistics, ethnography, and a little archaeology. As a result, much of his work remained preliminary and unfinished, but it was unified by a consistent ethical vision.  Boas was deeply opposed to racism and social prejudice of all kinds. And if anything united his students, it was sharing this ethical vision. As noted, many of his students were of Jewish heritage, and their immigration from Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine to the United States was driven by their parents desire to escape antisemitism and a darkening future.

1.3 From Columbia University to Barnard Teacher’s College: Boasian Anthropology and Gender

Had Boas not been appointed to the faculty of Columbia University, it is likely there would have been no cultural anthropology. That was very nearly the case on several occasions in any case. It is another accident of history that Boas’s tenure at Columbia (1896 to 1942) overlapped with Nicholas Murray Butler‘s tenure as President (1902 to 1945). As a result, Boas led an anthropology department whose students would shape 20th century American anthropology at the same moment Columbia University was controlled by a President determined to amass executive power and exercise sweeping control over faculty appointments and department budgets (Rosenthal, 2015). Butler’s unwavering goal across four decades was to modernize Columbia on the model of the German research university, centered on an executive modeled on American corporations. The outcome – for anthropology as for other fields – were highly productive doctoral programs.

The success Boas achieved at Columbia was not the result of Butler being a free thinker who supported a diverse faculty. Quite the contrary. In fact, Columbia under Butler was the first university to set a racial quota, halving Jewish enrollment after 1917. As World War One concluded, Boas’s pacifism and refusal to demonize Germans, and his public condemnation of anthropologists who doubled as spies, led to his censure by the American Anthropological Association (Price, 2000). Butler followed suit, banning Boas from lecturing to undergraduates at Columbia. In addition, between 1933 and 1939 – from the rise of Hitler to the start of World War Two – Butler hosted Nazi dignitaries at Columbia and engaged his students in exchange programs at German universities led by Nazi faculty. During those same years, Boas and his students were actively denouncing Nazism, and his books were being burned in Germany. For decades, Butler starved out some of Boas’s most promising – and radical – students by withholding financial support and teaching appointments. In the 1930s, Butler even took away funding for a department secretary, an injury that was removed though thanks to the support of Elsie Clews Parsons, whose beneficence kept the Columbia department alive from 1918 to 1942. Surprisingly, Columbia continued to be the most productive doctoral program in the United States. Despite Butler’s actions, during Boas’s tenure the doctoral program at Columbia was the most productive in the United States. In part, this reflected his pragmatism, as well as his openness to working with students from all backgrounds. Banned from lecturing to male undergraduates at Columbia, Boas simply turned to lecturing to female undergraduates at Barnard College. The result was dramatic, as we will see.

The decades after the turn of the century were critical, because at this time anthropology was expanding from museums to universities, and facing competition from other fledgling, ambitious fields, including sociology and psychology. Owing much to timing, students who earned their doctorates from Boas founded departments that would soon rank among the most influential anthropology programs in the United States: Alfred Kroeber, for example, would found the anthropology program at the University of California; Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University; and Edward Sapir would exercise a decisive influence first at the University of Chicago and then at Yale University.

This is not to suggest that everyone who received a PhD under Boas obtained a tenured appointment or founded a department. Between 1901 – when Alfred Kroeber became the “first Boasian” (Jacknis, 2001) – and 1940  the doors of opportunity opened and closed quickly. This was the case even for Boas’s male students. For his female and minority students, opportunities usually failed to materialize at all. While some of Boas’s early cohort of doctoral students – including Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, and Melville Herskovits – advanced professionally, most struggled. Antisemitic prejudice seemed lighter for students of Germanic background, and much heavier for those whose families hailed from Poland – like Paul Radin – or Ukraine – like Alexander Goldenweiser (Glazier, 2020; Kan, 2003). Despite the fact that Boas considered them to be very gifted, neither obtained more than temporary academic positions. Their nomadic careers took them across the United States and Europe.

Boas’s black and female students faced even greater barriers, though most were neither immigrants nor of Jewish heritage. There is an interesting twist here. As in most other American universities of the time – especially private colleges – enrollment at Columbia was restricted to men. Columbia did not admit female undergraduates until 1968. But like other universities of prominence, Columbia was matched with a “sister college” – the Barnard Teacher’s College. Barnard enrolled only women. As mentioned above, after Boas was banned from lecturing to male undergraduates at Columbia, he began lecturing to female undergraduates at Barnard. The result was a small flood of female students who were eager and able to begin doctoral studies with Boas after graduation (Niehaus, 2006).  By 1925, Boas remarked that nearly all of his graduate students were women. The prominence of women in anthropology would not reach similar levels again until the 1970s. But only a few female students gained full time academic appointments, including Gladys Reichard at Columbia. Most did not.

The cards of academia were stacked against aspiring female academics. For example, despite their prominence as authors and public intellectuals, both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead held adjunct appointments until late in their lives. Boas endorsed Benedict as his successor at Columbia, and her popular introduction to anthropology, titled Patterns of Culture (Benedict, 1934), sold over one million copies. But she was passed over as chair, and perhaps owing to her feminism and anti-racist activism, she was not awarded tenure until just before her death. Similarly,  Butler passed over Mead, a prolific author and researcher who became the public face of American anthropology in the post-war era. Mead held a curator appointment at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1968. But her first tenured academic appointment – albeit as distinguished professor – was at a little known program at the University of Rhode Island in 1968, a position she started just a decade before she died.

For anthropologists from working class backgrounds, particular women, such as Ruth Landes (Cole, 2003) and Cora Du Bois (Seymour, 2015) the only way to remain in the discipline was to find aligned non-academic employment. To their efforts we owe the emergence of applied anthropology. Landes focused on what today would be called social justice work, while Du Bois became an intelligence agent for forerunners of the CIA. That said, the addition of wealth to scholarship seemed to matter little. Elsie Clews Parsons, whose father helped found the New York Stock Exchange and who was heir to a considerable fortune, was largely responsible for the funding of all anthropology graduate students at Columbia after 1918, both male and female. Her support allowed Boas’s female doctoral students to conduct research. But she was much more than a source of funds. She published two dozen books and hundreds of papers. But Parson never held an academic position after she moved from social work to anthropology. In 1942, just before she died, Parsons was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association.

1.4 The Boasians and Native American Studies: from the lower east side to reservations

A great many of Boas’s graduate students hailed from New York City, and most did their doctoral research in indigenous communities confined to reservations. Indeed, it is not inaccurate to describe Boasian anthropology as a dialogue between immigrant New York City and reservations. This in itself made American cultural anthropology distinct. Both Boasian anthropologists and Native peoples were, or soon would be, impacted by genocidal violence. In 1900, the year cultural anthropology was launched as an academic movement, the United States Census counted just 200,000 people of Native heritage in the lower 48. Excluding Alaska and Hawaii, the lowest pre-contact population estimates suggest – prior to 1492 – a minimum of two million indigenous inhabitants of the area now occupied by the United States (Thorton, 2005). Upper estimates are closer to ten million. By the low count, the Native population declined 90% over the next four centuries. By the high count, the decline was 98%. It is true that an onslaught of Old World diseases played a decisive role, but so did ethnic cleansing, starvation, forced relocation, and generations of trauma. Confined to reservations largely established in the latter half of the 19th century, life expectancy was low.

As it happened, as the indigenous population of the United States was reaching its nadir, new flows of European immigration from southern and eastern Europe was reaching a peak. Between 1880 and 1910, millions of people from Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine reached Ellis Island in New York City, including over one million people of Jewish heritage. Although the latter arrived well in advance of the Nazi Holocaust, those leaving Russia and Ukraine were often fleeing violent pogroms that forced them to abandon their land and livelihood. Among them were several dozen individuals who would make signal contributions to American cultural anthropology.

Although Margaret Mead is known for her work in the Pacific, and Melville Herskovits for his work with the African diaspora, the great majority of Boasian research was conducted with Native peoples in the United States. In many cases, Boas and his students became deeply identified with particular peoples or regional cultural areas, and their work shaped later scholarship for decades to come. This applies, for example, to the work of Boas on the North Pacific Coast, Robert Lowie on the Plains, and Alfred Kroeber in California. But the most studied region in the United States was the American Southwest, a region where relative isolation and cultural conservatism led to high levels of language survival and community cohesion. Native peoples of the Southwest – including the Zuni, Hopi, and Rio Grande Puebloans, and above all the Navajo, whose settlements were small and scattered – were visited, at one time or another, by the majority of the Boasians. Elsie Clews Parsons spent most summers in the region, and she generously supported fieldwork by Boas’s female students that enabled them to earn doctoral degrees. These women have become known to historians of anthropology as the daughters of the desert (Babcock & Parezo, 1988). They included Ruth Benedict, and two more Ruth’s (Ruth Bunzel and Ruth Underhill), as well as Gladys Reichard and Esther Goldfrank. Their work differed in significant ways from that of male anthropologists, not only for investing more time and attention on women, but also for focusing on learning weaving, pottery, and other arts and crafts through direct experience, and for experimenting with fiction.

After his initial research in the 1890s, Boas became increasingly convinced that only people native to a cultural tradition and language could capture it ethnographically and, especially, linguistically. For this reason he sought to recruit students and fieldworkers who were Native to the traditions being studied. Among his Native students, the most notable was William Jones (1871 – 1909).  Jones was a member of the Meskwaki (also referred to as the Fox) people, who had been removed from the Ohio River Valley to, among other places, Tama, Iowa. Jones attended Oberlin College, followed by Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree.

In 1900, Jones came to New York City for graduate studies with Boas, drawn in part by a rare fellowship from Columbia University. His financial support continued through 1904, when Jones became the first Native American to complete a PhD in anthropology. Boas considered Jones to be his most outstanding student, and encouraged him to continue his Algonkian linguistic studies, where he was unmatched. To this end, Boas secured funding, putting together a patchwork quilt of financial support from multiple foundations and funds, in the manner that he funded all of his other students (Zumwalt, 2022). As Jones worked on the project after completing his dissertation, he became increasingly frustrated by insufficient financial support. Boas’s letters demonstrate that he actively pursued additional money. Unknown to Boas, however, the shortfalls were preventing Jones from marrying. In 1907 Jones suddenly switched projects, halting his Algonkian studies to do fieldwork in the Philippines for George Amos Dorsey (1868 – 1931), an anthropologist at Harvard. Two years into the work, Jones was murdered by three Ilongot men, who were portrayed as savage headhunters (see Vigil, 2018).

While students like Jones were rare, Boas employed Native ethnographers to collect texts and artifacts and do fieldwork for much of his career. This followed the model established by the Bureau of American Ethnology in the 19th century. Among Boas’s most famous field assistants were George Hunt and Ella Cara Deloria, both of whom established lasting reputations as ethnographers and linguists.

George Hunt (1854 – 1933) produced high quality ethnographic observations and textual materials on the North Pacific Coast from 1896 to his death. Studies of the western tradition, Boas noted, centered on a collection of classic texts that were studied and interpreted by generations of scholars. Oral traditions, he felt, lacked that foundation. Boas viewed textual collections produced by indigenous peoples in their native languages as providing a Native analog to Plato and Aristotle: they would be “the foundation of all future research” (Briggs and Bauman, 1999). Alongside the massive work of text creation, which ran into thousands of pages, Boas also employed Hunt to collect artifacts and skeletal remains for the American Museum of Natural History and other museums, activities that created considerable scandals. Additionally, Hunt’s ethnic identity – his father was Scottish, his mother was Tlingit – made him an outsider to many of the peoples he collected from.

If George Hunt was Boas’s oldest collaborator, Ella Cara Deloria (1889 – 1971) was his youngest. Boas felt Deloria’s ethnographic and linguistic work was of higher quality than anyone he had worked with. Somewhat similar to the Parker family among the Seneca who worked with Lewis Henry Morgan, and the La Flesche family who assisted Alice Fletcher in her work with the Omaha, Deloria’s family had high social standing among the Dakota peoples and also achieved a high level of education. Deloria graduated from Barnard Teacher’s College and although she never pursued graduate studies, she worked with Boas from 1926 until his death in 1942. Their letters strike a familiar theme for all but a handful of the Boasians: continual financial stress. But more than any other fieldworker, Deloria also routinely pushed back and challenged Boas, as well as the work of prior ethnographers.

1.5 The Boasians and African American Studies

According to St Claire Drake, a social anthropologist who became one of the most prominent and respected Black social scientist of the 20th century, Black intellectuals mostly considered anthropologists “an enemy.” This point is  seconded by John Gwaltney, a Black anthropologist who worked alongside Margaret Mead. Gwaltney argues that Black scholars see disparities between mostly white anthropologists and the communities they study. Only anthropologists benefit from the work: “benefits accrue to the investigator” and there is “a relative paucity of positive results to the communities studied. Anthropological fieldwork is viewed as a good job, and good jobs are … [rare] …. [fieldworkers rise] to preeminence on the basis of unremunerated contributions Black participants contribute to their indispensable store of knowledge” (Gwaltney, 2015: 32). But St. Clair Drake argues that Boas was an exception to this exploitative approach:

Boas … won the respect of … educated Blacks who were carrying on the two-century old task of … racial vindication (Drake, 1980).

Drake insists that Boas delivered useful knowledge – knowledge that could counter racial prejudice and challenge white supremacism. The value of ethnological data and detailed ethnographic work was evident in the first decade of the 20th century to pioneering Black social thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois (Liss, 1998). Lee D. Baker concurs, noting that in 1906, Boas “spontaneously delivered the commencement address at Atlanta University ” – a historically Black university. Drawing upon his considerable knowledge of what little was then known by anthropologists about African history and ethnography, Boas countered descriptions of Africa as backward and savage (Baker, 1994; Baker, 1998). From that point forth, Du Bois began developing an “Afrocentric” curriculum to teach his students about African cultures.

Boas actively recruited minority scholars as graduate students, both Native American and African American, and sought to open journals and conferences to ethnographic study for the purpose of countering inaccurate representations. Between 1918 and 1955, however, just 14 Black scholars completed doctoral studies in anthropology. Just five worked with Boas or his students. Only a handful obtained tenured positions.

The first African American to complete a PhD in anthropology at Columbia – or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter – was Louis Eugene King in 1932. The subtitle of Ira Harrison’s biographical essay on King is “the anthropologist who never was” (Harrison, 1999). While working on his own community study, King supported himself by completing multiyear intensive field projects for tenured white faculty, including Boas’s student Melville Herskovits. After overcoming financial stress to complete his doctoral dissertation, King hit a wall: Columbia required doctoral students to submit 27 typed copies. In letters to King encouraging him to apply for academic positions, Boas urged him to recognize that this was merely a technicality – King had earned his PhD. But Boas unwittingly  put his finger on the heart of the issue: “the printing of the thesis” wrote Boas, “is a purely financial matter.” For King, it was a financial obstacle he could not meet. He had no relative like Abraham Jacobi to see him through. And while Boas noted that “some of my students who took the PhD five years ago have not had their thesis printed yet” but were already working on university faculties, it was King’s belief that the failure of Columbia to verify his doctoral degree damaged his candidacy for jobs.

For a decade after unofficially completing his PhD, King desperately sought income to support his family. In 1942, King took a position doing manual labor at a Navy Yard in New Jersey, where he was promoted quickly in what today is called logistics and project management. He spent the rest of his working life in the Navy. In an interview with Ira Harrison in 1979, King said:

I stayed [at the Naval Yard] and put in … my time …. I was very, very, very sore … and disgusted [with anthropology and academia].

Even Boas’s greatest Black student, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) encountered financial barriers that blocked completing her degree at Columbia. Hurston had the financial support of a matron, but it was a mentoring relation with strings. The demands placed her matron placed on her time were so heavy that her work suffered. Despite this, Hurston’s rich ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in Florida, Haiti, and Jamaica during the Great Depression, allowed her to publish multiple novels and short stories – including Their Eyes were Watching God (Hurston, 1937) – and two major monographs on African American folklore in the American South (Hurston, 1935) and the Caribbean (Hurston, 1938). After dying forgotten and alone, Hurston today is far and away the most widely read and discussed Boasian, and the work she completed is viewed as being decades ahead of its time.

It was Melford Herskovits (1895-1963) who emerged as the most influential student of Africa and Afro-America in American cultural anthropology. Herskovits was a first generation American, whose parents came from Germany and Hungary. Like many Boasians, his parents were of Jewish heritage. At the time, the great majority of Boasian research was conducted with Native peoples in North America. Herskovits became the first Boasian to focus on Africa and Afro-America – working and encouraging his students to work on both sides of the Atlantic. Herskovits obtained a full time position at Northwestern University in 1927, where he founded the first interdisciplinary program in African American Studies in 1941. For the next two decades, almost every anthropologist who worked in Africa or the African diaspora was a student of Herskovits  (Gershenhorn, 2004).

2. What Was Cultural Anthropology?

Now that we have introduced some of the social and institutional contexts and personalities, our next goal is to understand the intellectual foundations of cultural anthropology in the period between 1900 to 1950. So what was cultural anthropology about? And how did it manage to grow so fast across what can only be described as difficult decades?

2.1 Four-Field Anthropology

Since its earliest appearance within a decade following the first voyage of Columbus, at the dawn of the sixteenth century, the word anthropology has been persistently polyvocal. This means it has carried multiple meanings (Vermeulen, 2015). In some usages – which prevail to this day in continental Europe – anthropology refers to the comparative study of human anatomy, which was long associated with the study of races. In this context, to speak of physical anthropology is redundant.

But anthropology has also been used to refer to the holistic study of humanity, including not just blood, bones, hair, and skin, but also language, art, religion, and social relations. In the United States, the latter meaning came to prevail in the 20th century. Most histories associate this with the influence of Franz Boas, who developed considerable expertise not only in ethnography, ethnology, and linguistics, but also in physical anthropology. But it is also true that archaeology and physical anthropology were much more strongly associated with Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution during this period. And there was a considerable gap between the vision of anthropology at those institutions and Boasian anthropology.

In fact, as Rosemary Zumwalt has shown, through the careful study of Boas’s papers and correspondence, during his early years at Columbia Boas actively sought to recruit a well prepared archaeologist as well as a competent physical anthropologist. Neither effort panned out. Examining how Boas’s efforts failed also shows how fragile his own position was at Columbia University.

How Archaeology went missing at Columbia University

In 1903, as Boas was struggling to cobble together funding to bring on an archaeologist, President Butler and Frederic Ward Putnam (1839 – 1915) – who headed the Peabody Museum and the Anthropology program at Harvard, conspired to drop a bomb: it was announced through a campus newsletter that Columbia University had received external support to establish an endowed Chair in Archaeology. While Boas was used to working on salaries amounting to a few thousand dollars, the new Loubat Chair in American Anthropology came with an endowment of $100,000. It was all news to Boas, whose own position was neither endowed nor permanent, and who was never informed of the hire, despite being Chair of the Anthropology Department at Columbia.

But that was just the half of it. Not only was the Loubat Chair funded without Boas’ knowledge, it was also filled without his knowledge or approval. The first appointment to the Loubat Chair would be Marshall H. Saville. Saville had no academic preparation in anthropology or archaeology – or any other field. Although lack of credentials was not uncommon in the 19th century, Boas was trying to change that. But even among amateurs Saville was an unknown. As it happened, things would turn out much worse than Boas feared. Saville held his position for over three decades, from 1903 to 1935. After announcing courses that he never actually taught, Saville quit announcing courses altogether after 1918 (Zumwalt, 2022). There was, thus, no training in archaeology offered at Columbia University until after 1945. This seems to have been perfectly fine with Harvard and the Smithsonian, who kept firm control of archaeology.

Boas and Physical Anthropology: The Immigrant Head form Study

Boas trained in anthropometry with the eminent physical anthropologist Rudolf Virchow in Germany during the interlude between his arctic expedition and his arrival in New York City. He was particularly adept at measuring head forms. Measuring heads was, in fact, a key part of his episodic field work for the British Association for the Advancement of Science between 1887 and 1896. He worked under the supervision of Edward Bennett Tylor, primarily on the North Pacific Coast in British Columbia. Boas found the work repugnant, and it proved ethically challenging. Often, he met his quota for measurements by visiting local jails, and measuring Native individuals who were locked up. Worse, it appears from his letters to his wife that he may also have engaged in robbing skeletal materials from graves, a practice that became normalized in the emerging field of physical anthropology at the time. After his appointment to the faculty at Columbia, Boas began relying on Native collectors as fieldworkers. He also put his training in anthropometry to more progressive causes.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the eugenics movement was rapidly gaining steam. It offered a simple diagnosis of social problems, arguing that poverty and crime and all other undesirable traits were the product of biological inferiority. As a political movement, eugenics promised to solve social problems by preventing undesirable individuals from reproducing. When the focus was on white Americans of Nordic descent, the eugenic solution was two-fold: to sterilize the poor already in the United States, and to ban immigration of people of “undesirable” stock – including southern and eastern Europeans (particularly Poles, Italians, and Jews), and East Asians (particularly Chinese). Prejudice against southern and eastern Europeans – who were considered “whites of a different color” (Jacobson, 1999) was quite severe. Indeed, hiring offices at steel mills and factories often had coded sheets that assigned different nationalities to different jobs based on stereotypes about their character and innate ability, and recent European immigrants did not fare well.

Several decades earlier in Germany, Rudolph Virchow had overseen several massive anthropometric efforts, measuring millions of soldiers in the military and school children. Virchow demonstrated the physical variability and biological plasticity of the German people, casting doubt on the idea of a Nordic race. Boas would build on Virchow’s work in his own efforts to challenge was he called “the nonsense of Nordic racial superiority” – for how could Nordics be considered a superior race if they were not a race at all? Virchow also suggested that head forms – considered heritable, fixed, and unchangeable by 19th century polygenists and 20th century eugenicists – were plastic and variable, and could be altered by differences in diet and environment and overall health. Boas set out to replicate Virchow’s research in the United States, and demonstrate the fallacies of racial thinking and the plasticity of the head forms of new Americans, which, he predicted, would become more similar to those of other Americans across decades and generations of similar developmental environments.

Boas was unable to recruit a physical anthropologist from Harvard or the Smithsonian Institution, so he sought funding independently, and undertook the study at Columbia University. He was able to obtain substantial financial support, and collected a massive amount of data, while providing training in anthropometry to a cohort of his graduate students. The idea was to collect data that would make it possible to compare the head form of immigrants to the United States with that of their children who were born and raised in the United States (Boas, 1912; Boas, 1936).

Although his efforts failed to stop the passage of legislation establishing racial quotas that drastically reduced immigration from targeted regions, the data from the study provided an important challenge to racial eugenics in the United States. Boas would draw on this research over the next two decades to cast doubt on the idea that race was a biologically meaningful category. As the Nazi racial state took form, and Nazi supporters of eugenics embraced mass murder as a method, Boas and his students would respond with three arguments. First, they insisted that culture had no relationship to race: race was a purely biological concept. Secondly, they argued that it was questionable whether biological races existed. For one thing, variation among individuals within races was greater than the variation between races, and for another, physical variation did not group cleanly, and it was difficult to find racial markers enabling confident segregation of one race from another. Third, they argued that culture, not race, shaped human behavior, and cultures could not be ranked higher or lower.

2.2 The Boasian Concept of Culture: A Different Kind of Nature

The concept of culture was the most fundamental idea in American cultural anthropology. Behind relatively simple definitions (e.g., “culture refers to the way of life of a people”), the concept is staggeringly complex. As Raymond Williams noted, culture and nature emerged together over the past two millennia, and “culture is one of  … the most complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 1976: 87). The most complicated? The word nature. Put them together and you have a lot of threads to sort out. Fortunately, Arthur Lovejoy did much of the work for us, as we discussed in the chapter on Greco-Roman thinking (Lovejoy and Boas, 1948). Lovejoy argued that the roots of the concepts of nature and culture were antique, and derive from Greco-Roman thinking. Most importantly, he noted that in the Western tradition, culture stands in opposition to Nature

Nature in Greco-Roman thought refers to all that is innate, fixed, and permanent. The natural order is also associated with all that is normal and good. It exists beyond human artifice, and human actions that “go against nature” are not expected to turn out well. In contrast, culture in Greco-Roman thought references all that is learned, variable, and changing. It is a product of human action that changes the world to meet human needs. In the realm of culture the normal and the good are no longer singular or fixed, but variable and changing. Cultures run into one another; they overlap and have weak boundaries; they mix.

The Boasian concept of culture did not fundamentally break with any of this thinking, save for one thing: the Boasians insisted that human nature is fundamentally cultural. Nor did the Boasian concept diverge from the definition of culture offered by Edward Tylor in 1871 in Primitive Culture: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.” From that definition we can draw several key themes:

To say that culture is acquired is to repeat the Greco-Roman emphasis on the learned as opposed to the innate; to say that it is acquired by man is to restrict it to human beings; and to qualify that by saying it is acquired by man as a member of society is to maintain the focus on the group as opposed to the individual. Lastly, an emphasis on the heterogeneity of culture – that it is a complex whole – shapes the whole field of anthropology. The Boasian concept of culture fully accepted Tylor’s themes. The only point that was widely contested was the role of the individual in culture. Boas, Edward Sapir, and Alexander Goldenweiser in particular all wrote extensively on individual creativity as a cultural expression. Also influential was Alfred Kroeber’s acceptance of Herbert Spencer’s definition of culture as the superorganic (Kroeber, 1915). The conceptual distinction was clarified, however, by making a distinction between genetic and extra-genetic transmission, which became possible later in the century (Richerson and Boyd, 1988).

One might ask: If the concept of culture is so fundamental to Boasian anthropology, what did the Boasian’s add?

That is an excellent question. The answer comes down to two concepts: cultural particularism and cultural relativity.

2.3 Empty Universals and Cultural Particularity: Culture comes in cultures

It is sometimes argued that cultural anthropologists had no interest in human universals. This is simply untrue. Ella Cara Deloria had the following aphorism written across the top of her notebook:

Humans are everywhere the same. Cultures are everywhere different. Professor Boas.

Boas stressed this point not only in his lectures, but in his most important book on culture, Primitive Art:

The mental processes of man are the same everywhere, regardless of race or culture …. There is no such thing as a “primitive mind” …. Each individual in “primitive” society is a man, a woman, a child of the same kind …. as in our own society (Boas, 1927:2).

What then differentiates aesthetic expression from one society to the next?

The answer, Boas argued, lay in differences in the skills developed in ordinary living, the materials that are available, and the styles artists are exposed to. To create art we must achieve mastery of technique, and apply that mastery to a collective aesthetic. He placed mastery of technique, materials, and aesthetic style under the rubric of culture.

Consider the human capacity for language. All observed human societies have languages that allow them to communicate in creative ways. And all human languages enable their speakers to do a remarkable range of things, from indicating temporal relations to communicating spatial cues and noting what is singular and what is plural. But there is no universal language that all humans speak. And learning any particular language does not prepare you to learn another. Language is a cultural universal: it is found everywhere, and everywhere it is found it works differently than elsewhere. Thus general accounts of things all languages share are sometimes called empty universals – they can take you to features shared by all languages, but are insufficient to grasp any particular language.

2.4 Cultural Relativism

Perhaps no concept is more inextricably linked to Boasian cultural anthropology than the concept of cultural relativism. The concept itself, as an -ism, did not find its way into print until 1941 (De Laguna, 1941). The author was Grace De Laguna. Although she was a philosophy professor, it was not a case of independent invention: she was very familiar with Boasian ideas of cultural relativity because her daughter. Frederika De Laguna (1906 – 2004) was a student of Franz Boas. Inspired by what her daughter shared, it entered her teaching and then her writing.

Boas first published on the relativity of culture in 1887 in a comment  in the journal Science which he was then editing (Dall and Boas, 1887). It was a bold and lengthy critique of the principles expressed in the displays of American museum collections. Following the lead of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, American museums grouped artifacts of the same kind together, separating them into evolutionary levels, to show, as Morgan put it, the main lines of human development from savagery, through barbarism, to civilization (Morgan, 1877). The lesson they taught was differential progress. American civilization sat at the pinnacle of human development, and, as such, owned the future. Peoples who were lower were destined for either assimilation or extermination.

In a public museum, such ideological messaging was essential, but it was also the lynch pin of the whole method of 19th century ethnology. As the Scottish ethnologist John McLennan put it, it came down to unequal development (McLennan, 1865):

So unequally has the species … developed, that … every … phase of progress may be … somewhere observed.

The same principle underlay was articulated by the French ethnologist Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando (1772-1842). In 1800 de Gérando proposed that by traveling outward from Paris or London, into the countryside and thence across the oceans, one could travel back in time and see the European past. John Locke had seized on this insight much earlier, in his Second Treatise on Government, published in 1689:

“Thus in the beginning all the World was America, and more so than that is now”

Boas objected to both the ethnological assumption behind such displays, and their ideological message. He insisted, first of all, that every people has a history that is as deep as every other. Contrary to the philosopher Hegel, there are no peoples without history. Rather than arranging museums by like artifacts arranged in evolutionary layers – doing violence to their cultural integrity – he suggested displays should be organized geographically, to demonstrate the genius and uniqueness of peoples everywhere. As he concluded, he stated the following:

I believe that the main object of ethnological collections [in our museums] 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.

It was a bold statement – Science was the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science –  and it cost Boas his editorial position. Lack of options forced him to work as a field collector for Edward Tylor and the British  Association for the Advancement of Science. But it did not silence Boas, or his students. The Boasians first universalized culture: they insisted that all people are cultured – there is no human being that lacks culture, because culture is part of human nature. Next the pluralized culture: culture only comes in cultures. Lastly, they democratized culture: all cultures are of equal value. Thus all peoples have histories, all peoples have cultures, and all cultures have equal value. The work of cultural anthropology was to teach these principles.

Alongside this ethical argument, they established what later came to be called methodological relativism. This was first set out in a paper Boas published in 1889. The paper addressed a phenomenon that linguists called alternating sounds – which they interpreted as the inability of savage peoples to pronounce a word consistently in the same manner – either for reasons that were physical or as a result deficits in the language itself. Boas expressed doubts that this was true. He noted that when we learn a language, we develop the ability to articulate and perceive those sounds, but not the sounds used in other languages. Thus whenever the effort is made to learn a new language, the student will perceive instability in pronunciation and perception. But the deficiency lies with the student who lacks competence in the language, not with the language being learned or the fluent speakers of that language.

Methodological relativism generalizes this observation. It is a stance that came to define cultural anthropology in the 20th century. Basically, methodological relativism operates on the expectation that human beings make sense, and when we find other people unfathomable it reflects more on our ignorance than their failings. Methodological relativism calls upon us to take people we differ from seriously, and search for the logic in their beliefs and behaviors. Failing that, it calls on us to recognize parallel irrationality in our own beliefs and behaviors.

Cultural Determinism and Anti-Racism

The Boasian’s insisted that culture, not biology, shaped human behavior. If we de-contextualize their arguments, they seem to be a little strong. No anthropologist would make that argument today. But the context was different, and the argument for cultural determinism was a political argument. In a paper of great value, Jürgen Langenkämper shares and contextualizes Boas’s German language correspondence with his colleagues in Germany as the fateful year 1933 approached and the Nazi Party seized power (Langenkämper, 2015). Boas frequently visited Germany during the summer in his later years, and much of his reading continued to center on German language publications throughout his life. From 1918 through 1933, Langenkämper notes, Boas reciprocated by collecting and shipping English language publications to Germany so scholars there could follow the development of cultural anthropology in the United States. Indeed, as his retirement approached, Boas planned to give his substantial library to an ethnological museum in Hamburg. As it happened, the Nazi movement would make this impossible.

As Langenkämper reports, in the summer of 1931 Boas gave a prepared speech at the University of Keil, where he had earned his doctoral degree in psychophysics 50 years prior. His speech was titled Rasse und Kultur (Race and Culture), and in it he challenged the race theories of Madison Grant in the United States and Hans Gunther for severe criticism. In this context, Boas made his central argument regarding cultural determinism (Langenkämper, 2015: 278):

The adaptability of individuals of various racial types to the same cultural traditions may be [treated] … as an axiom. The behavior of a people is not significantly determined by its biological origin, but its cultural tradition. [Knowing this] will save the world and especially Germany many difficulties.

During the year that followed, Langenkämper notes, Boas’s correspondence with German colleagues soared, exceeding 2,500 letters. Although he never stopped reaching out, over the next decade that correspondence would dwindle. Some colleagues, including Julius Lips, successfully escaped Germany. After 1940, others – including Claude Levi-Strauss and Paul Rivet – escaped from Nazi occupied Europe. But most German anthropologists were untainted by either Jewish identity or politics that the Nazi’s considered dangerous. A few fell silent, but many openly embraced National Socialism.

Contemporary anthropologists often overlook the fact that the “Boasian doctrine” of cultural determinism was developed in opposition to racial determinism in the United States and Germany. Until 1933, the consequences of racial determinism were felt primarily in the United States, in forms ranging from lynchings and beatings of Black Americans to federal legislation banning immigrants deemed racially undesirable. From 1900 until his death in 1942, Boas would urge his students to join him in the struggle against social prejudice. In 1928, Boas thanked Robert Lowie for his donation to field schools for anthropology students (Glazer, 2020: 56):

It is my greatest desire to see our science grow and exert its wholesome influence over our civilization.

A key aspect of that “wholesome influence” Glazer notes, was exploding the myth of race. In 1933, racial determinism began to directly impact German academics of Jewish descent. Initially, they were forced to resign from their professorships. Next their scholarly works were collected and burned, and they were forced to abandon their property and emigrate – if they could find a willing country to receive them. And in the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, as the Nazi’s called it, those who failed to emigrate would be deported to death camps and murdered.

online open access supplementary materials

Boas, Franz. Franz Boas Papers. American Philosophical Society Library. Digital Collections.

Boas, Franz. “Commencement Address at Atlanta University, May 31, 1906,” Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19. WEBDuBois.org

Brown, Vincent. Producer. Llewellyn Smith, Director. 2010. Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. Independent Lens.

Gershenhorn, Jerry. 2017. “Africa and the Americas: Life and Work of Melville Herskovits”, in Bérose – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie, Paris.

King, Charles. 2020. “Genius at Work: How Franz Boas Created the Field of Cultural Anthropology.” Columbia Magazine. Winter.

Organizational Web pages Without Authors

The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act). Office of the Historian, Foreign Services Institute, United States Department of State.

A People at Risk | Polish/Russian | Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History. Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress. Web page.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

References