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Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology
"We have, at long last, a real historian with real historical skills and no intra-professional ax to grind. . . . All these pieces show the virtues one finds missing in . . . nearly all of anthropological history work but [Stocking's]: extensive and critical use of archival sources, tracing of real rather than merely plausible intellectual connections, and contextualization of ideas and movements in terms of broader social and cultural currents. Stocking writes very clearly; attacks important topics—race and evolution, the influence of scientism, the interaction between anthropology and other disciplines; and is methodologically very sophisticated. Though his main theme is the development of racialism and of opposition to it, his book bears on a range of issues very much alive in anthropology. . . . I would think no apprentice anthropologist ought to be pronounced a journeyman until he or she has absorbed what Stocking has to say."—Clifford Geertz, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
408 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 3, 2020
Incredibly thorough and comprehensive intellectual history of the development of evolutionary racial science.
August 30, 2021
In social science, maybe in all science, there is a tendency for key topics to grow or diminish in importance, especially when viewed across generations. The great topics and ideas, once fiercely debated, are either appended to their discipline’s Grand Narrative (tacitly assumed by professors, but justified to undergraduates), or else they are shelved in libraries, perhaps never to be taught or debated again. Sometimes these debates amount to meaningless academic exercises. But in times when people, not just academics, are searching for answers to racialist thought, or else are hoping to find a justification for that thought, then it becomes clear that anthropology’s scientific narrative on race is a critical battleground. A lot is at stake. Proceeding with cautious courage, Stocking concatenates in Race, Culture, and Evolution a chain of little narratives. These thoroughly researched and well-documented narratives help to unravel America’s thorny problem of discerning equality among people who might look and act differently. Stocking’s research on the tribal ancestry of anthropologists, coming from outside anthropology, coming from his tribe of historians, uncovers a potentially dangerous interplay of science and ideology. By examining not only anthropology’s canonical positions on race, culture, and evolution, but also how those positions were derived through monumental scholarship and settled through acerbic debate, Stocking vindicates the liberal and cultural-pluralist views on race and culture. These views are now, a century after the triumph of the Boasians, received ‘hard’ science and not just potent ideological dogma.
Stocking explores a number of anthropologists and pseudo-anthropologists, but his main characters in these narratives are frequently E B Tylor and Franz Boas. In Victorian England, Tylor conducted a program of armchair ethnology. Instead of being based on fieldwork research on distinct cultures, Tylor’s work took explorers’ and travelers’ accounts out of context, then placing all the described societies in a hierarchy: savages on the bottom, barbarians in the middle, civilized Europeans on top. In fact, before Boas wrote of cultures (plural) many decades later, there were no cultures, just Tylor’s Culture, which a group had more or less of depending on where they stood in terms of their evolution (‘progress’). Yet Tylor had his graces. He believed, as most anthropologists now believe, that humans are all unified psychologically and intellectually. We all have the same mental potential, in part because we are all born with the same brain. Even Tylor’s notion of cultural evolution, although close to social Darwinism, is preferable to other Victorian views, such as the one that primitives were degenerate and fallen, having lost God’s gifts of perfect mind and Culture. As an aside, it is hard to think of a ‘progressive’ society without some notion of progress in civilization. A possible contradiction that needs to be taken up elsewhere.
Tylor was important to the concept of Culture, even if he failed to observe through fieldwork the particulars of different cultures. But Boas’ influence on the concept of culture is vastly more significant. Stocking charts the odyssey of Boas’ career: from physicist in Germany to Geographer in Alaska, from fieldworker in the Pacific Northwest to ethnographer, linguist, and ethnologist at Columbia, where he served as chairman of anthropology until his death in the 1940’s. The anthropology which Boas found everywhere at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which he justifiably sought to change, was based almost completely on the racialist heritage of skull measurements. Once it became clear to Boas that skulls came in many shapes and sizes, regardless of ‘race’, he made the scientific claim that there is more variation within a ‘race’ than there is between ‘races’. And no single feature is common to all members of a ‘race’. This scientific claim has only been strengthened and amplified by subsequent work in physical anthropology. Boas was also the first to study the head forms of immigrants to the US. Again, he found no evidence of permanent racial traits. The children of immigrants, being often much better nourished in America, grew bigger skulls than their parents did. So again, ‘race’ as a category does not predict or correlate with an individual’s intelligence or virtue. Boas also learned through his ethnographic experiences that what appear to be racial qualities and characteristics are really artifacts of cultural particulars. Thanks to Boas, we now know that race is formally undefinable and not predictive of anything that could possibly justify ranking purported ‘races’ in a hierarchy.
Early in the twentieth century, academics were fighting wars over how the field of anthropology would be constructed professionally. On the one side were the racist nativists who believed America was becoming racially diluted through open immigration. On the other side was Boas and his numerous intellectual progeny. These wars and campaigns were fought over how to determine who would found and staff the legion of new anthropology departments, who would edit the new journals, how would the new academic societies be constituted, how would artifacts be displayed in museums (again, by culture or by level of Culture), even who would hold important government posts to study and serve conquered American Indians and Pacific Islanders new to the US. The racist nativists believed in eugenics and in closing immigration to all but the ‘Nordic’ race. The Boasian anthropologists didn’t. But then as now, thankfully, the Boasians had science on their side. As another aside, those who wish to deconstruct social science so as to de-legitimatize its foundational Grand Narrative should probably think again.
I found the scholarship of Race, Culture, and Evolution to be unmatched in its handling of a subject most would not want to touch. I have a few minor gripes. The methodological introductions to each article did not add much to my understanding of the articles, and they might be seen as disruptive to the overall flow of the book. I would have liked to hear more about Boas’ contributions as a linguist, which are not insignificant to his understanding of cultural relativism and of intellectual equality among the ‘races’. But taken as a whole, which by the way is far more elaborate and intricate than my summary of two or three main threads would allow, Race, Culture, and Evolution should be required reading for anyone who plans to teach anthropology. With luck, it might remind you of why you ever cared about anthropology in the first place.
Stocking explores a number of anthropologists and pseudo-anthropologists, but his main characters in these narratives are frequently E B Tylor and Franz Boas. In Victorian England, Tylor conducted a program of armchair ethnology. Instead of being based on fieldwork research on distinct cultures, Tylor’s work took explorers’ and travelers’ accounts out of context, then placing all the described societies in a hierarchy: savages on the bottom, barbarians in the middle, civilized Europeans on top. In fact, before Boas wrote of cultures (plural) many decades later, there were no cultures, just Tylor’s Culture, which a group had more or less of depending on where they stood in terms of their evolution (‘progress’). Yet Tylor had his graces. He believed, as most anthropologists now believe, that humans are all unified psychologically and intellectually. We all have the same mental potential, in part because we are all born with the same brain. Even Tylor’s notion of cultural evolution, although close to social Darwinism, is preferable to other Victorian views, such as the one that primitives were degenerate and fallen, having lost God’s gifts of perfect mind and Culture. As an aside, it is hard to think of a ‘progressive’ society without some notion of progress in civilization. A possible contradiction that needs to be taken up elsewhere.
Tylor was important to the concept of Culture, even if he failed to observe through fieldwork the particulars of different cultures. But Boas’ influence on the concept of culture is vastly more significant. Stocking charts the odyssey of Boas’ career: from physicist in Germany to Geographer in Alaska, from fieldworker in the Pacific Northwest to ethnographer, linguist, and ethnologist at Columbia, where he served as chairman of anthropology until his death in the 1940’s. The anthropology which Boas found everywhere at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which he justifiably sought to change, was based almost completely on the racialist heritage of skull measurements. Once it became clear to Boas that skulls came in many shapes and sizes, regardless of ‘race’, he made the scientific claim that there is more variation within a ‘race’ than there is between ‘races’. And no single feature is common to all members of a ‘race’. This scientific claim has only been strengthened and amplified by subsequent work in physical anthropology. Boas was also the first to study the head forms of immigrants to the US. Again, he found no evidence of permanent racial traits. The children of immigrants, being often much better nourished in America, grew bigger skulls than their parents did. So again, ‘race’ as a category does not predict or correlate with an individual’s intelligence or virtue. Boas also learned through his ethnographic experiences that what appear to be racial qualities and characteristics are really artifacts of cultural particulars. Thanks to Boas, we now know that race is formally undefinable and not predictive of anything that could possibly justify ranking purported ‘races’ in a hierarchy.
Early in the twentieth century, academics were fighting wars over how the field of anthropology would be constructed professionally. On the one side were the racist nativists who believed America was becoming racially diluted through open immigration. On the other side was Boas and his numerous intellectual progeny. These wars and campaigns were fought over how to determine who would found and staff the legion of new anthropology departments, who would edit the new journals, how would the new academic societies be constituted, how would artifacts be displayed in museums (again, by culture or by level of Culture), even who would hold important government posts to study and serve conquered American Indians and Pacific Islanders new to the US. The racist nativists believed in eugenics and in closing immigration to all but the ‘Nordic’ race. The Boasian anthropologists didn’t. But then as now, thankfully, the Boasians had science on their side. As another aside, those who wish to deconstruct social science so as to de-legitimatize its foundational Grand Narrative should probably think again.
I found the scholarship of Race, Culture, and Evolution to be unmatched in its handling of a subject most would not want to touch. I have a few minor gripes. The methodological introductions to each article did not add much to my understanding of the articles, and they might be seen as disruptive to the overall flow of the book. I would have liked to hear more about Boas’ contributions as a linguist, which are not insignificant to his understanding of cultural relativism and of intellectual equality among the ‘races’. But taken as a whole, which by the way is far more elaborate and intricate than my summary of two or three main threads would allow, Race, Culture, and Evolution should be required reading for anyone who plans to teach anthropology. With luck, it might remind you of why you ever cared about anthropology in the first place.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews