Anthropology and Modern Life

by Franz Boas

Overview

Anthropologist Franz Boas was a statwart fighter for human rights and against racism. He was passionately concerned about individual liberty, freedom of inquiry and speech, equality of opportunity, and the defeat of prejudice and chauvinism. His Anthropology and Modern Life shows how Boas uses science in the service of humanity, hoping to break down racial and cultural barriers.

From the book's very opening. Boas shatters the myth that anthropology is simply a collection of curious facts about exotic peoples and their customs and belief systems. He asserts that a clear understanding of the principles of anthropology illuminates the social processes of our own times and may show us what to do and what to avoid. Boas proceeds to discuss issues that have had resounding significance in our own time: the problem of defining race: the subjective view of racial types: heredity versus environment: alleged physiological and mental differences between races: the significance of intelligence tests: the importance of one's cultural experience: open versus closed societies: nationality and nationalism: the mixed descent of European nations: eugenics: social conditions versus heredity in the committing of crimes: intolerance; and the influence of race and sex on a successful education. While he outwardly acknowledges that his book runs contrary to popular prejudices. Boas was an optimist, and hoped that dissenters, in reading Anthropology and Modern Life, would come to reexamine their own viewpoints dispassionately and critically.

This new edition of Anthropology and Modern Life is enhanced by an introduction and afterword by Herbert S. Lewis, who details Franz Boas' life, influence, and ideals. This volume will be a welcome contribution to the libraries of anthropologists, sociologists, and those concerned with human rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473395978
Publisher:	Read Books Ltd.
Publication date:	05/06/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Franz Boas was born in Germany in 1858 and educated at the University of Kiel. His first anthropological fieldwork was among the Inuit in Northern Canada in 1883, a turning point in Boas’s life as he became fascinated with the role of culture. He began lecturing at the University of Columbia in 1896, establishing the first department of Anthropology in the United States and becoming Columbia’s first professor of Anthropology, a position he held for thirty-seven years. He influenced an astonishing variety of scholars and researchers, from the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict to the philosopher W. E. B. DuBois and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Boas is the early-twentieth-century scholar most responsible for discrediting the then-dominant scientific theories of racial superiority. Through his elaboration of cultural relativism as an alternative theoretical framework, he came to have an enormous influence on the development of American anthropology. The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), demonstrated that there was no such thing as a ‘pure’ race or a superior one. His books were banned in Hitler's Germany. He was a fierce advocate of intellectual freedom, supported many democratic causes, and was the founder of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom.

Table of Contents

	Transaction Introduction	ix
	Preface	7
I.	What is Anthropology?	11
	Anthropology treats of man as a member of a racial or social group
	Pure and applied anthropology
II.	The Problem of Race	18
	Significance of the term "Race"
	Overlapping of racial types
	Subjective existence of types
	Racial heredity and family lines
	Inbred and heterogeneous types
	Attempts to determine constituent races of a population
	Selection
	Genetic differences between individuals of the same bodily form
	Environmental influences upon bodily form
	Summary
	Races considered from an evolutionary viewpoint
	Relation between the size of the brain and intelligence
	Man as a domesticated form
	Physiological and mental differences between races
	Difficulty of distinguishing between hereditary and environmental conditions
	Significance of intelligence tests
	Tests of American Negroes
	Relative importance of cultural experience and racial descent
	Racial descent disregarded by ethnologists
III.	The Interrelation of Races	63
	Race consciousness
	Open and closed societies
	Race a type of closed society
	Intermingling of races
	Conditions under which race antipathies break down
IV.	Nationalism	81
	Confusion between the terms "Race" and "Nationality"
	Racial segregation within a nation
	Mixed descent of European nations
	Language as basis of national groupings
	Nationality, political and cultural
	Culture and political organization as basis of nationality
	Fictitious groupings based on distant relation of speech
	History of nationalism
	Increase in size of political units
	Early development of tribal units
	The function of nationalism
V.	Eugenics	106
	Effects of selection
	Effect of environment and heredity
	General degeneracy
	Selection for development of specific qualities
	Social effects of eugenic legislation
	Elimination of the unfit
	Dangers of eugenic procedure
VI.	Criminology	122
	Criminals as a class
	Criminals as defectives
	Social conditions and crime
	Relative importance of hereditary and environmental factors
VII.	Stability of Culture	132
	Acceleration of cultural development
	Periodicity of the rate of change
	Automatic habits
	Negative effect of automatism
	Intolerance
	Causes of conformity
	Relation between material inventions and automatic habits
	The relation between language and thought
	Effect of uniformity of culture
	The influence of individuals upon culture
	Actions are more stable than their interpretations
	Stability of patterns of thought
VIII.	Education	168
	Phenomena of growth and development
	Influence of heredity
	Retardation and acceleration
	Comparison of sexes
	Application of generalized observations to the establishment of educational standards
	Racial characteristics
	Generalized standards are not applicable to individuals
	Cases in which standards are applicable
	Prediction of individual development
	Cultural effects of education
	Effect of education upon mental freedom
	Conflicts in educational aims
	Effect of education upon crises in the life of the individual
	The cultural outlook of classes
	Cultural outlook of educated class
	Cultural outlook of the masses
IX.	Modern Life and Primitive Culture	202
	Valuation of different cultural aims
	Objective study must be based on different cultures
	Anthropology an historic science
	Primitive cultures as historic growths
	General social laws
	Prediction of development of culture impossible
	Progress in inventions and knowledge
	Effect of leisure
	Stability of moral ideas
	Progress in ethical behavior
	Self-perfection
	Progress in social organization
	Leadership
	Position of women
	Marriage
	Property
	Georgraphic determinism
	Economic determinism
	Is the direction of cultural development predetermined?
	Culture not superorganic
	Afterword	247
	References	325

Editorial Reviews

"…for a college student to read the Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class, for racism to be rejected as both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid, and for anyone, regardless of their gender expression, to claim workplaces and boardrooms as fully theirs—if all of these things are not innovations or aspirations but the regular, taken-for-granted way of organizing society, then we have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for it." - Charles King, author of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

"…the father of American cultural anthropology and the scholar who taught generations how to think about human diversity without hierarchy." - Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher