Changing Times, Changing Faces: Franz Boas's Immigrant Study in Modern Perspective

Franz Boas's study of the changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants has stood for over ninety years as proof of environmental influences on cranial form. Recent reanalysis of his data have shown differing interpretations of the importance of his findings. Here, we explore the historical, political, and social setting of the study that could have led Boas to overstate the importance of his findings. We also include a discussion of the issue at large with respect to the study of modern and prehistoric human variation. Given the current state of population research using craniometric data we conclude, as many of Boas's early criticism have, that while some of the changes observed by Boas have statistical credibility, they generally lack biological meaning when considered in the scope of the degree of modern human variation. [Keywords: plasticity, immigration, craniometries, cranial index, human variation]     

Heredity, Environment, and Cranial Form: A Reanalysis of Boas's Immigrant Data

Franz Boas's classic study, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants , is a landmark in the history of anthropology. More than any single study, it undermined racial typology in physical anthropology and helped turn the tide against early-20thcentury scientific racism. In 1928, Boas responded to critics of the immigrant study by publishing the raw data set as Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man . Here we present a reanalysis of that long-neglected data set. Using methods that were unavailable to Boas, we test his main conclusion that cranial form changed in response to environmental influences within a single generation of European immigrants to the United States. In general, we conclude that Boas got it right. However, we demonstrate that modern analytical methods provide stronger support for Boas's conclusion than did the tools at his disposal. We suggest future areas of research for this historically important data set. [Keywords: Franz Boas, cranial form, immigrant study, heredity, environment]     

Some Implications of Clark Wissler's Race Theory

A recent attempt to place the name of Clark Wissler in a central position in the history of anthropology ignores his blatant racism. Wissler's racism was evident not only in scholarly and popular circles, but, as well, was employed by the United States government to give ‘scientific’ status to its Immigration Act of 1924. The Act favoured the inflow of Northwest Europeans at the expense of Eastern European Jews and other groups who had been immigrating in massive numbers, and whose presence had become increasingly unwelcome. It was used by the Nazi propaganda machine to justify German anti-Semitism in 1933 and thereafter, and by the United States Department of State to turn away the eventual victims of Nazi genocide. Wissler thus provides a profound scholarly and human contrast to Franz Boas, who publicly deplored racism and immigration restriction. Boas' stand as a ‘citizen-scientist’ partly accounts for his under-evaluation by later anthropologists, most recently by Derek Freeman in his Margaret Mead and Samoa.     

A Cannibal in the National Museum: The Early Career of Franz Boas in America

Franz Boas spent several weeks at Fort Rupert, British Columbia, at the end of 1894, when he saw the Kwakiutl hamatsa ritual in situ for the first time. Soon after his return east Boas posed for a series of photographs in the U.S. National Museum for a diorama of the hamatsa dance. These photographs, now published for the first time, are a sharp reminder of Boas' constant (and sometimes forced) collaboration with the limited number of anthropological institutions in America at the end of the century, and of his personal difficulties in establishing himself professionally in America.     

Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolutionaries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902)

This review of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, still the most important expedition in American anthropology, gives an idea of the goals and hazards of fieldwork around 1900, the pitfalls of international research, the tensions between anthropologists and host populations, the careers of early anthropologists, the role of private philanthropy, and the character of anthropology at the turn of the century. Franz Boas was the Expedition's linchpin. His organization of the Expedition, the way he handled problems, and his personal concerns reveal aspects of his view of anthropology and some of his basic attitudes.     

Clark Wissler and the Development of Anthropology in the United States

Wissler receives scant notice today although he was a major figure in American anthropology. During the decades when the historical particularism of Franz Boas dominated American cultural anthropology, Wissler's theories provided a nomothetic alternative. His theories are in current use in various guises. The importance of Wissler has been obscured to some extent because he is often misclassified as a Boasian. However, he consciously worked outside of Boas's influence.     

A Gifted Amateur: The Case of George Washington Ellis

George Washington Ellis published Negro Culture in West Africa in 1914 in response to the social gospel prophets' racist and stereotypical perspectives of West Africa and Africans. In so doing. Ellis attempted to shift the discourse from one that emphasized African barbarism to one that repudiated the idea of African inferiority. Unwittingly, however, Ellis preached a brand of romantic racialism—a benign doctrine that was commonplace in the racial discourse of African American elites at the Turn of the Century. Asa consequence, his loyalties were divided between 19th-century ethnological science and the "new ethnology" of Franz Boas. [Keywords: George Washington Ellis, history of racism, antiracism, African American anthropology, social gospel prophets]     

Boas's Changes in Bodily Form: The Immigrant Study, Cranial Plasticity, and Boas's Physical Anthropology

In two recent articles, we and another set of researchers independently reanalyzed data from Franz Boas's classic study of immigrants and their descendants. Whereas we confirm Boas's overarching conclusion regarding the plasticity of cranial form, Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz argue that Boas was incorrect. Here we attempt to reconcile these apparently incompatible conclusions. We first address methodological differences between our reanalyses and suggest that (1) Sparks and Jantz posed a different set of questions than we did, and (2) their results are largely consistent with our own. We then discuss our differing understandings of Boas's original argument and of the concept of cranial plasticity. In particular, we argue that Sparks and Jantz attribute to Boas a position he explicitly rejected. When we clarify Boas's position and place the immigrant study in historical context, Sparks and Jantz's renalysis supports our conclusion that, on the whole, Boas got it right. [Keywords: Franz Boas, plasticity, anthropometry, heritability, immigrant study]     

The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905

This article reviews the interplay of the personal, institutional, and intellectual factors in the relationship between Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, his first important student. It focuses on their first decade, 1896-1905, a critical transitional period in the formation of American anthropology. After a consideration of their personal and familial contexts, it reviews Boas's role as a graduate professor to Kroeber, the beginning of an academic anthropology program at the University of California, Boas and Kroeber's collaborative and competitive relationship as museum curators, their diverging ethnographic strategies, Boas's editing of Kroeber's professional writings, and their disagreements over the organization of national professional societies (primarily the American Anthropological Association and the American Folklore Society). This article is a case study of the construction of anthropological traditions. [Keywords: Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, history of anthropology]     

Debate: Racism today: a perspective from international politics

In a recent contribution, Howard Winant aligns himself with scholars who contest the possibilities of general theories of ethnic and racial relations. He defines racism in terms of its social functions in specific historical contexts. As an approach to the constituents of 'racism today', this neglects the international dimension. In considering how the conclusions drawn from studies in one place at one time may be transferred for use in analyses elsewhere, it is important to note that the situation in the USA is in many respects exceptional. Winant also advances a theory of race formation which cannot easily be tested. An alternative approach would build on recent developments within the United Nations to identify a political framework distinct from the framework needed for socio-scientific studies. Within the political framework different components of racism are separately defined as violations of human rights.     

Marxism,racism and the construction of ‘race’ as a social and political relation: an interview with Professor Robert Miles

Robert Miles has made a significant contribution to the field of racism and ethnic studies. In his early work, Miles drew upon structuralist Marxist theorizations of capitalism to offer a historically informed analysis of racism and migrant labour (Miles 1982). This perspective placed political economy at the centre of the study of racism. In addition, Miles' critical discussions with other influential contemporaries such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 1982) raised crucial issues concerning the construction of ‘race’ as a social and political relation in Britain (Back and Solomos 2000). However, Miles became most renowned for his critique of the ‘race relations’ paradigm and his insistence that sociologists employ the concept of ‘racialization’ rather than ‘race’ (Miles 1982, 1989, 1993). Overall, Miles' work was rich both in its theoretical clarity and historical depth, and his contributions warrant critical analysis today. The following interview was conducted in December 2009.     

Linguistic Magic Bullets in the Making of a Modernist Anthropology

This article engages current debates about concepts of culture in U.S. anthropology by examining how assumptions about language shape them. Characterizing linguistic patterns as particularly inaccessible to conscious introspection, Franz Boas suggested that culture is similarly automatic and unconscious—except for anthropologists. He used this notion in attempting to position the discipline as the obligatory passage point for academic and public debate about difference. Unfortunately, this mode of inserting linguistics in the discipline, which has long outlived Boas, reifies language ideologies by promoting simplistic models that belie the cultural complexity of human communication. By pointing to the way that recent work in linguistic anthropology has questioned key assumptions that shaped Boas's concept of culture, the article urges other anthropologists to stop asking their linguistic colleagues for magic bullets and to appreciate the critical role that examining linguistic ideologies and practices can play in discussions of the politics of culture. [Keywords: Franz Boas, culture concept, linguistic anthropology, language ideologies, scientific authority]     

Revisiting Hrdlička and Boas: Asymmetries of Race and Anti-Imperialism in Interwar Anthropology

ABSTRACT  Physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička is often remembered as an institutional and political opponent of Franz Boas and as an advocate of racial typology against which the Boasian antiracialist position in American anthropology developed. I argue that Hrdlička nonetheless also has more subtle lessons to offer about the political limits of Boasian antiracism. Examining Hrdlička's engagement with the politics of Europe and East Asia from the 1920s to the 1940s, particularly with the intellectual grounding of Japanese imperialism, I suggest that he was perhaps uniquely cognizant of a "second problem of race in the world"—the racist assimilationism of the Japanese empire—vis-à-vis the Boasian grasp of race, rooted in a response to U.S. and Nazi racisms, as a category of invidious difference. Moreover, I contend that the lacuna that Hrdlička helps us identify has continued to haunt the discipline at certain key moments of Boasian critique of other ideological forces.     

Charles Mills for and against liberalism

Charles Mills both severely criticizes and reluctantly accepts liberal political theory’s approach to race and racism. In this new book, he develops contract theory’s understanding of race and racism in the effort to resuscitate liberalism from the racist deathbed on which it lies. To do this he must wrestle with political forms of black resistance that comport uneasily with liberalism, at best: nationalism notably, but also other types of racially oriented collective subjectivity, for example, identity politics. The book represents a major advance in Mills’s thought, but his work remains uneasy about the instability of race and the flexibility of racism.     

Habits,habitats, and heredity: A brief history of studies in human plasticity

There has long been controversy concerning the relative importance of environment and ancestry in determining the characteristics of living creatures including members of the human species. At the beginning of the present century most biologists and anthropologists seem to have assumed that environment had little or no effect upon our bodily traits. We inherited them. The studies of Franz Boas on Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants cast doubts upon this assumption, and provoked considerable resentment. Since 1911, however, quite a few scholars have confirmed and elaborated upon the findings of Boas. At the same time, many other studies have demonstrated secular changes bodily size and shape within quite a few different populations. The idea of bodily plasticity has therefore, by this decade, become quite acceptable. This paper recounts the historical sequence of events leading to the change in anthropological assumptions, mentioning the scholars whose work contributed to this Important advance in scientific understanding.     

The anthropometric legacy of Franz Boas

Franz Boas was responsible for obtaining anthropometric data from approximately 27,000 subjects living around the turn-of-the-century. The subjects are of Native American, Siberian and European ancestry. These data have been entered into databases and are available for research. This paper describes the circumstances under which these data were collected and discusses their research potential.     

Multivariate analysis of anthropometric data and classifications of British Columbian natives

Anthropometric data collected in native populations of British Columbia in the late 19th century by Franz Boas were analyzed by two multivariate techniques. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to test physical classificatory units devised by Boas and an ad hoc classification based on local cultural units. Both were found to have some empirical validity. Mahalanobis' D (Mahalanobis, '30) was computed between pairs of local groups, for both sexes. From these a matrix of differences was prepared and diagrams drawn to illustrate phenetic relationships among samples. By this means one cluster of groups, Interior B.C. peoples, could be distinguished and other local samples appeared distinctly different from each other. It was concluded that in the absence of genealogical data by which to identify local populations, local cultural units are preferable to more inclusive units for making empirical comparisons and classifications.     

Reenvisioning Boas and Boasian Anthropology

Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884: Journals and Letters. Ludger Miiller Wille. ed. Translated by William Barr. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 298 pp.
Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906. Douglas Cole. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1999. 360 pp.     

Chronobiology: a frontier in biology and medicine

On the occasion of Franz Halberg's 70th birthday, some of his many achievements are reviewed. We provide a historical background to the development of chronobiology; offer insight into the current state of this new science; and sketch the promise of this discipline for health care and cure. As a tribute to Franz Halberg, in an era of fast-growing technology, an attempt is made to describe his perspective of tomorrow's medicine and biology. The many students he trained throughout his productive career face the challenge of deserving the trust he placed in them and of further implementing his vision. A leader in social pediatrics put it aptly: it will take several generations of researchers to study and master his life's work.     

Claude Bourgelat and the creation of the first veterinary schools

The first veterinary school in the world was created in Lyon in 1761 by an equerry, Claude Bourgelat (1712-1779), a man renowned for his skill in horsemanship and horse medicine, a man fully able to understand the issues of his time. Aware of the scope of the physiocratic movement and of the need to improve the health of farm animals, he was able to understand the expectations of Henri-Léonard Bertin, Minister of King Louis XV, in proposing the creation of an establishment, breaking with traditional farriery. The creation of the Veterinary School of Lyon would mark a milestone: the consideration of livestock and the establishment of a profession, based on a scientific approach applied to all species. His relations, his communication skills, his European reputation and the opening of the first two schools to foreign students have ensured dissemination of this renewed vision throughout Europe, and provided these schools and their creator with a reputation that they still retain today.