Franz Boas published Anthropology and Modern Life in 1928, while he was professor of anthropology at Columbia University. It is a work of argument, not narrative: nine chapters that move from the definition of anthropology through race, nationalism, eugenics, criminology, cultural stability, and education to a closing comparison of modern civilization with primitive culture. Boas writes as a scientist addressing the public, using the methods and findings of anthropology to test the assumptions behind the social policies of his day.
The book’s central claim is that the principles of anthropology illuminate the social processes of the present. Boas insists that the study of “exotic” peoples is not a collection of curiosities but a way of teaching “what to do and what to avoid.” Two fundamental concepts organize the argument: race and the stability of culture. Around these he builds a sustained critique of the belief that biology determines social life.
How the Case Against Racial Determinism Builds
The Anthropologist’s Vantage Point
Boas opens by clearing away a stubborn misconception: that anthropology is a cabinet of curiosities about exotic peoples, good for amusement and nothing more. Its principles, he insists, bear directly on the social processes of the present and teach us what to do and what to avoid. The anthropologist is not the anatomist, the physiologist, or the psychologist. Those sciences study the individual as a type; anthropology studies the individual only as a member of a racial or social group, asking how differences are distributed and how far they range within the group. It borrows from individual anatomy, physiology, and psychology but applies them to collectives. Bodily form follows ancestry and living conditions; bodily function follows social conditions, as a meat diet differs from a vegetable one. Mental reactions differ between the Indians of the western plateaus and the ancient Mexicans—one race, but a more complex organization. Economic life, social organization, religion, art: none of these can be handled by isolating the individual. Pure science, Boas grants, concerns only the interrelations of phenomena, not their usefulness, as in physics and chemistry; yet anthropological problems touch our intimate life, not least the factors governing how children develop. Two fundamental concepts frame what follows: race, and the stability of culture.
The Vagueness of Race
Cultural contrasts correlated with racial types—Europeans against East Asiatics until the Japanese adopted European patterns, Europeans against native Australians, African Negroes, American Indians—have led many to assume that each race carries its own mental character. In America, fears of racial intermixture and laws controlling population growth rest on such assumptions, and cultural and bodily differences breed antagonisms rationalized as instinctive racial antipathies. Boas finds little clarity in the word race. Racial characteristics ought to mean traits determined by heredity in which all members of the group participate: the Swede’s lack of pigmentation, straight or wavy hair, narrow elevated nose, against the Negro’s deep pigmentation, frizzly hair, wide flat nose. But no anatomist can certainly tell a Swede’s brain from a Negro’s. The nearer two races are related, the more traits they share; a Dane cannot be identified from bodily traits alone, since tall blond long-headed people occur in Germany, France, even Italy. Strict racial heredity would require that all members partake of the traits; forms peculiar to some members are not true racial characteristics. North Italians are round-headed, Scandinavians long-headed, yet intermediate forms might belong to either group. We are misled by general impressions into subjective types—the typical Swede, the typical Sicilian—which reveal nothing about hereditary composition. A Swede in Scotland would see many of his own type plus a dark, tall, long-headed type and incline to call the unfamiliar one racially distinct; a Scotchman in Sweden would note many blonds like himself. We classify American Indians the same way, as looking Asiatic, East European, or Jewish. Extreme forms—the North European blond, the Armenian with high nose and high head flat behind—are wrongly taken for pure types; biologically this is unjustifiable, since we know neither their ancestry nor how their descendants may vary.
Fraternities and Family Lines
Heredity transmits characteristics from ancestors to offspring, and a race is supposed to be a group of common descent—yet that descent cannot be proved. Only a family group of brothers and sisters, a fraternity, demonstrably represents hereditarily transmitted qualities. Fraternities scatter around a middle value; one could speak of racial heredity only if all fraternities in the race were alike. In fact family lines vary considerably, and a fraternity in one race may be duplicated in another. No typical New Yorker can be picked from a single family—English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Armenian, Negro lines all differ—and conditions in France are similar, with blond Northwestern, darker Central European, and Mediterranean types, so there is no racial unity or racial heredity. In old inbred communities—landowners in small European villages, the high nobility of Europe, isolated tribes—intermarrying families grow alike. The Eskimos of North Greenland, cut off for centuries and never exceeding a few hundred, bear considerable likeness, though family-line similarity is unknown. An isolated Tennessee valley where people intermarried for a century shows very similar family lines. With continued inbreeding, family lines become alike whether the ancestry is homogeneous or mixed, and racial differences then appear between siblings leaning toward different ancestral strains. The Bastaards of South Africa, an old mixture of Dutch and Hottentot, and the Chippewa of eastern Canada, descendants of French and Indians, are inbred communities with similar family lines but strongly differing siblings. Modern city life works against inbreeding; the larger, denser, more mobile the population, the more diverse the family lines. Despite apparent homogeneity, the Swedish nation holds many family lines—some typical blonds, others with hereditary dark hair and brown eyes.
Environment, Occupation, and the Limits of Heredity
Anatomical form is only partly hereditary; environment and occupation modify it. Records of European male stature since the mid-nineteenth century show average heights up by more than an inch, though improved public health muddies this as proof; stronger evidence comes from descendants of European settlers in America, taller than their parents, presumably from more favorable conditions. Occupation shapes the body—the laborer’s hand against the musician’s, limbs by habitual posture, the legs of the oriental who squats. Head and face forms are not quite stable and respond to environment, so after migration a child will not be quite like the parent. All such changes are slight and do not touch essential hereditary character, yet they are not negligible: a Negro will never become a European, but minor differences between European populations may owe more to environment than to heredity. Racial heredity, strictly, applies only when all individuals of a race share certain anatomical features; family lines within a race differ considerably, and similar lines occur in contiguous territories. Vague impressions of types prove nothing biologically, and identifying apparently identical types across differently composed populations is inadmissible; each individual must be understood as a member of his group. Heredity ordinarily concerns family lines, not races. Comparing races is justifiable only if the results are not applied to individuals: among Europeans a large-brained group may be fifty per cent against twenty per cent among Negroes, leaving thirty per cent unmatched.
The Ladder of the Animal Form
Can races be arranged in an ascending series from the ancestral animal form? Single traits can be serially ordered, but differently for each trait. The ancestral form had a flat nose; Bushmen, Negroes, and Australians have flat, broad noses, while Mongoloids, Europeans, and particularly Armenians have narrow, prominent noses, farthest from the animal. Apes have narrow lips; Whites thin, many Mongoloid types fuller, Negroes thickest. Australians, Europeans, and a few scattered tribes have the amplest body hair; Mongols the least. The order of difference from animals is not the same across traits.
The Case Against Creative Eugenics
The eugenist who wants more than to eliminate the unfit must first say which strains are best to cultivate. With chickens or Indian corn the desired end is clear—many heavy eggs, a large yield of good corn—but in man it is unclear whether we want physical excellence, mental ability, creative power, or artistic genius. Given the fundamental differences among the ideals of distinct civilizations, we have no right to stamp modern ideals as final and suppress what does not fit. Modern life weights logic above beauty; raising a generation of logical thinkers while suppressing vigorous emotional life would imply an overestimation of present standards that Boas finds intolerable. The precise cultural forms cannot be foretold because they are culturally, not biologically, determined, though within limits emotional intensity and logical vigor could be increased or decreased by organic selection. Without a selection of standards eugenic practice is impossible, but history should make us hesitate to set standards for all time. This concerns our right to apply creative eugenic principles, not whether practical results can be attained; social factors outweigh biological ones. Creating the best human types by selective mating is hardly practical now, dwelling only as an ideal in enthusiasts’ minds.
Immediate eugenics concerns eliminating burdensome strains and suppressing the progeny of the defective classes. Boas doubts eugenics alone will materially succeed, since no amount of selection will overcome social conditions that raise a poverty- and disease-stricken proletariat, which would be reborn from the best stock so long as those conditions persist. Eliminated defectives would be replaced by new groups pushed into the deadly environment; defectives would certainly remain. Amelioration of the social conditions of the poor is required, which would raise many apparently defective persons. Knowledge of heredity permits saying certain pathological conditions are hereditary and that apparently healthy parents of defective strains likely have defective descendants; numbers can even be predicted. The eugenist must decide whether to suppress all normal individuals in such families to avoid defectives, or carry the defectives as a burden for the sake of healthy children—a question not decidable scientifically but by ethical and social standards. Many defective families produced individuals who gave civilization its greatest treasures; eugenists might have prevented Beethoven’s father from having children, depriving mankind of Beethoven’s genius.
Another aspect is more vital. Eugenics aims to raise a better race and do away with increasing suffering by eliminating those hereditarily destined to suffer and cause suffering; the humanitarian conquest of suffering and the ideal of raising human efficiency make eugenics attractive. Boas believes the human mind and body are so constituted that attaining these ends would destroy society; the wish to eliminate unnecessary suffering is divided by a narrow margin from the wish to eliminate all suffering. This ideal is unattainable: labor and conflict of duties always bring suffering that must be borne; many works of sublime beauty are the fruit of mental agony, and we should be poor if willingness to suffer disappeared. Cultivating this ideal makes yesterday’s discomfort today’s suffering, and eliminating discomforts leads to disastrous effeminacy. Increasing demands for self-perfection intensify this: the more complex our civilization and extended our technical skill and knowledge, the more energy demanded for highest efficiency and the less admissible that working capacity be diminished by suffering. We drift toward a danger-line where the individual will no longer bear discomfort or pain for the continuance of the race, and emotional life is so repressed by desire for self-perfection—or by self-indulgence—that the coming generation is sacrificed to the selfishness of the living. The phenomenon at the end of antiquity, when no children were born to replace passing generations, is repeated now in ever widening circles; the more vigorously eugenic ideals of eliminating suffering and of self-development are held up, the sooner we drift toward destruction of the race. Eugenics should not deceive us into trying to raise a race of supermen nor into eliminating all suffering and pain. Its proper field is suppressing defective classes whose deficiencies are proved by rigid methods to be hereditary, and preventing unions that unavoidably lead to disease-stricken progeny; how much can and should be attempted depends on careful studies of the laws of heredity. Eugenics is not a panacea but a dangerous sword that may turn its edge against those who rely on its strength.
The Criminal Type and Its Disproof
Criminology follows. A whole science has developed on the assumption of a biologically determined criminal type and hereditary transmission of criminality. The Italian school led by Lombroso endeavored to define the criminal type and the physical characteristics of criminals addicted to various crimes; a number of stigmata were established believed to characterize a person as criminal. If proved, treatment would be simplified, making it possible to select all criminals before commission of a crime and protect society. These extreme hopes have not been fulfilled, and the previous considerations make it plausible they could not be, because the interrelation between gross bodily form and mentality is not close. All that has been proved is that many criminals are defective mentally and physically; it is not surprising that anomalies accompanying defectiveness are found among them more frequently than among the socially normal, but the presence of any one stigma does not prove a born criminal. Careful statistical study has shown alleged stigmata—such as absence of the lobe of the ear and irregularities in the position of the teeth—are more frequent in local noncriminal groups than among criminals, so they cannot be considered significant; neither is there a clear physiological relation between the alleged stigmata and social or even physical defects. Goring made a most careful examination of the criminal population; his general results are worth quoting: “For statistical evidence, one assertion can be dogmatically made: It is, that the criminal is differentiated by inferior stature, by defective intelligence and, to some extent, by his antisocial proclivities; but that, apart from”—and here the notes break off.
Habit, Tool, and the Stability of Culture
Habitual motor actions, embedded in tools, furniture, speech, and symbols, become automatic and stabilize culture, while meanings and interpretations change more readily than the actions themselves. The Eskimo throwing board shows how: a groove holds the lance, the far end moves faster than the hand, and accuracy depends on the hand’s intimate familiarity with the board. Forms differ by region—broad and heavy with thumb-and-finger grips in Labrador and farther north, slender with a differently arranged grip in Alaska—so a hand accustomed to the wide board needs considerable time to learn the narrow one. A fundamentally different implement occurs in Australia; Boas presumes an Australian trying an Eskimo board would fail to hit his game. Modern tools work the same way: the plane handle’s form facilitates our movements and fixes habitual ones. Posture follows: we sit on chairs with backs supported and feet on the floor, while Indians sit on the ground, legs forward or sideways, or squat between the feet—impossible for most of us. Furniture expresses motor habits and compels each generation to follow them, stabilizing and automatizing them. The piano keyboard’s permanence and the alphabet’s complexity illustrate resistance to change.
Speech is man’s most automatic activity; language supplies forms for new cultural needs, and words no longer needed disappear. A Vancouver Island Indian says not “the man is dead” but “this man who has passed away lies dead on the floor of this house”
Double Standards and the Moral Life
Boas turns to ethics, and finds the old tribal line between insider and outsider still drawn in modern life. Legislation that discriminates between citizens and foreigners, protective tariffs hostile to outsiders—these express a double ethical standard, one for fellows and another for strangers. Modern society also carries a duty of self-perfection that seems absent in primitive life; simple societies hold to a single standard of conduct, free of the conflicting valuations of modern times. The Eskimo lives free of human control yet is hemmed in by material culture, beliefs, and tradition, knowing no group with different standards. In Samoa, the lack of stratification into groups with distinct ideals makes new thought difficult. Rare misfits do occur—a timid, unambitious nobleman, an aggressive, ambitious commoner among the Northwest Coast Indians—but such cases are rare, and the individual finds it hard to impress himself on his environment. Conduct never matches the ethical code; obedience depends on social and religious control. Modern society holds each person responsible, while most primitive societies lack strict accountability, though fear of supernatural punishment may substitute. There is no evolution of moral ideas: lying, theft, murder, and rape are discountenanced among equals in a closed society. Progress in ethical conduct rests on recognizing larger groups as sharing the closed society’s rights, and on increasing social control.
The Meaning of Progress
Defining progress in ethical ideas is difficult, and universally valid progress in social organization harder still, since what counts as progress depends on the standard one chooses—anarchist, voluntarily regimented, or powerfully controlled. Only progress that depends on knowledge aiding safety, health, and comfort is absolute. Valid progress in social forms is tied to advance in knowledge, rests on a wider concept of humanity, and weakens conflicts between societies: the outsider is no longer rightless prey, and intertribal duties are recognized through fear of retaliation, intermarriage, or other means, so that tribal solidarity is liable to break down. This expansion weakens the concept of status fixed at birth. Civilization shows status determined by birth or later act losing force; citizenship and marriage remain obligatory statuses, with marriage weakening. Earlier, the status of nobleman, serf, or guild member was fixed; in complex primitive societies, clan, age group, or society status was often absolutely determined, with unescapable obligations. Individual freedom has been increasing.
Equality and the Rise of Leadership
Observations on the multitude of social forms and human variability illuminate modern political questions: the demand for equality, sexual relations, and the denial of individual property rights. Anatomy, physiology, and psychology show that equality does not exist—ability and vigor are unevenly distributed and depend on age and sex. Even without organization implying subordination, leadership develops: Eskimo society is fundamentally anarchical, yet tribal movements are determined by leaders to whose energy, skill, and experience others submit, and the man, the family provider, determines the household’s movements. Historical conditions determine leaders’ powers: monarchical institutions spread over much of the Old World, democratic over the New. Wherever communal work was needed, recognized leaders sprang up; among North American Indians averse to centralized control, the buffalo hunt required strict police regulations, since disorganized individual hunting would endanger the food supply. Hunt and war particularly require leadership; submission depends on organizational complexity, the need for joint action, and conflicts arising from individual occupations. The assumption that all leadership is an aberration from primitive nature and an expression of lust for power cannot be maintained: man is gregarious, living in closed societies, with new ones always springing up; almost all closed animal societies have leaders and often rank orders, though conditions in the primitive human horde were probably different.
The Relation of the Sexes
Setting aside property rights, everywhere there is a clear distinction between men’s and women’s occupations. The woman, encumbered much of her mature life by care of young children, is tied to the home and hindered in mobility; for this reason more than any other she cannot participate in the strenuous life of hunter and warrior. Division of duties by sex is not unusual among gregarious animals. Domestic occupations do not necessarily preclude women from higher cultural activities: skilled in varied technical activities, they are in some cases creative artists, while men devoted to the chase do not participate much in artistic production. Where a complex economy prevails and wealth depends on managing produce secured by household members, her influence in social or even political matters may be important; she is not excluded from religious activities and acts as shaman or priestess. Since unmarried women are all but unknown among primitive tribes, womanhood’s position is practically determined by the limitations imposed by child-bearing and child care. Infant mortality is high and intervals between births correspondingly short; with the modern decrease in infant mortality, voluntary reduction of children, and increasing numbers of unmarried women, women’s movements have become freer and a fundamental cause of differentiation between men’s and women’s social positions removed. Not solely economic pressure but the removal of child-bearing limitations has led to demands for wider opportunities and equal rights. Women’s cultural values in primitive society make us doubt any fundamental difference in creative power between the sexes; imponderable differences in the treatment of young children, parental attitudes toward sons and daughters, and the differentiated status inherent in our tradition outweigh actual differences. Creative power and independence seem largely independent of physiologically determined differences in interests and character. The danger in modern woman’s desire for freedom lies in intentional suppression of child-bearing functions that might hinder free activity; society will always need enough women to bear children and enough willing to devote themselves lovingly to bringing them up.
Marriage as an Economic Institution
Study of foreign cultures shows that permanent marriage is not based primarily on permanence of sexual love between two individuals but is essentially regulated by economic considerations; formal marriage is connected with the transfer of property.
Race as a Biological and Social Problem
Boas begins by dismantling the ordinary notion of race. A racial characteristic, strictly speaking, is a trait determined by heredity in which all members of the group participate. By that standard, races are nearly impossible to identify. Family lines within any nation vary enormously, and similar lines appear in different populations. The “typical” Swede or Sicilian is a subjective impression, not a biological fact. Heredity, Boas argues, ordinarily concerns family lines rather than races, and comparisons between races are justifiable only if the results are never applied to individuals.
He then turns to the body itself. Stature has increased among Europeans since the mid-nineteenth century, and the children of immigrants grow taller than their parents. Occupation shapes the hand and the posture. Head and face forms shift with environment. These changes are slight, but they show that anatomical form is only partly hereditary. Attempts to arrange races in an ascending series fail because the order differs for each trait: in nose form, in lips, in body hair, the ranking is never the same. Brain size overlaps so markedly between races that no individual can be identified by it, and the correlation between gross brain structure and function is too slight to support any inference about intelligence. Boas adds a striking point: modern races are domesticated forms. Fire, tools, and artificial protection made man the oldest domesticated animal, and traits once read as “primitive” may be later acquisitions stabilized by that domestication.
The social consequences follow. Race consciousness exists and must be studied, but Boas doubts that it is instinctive. Its intensity varies from place to place—strong between White and Negro in the United States, much weaker in Brazil and Santo Domingo—and no instinctive hostility between human races has ever been observed. What we call racial antipathy belongs to the psychology of the closed society, the group that treats every outsider as an enemy. The Negro, recognizable by bodily appearance, is automatically placed in his class; a red-haired group believed to have undesirable character would be segregated in the same way. Race feeling is a habit of exclusion, not a law of nature.
Culture, Nation, and the Individual
Ethnology, Boas shows, has never needed racial descent to explain culture. Tylor, Spencer, Bastian, and Ratzel all worked without it, and the distribution of inventions and customs—spear-throwers, blowguns, totemic ideas, age societies—follows historical contact, not racial lines. Similar forms appear among peoples of entirely different descent.
From this base Boas examines nationalism. Language seems to be the bond of national life, but he calls unity of language “more an idealized concept than a real bond.” Dialect and class divide speakers of the same tongue; educated Europeans of different nations have more in common with each other than with their own uneducated classes. What makes a nation is a community of emotional life arising from everyday habits, forms of thought, feeling, and action. Nationality has been a creative force, but when a fictitious racial or national unit is set up, the free unfolding of mind becomes an excuse for imperial ambition. Federation of nations, Boas argues, is the next necessary step in human evolution, no more Utopian than nationalism was a century earlier.
The chapter on eugenics applies the same skepticism. Before selecting for better “strains,” the eugenist must say which strains are best, and Boas finds no scientific answer: modern ideals cannot be stamped as final. Social factors outweigh biological ones, and no selection will overcome conditions that produce a poverty-stricken proletariat. Many defective families have produced individuals who gave civilization its greatest treasures; eugenists might have prevented Beethoven’s father from having children. Eugenics, he concludes, is not a panacea but a dangerous sword that may turn its edge against those who rely on its strength. Criminology receives similar treatment: Lombroso’s criminal type has not held up, and Goring’s careful statistics show the alleged stigmata are unreliable.
Habit, Stability, and the Reach of Education
The book’s middle chapters turn to culture’s inertia. Habitual motor actions—the grip of an Eskimo throwing board, the posture of a chair, the piano keyboard, the alphabet—become automatic and stabilize culture, while meanings change more readily than the actions themselves. The same Sun Dance serves as war prayer, illness pledge, or disease preventive; Plains designs keep their form while their meanings vary. Actions are more stable than thoughts, and when actions are raised to consciousness they are rationalized after the fact. Intolerance, from the Inquisition to modern nationalism, rests on the impossibility of changing automatic thought.
Education, for Boas, is where this insight matters most. Physiological age varies widely among children of the same chronological age, and the body does not develop as a unit. Group averages can guide mass selection, but they cannot be applied to individuals. More importantly, early habits are the most stable and the least subject to reason. The Eskimo believe themselves perfectly free while innumerable restrictions determine their behavior; we are no different. To educate for freedom, a society must prevent unreasoned habits from taking hold.
The Masses, the Intellectuals, and the Meaning of Progress
In the closing chapters Boas turns to modern civilization itself. The educated classes, he argues, are controlled by specialized ideals inherited from the past and are often conventional and tradition-bound; the masses, less attached to tradition, respond more quickly to the demands of the hour, and their ethical ideals are human rather than class ideals. He would sooner trust the masses’ judgment on fundamental human problems, though not on technical ones. He does not believe the past can be cast away; the task is to free ourselves of traditional prejudice, keep what is useful, and free future minds to correct our mistakes.
The final chapter asks whether absolute standards exist in social science. They do not: valuations differ between cultures and cannot be compared, and the anthropologist must free himself from the judgments of his own culture to study others on their own basis. Progress is absolute only where knowledge aids safety, health, and comfort; in social forms it means the widening of the closed society’s rights to larger groups and the weakening of status fixed at birth. On equality, leadership, and the relation of the sexes, Boas draws on the variety of social forms to show that inequality is not a biological necessity, that leadership arises wherever joint action is needed, and that women’s subordination rests on the limitations of child-bearing rather than on any proved difference in creative power. Marriage, likewise, is shown to rest on economic arrangements rather than on the permanence of romantic love.
Why the Book Still Matters
Anthropology and Modern Life appeared at a moment when racial and eugenic arguments were shaping public policy on both sides of the Atlantic, and its patient dismantling of those arguments gave later critics a scientific vocabulary for resisting them. Boas’s insistence that race is a vague category, that culture cannot be explained by descent, and that the anthropologist must suspend his own valuations remains a foundation of cultural anthropology. The book also shows the discipline turning its tools on its own society—on immigration law, education, criminology, and the position of women—rather than only on distant peoples. Its prose is plain and its examples concrete, and its central warning, that a science of heredity can become a sword turned against those who trust it, has lost none of its edge.
