Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man is a work of anthropology and argument — an extended essay in ten chapters, with notes, that examines what “race” can and cannot explain about human achievement. It grew out of essays Boas had published over the preceding decades, several of them revised and enlarged for the volume, and it draws on his own fieldwork and on his report on changes in the bodily form of immigrants’ descendants. Written from within the American immigrant society of the early twentieth century, it is aimed squarely at the racial assumptions of its own moment.
“Holophrasis can hardly be taken as a fundamental characteristic of primitive languages.”
Boas’s central claim is narrow and stubborn: the belief in gifted races rests on the assumption that higher achievement means higher mental faculty, and that assumption has never been proved. Civilization, he argues, is not the product of a single people; ideas travel regardless of race, language, or distance, and historical events are more potent than native faculty. What follows is a patient dismantling — of anatomical arguments, of heredity arguments, of the supposed mental inferiority of primitive peoples — and then a reconstruction of how culture actually moves and changes.
How the Case Against Racial Hierarchy Is Built
The Preface and the Plan of the Book
Boas opens by saying the problem had occupied him for years, and that the volume gathers several essays revised and enlarged from their first appearances—”Human Faculty as Determined by Race” from 1894, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” from 1896, “The Mind of Primitive Man” from 1901, “Race Problems in America” from 1909—alongside material from his handbook of American Indian languages and from his report on changes in bodily form among immigrants’ descendants. The table of contents lays out ten chapters, moving from racial prejudice and the influence of environment and heredity through the mental traits of primitive and civilized man, race and language, the universality of cultural traits, the evolutionary viewpoint, and traits of primitive culture, to a summary and a closing chapter on race problems in the United States.
The Assumption of European Superiority
Civilized man, proud of having conquered nature, looks down on the primitive and takes the white race for a higher type. Boas asks the reader to pause over that assumption. The naïve faith in European superiority rests on two inferences: that a higher civilization proves a higher aptitude, and that every deviation from the white type is a mark of inferiority. He notes that Tacitus found the virtues of earlier stages among foreign tribes, and sets out to test both unproved premises—that achievement is chiefly due to exceptional aptitude, and that the North European type stands highest.
Civilization as a Shared Inheritance
Against the notion that races have had equal chances, Boas reviews the history of civilization. The civilizations of eastern and western Asia passed among peoples; conquerors learned from the conquered; the ancestors of today’s civilized races were then no better than primitive man. No civilization was the product of a single people—Hamitic, Semitic, Aryan, and Mongol all contributed, and ideas spread regardless of race, language, or distance. Ancient Peru and Central America stood nearly as high. The gap between the Old and New Worlds is essentially one of time, three or four thousand years, to be explained by the laws of chance rather than hereditary inferiority; Penck’s glacial investigations date man beyond a hundred thousand years, and the Magdalenian civilization not less than twenty thousand. The white race’s civilization reached all its members, while other races’ civilizations failed to reach all their tribes—evidence of remarkable assimilative power. Ancient assimilation came easily because peoples looked alike, lived near one another, and were not devastated by new diseases, as America and Polynesia were; manufacture offered no fundamental contrast, and no swamping by numbers occurred. Arab civilization surpassed many European nations, and Mohammedans civilized the negroes of the Soudan through amalgamation and polygamy; Chinese civilization spread in similar fashion. American negro inferiority, he suggests, reflects persistent race feeling. Historical events, then, are more potent than faculty, and achievement does not prove a greater gift.
Anatomy and the Argument from Brain Size
Turning to anatomy, Boas cites R. B. Bean’s claim of differences between negro and white brains in Baltimore, refuted by Franklin P. Mall; similar differences occur between long-headed and short-headed Frenchmen. He surveys features recalling lower animal forms—platycnemism, the os Incæ most frequent among Peruvians, small nasal bones, variations in arteries and muscles—found in all races but in differing degrees, perhaps human characteristics not yet stable. Races can be arranged so that one seems farthest from the higher animals, but the gap between man and animal dwarfs racial variation. The negro’s lower face, with its forward-pushed alveolar arch, is a type slightly nearer the animal, as are the broad flat noses of negro and Mongol; following Klaatsch, Stratz, and Schoetensack, he notes the Australian’s generalized traits. Yet higher races do not stand farthest from the animal in all respects: the European shares the animal ancestor’s hairiness with the Australian, the specifically human red lip is most developed in the negro, and the negro’s limb proportions diverge more from the apes than the European’s. Divergence from the ancestor developed in varying directions.
Inferences from brutish features to brutish minds seem open to serious doubt. Karl Pearson’s elaborate inquiry convinced him there is little relationship between external physical and psychical character in man, and Boas concludes that characteristics of the osseous, muscular, visceral, or circulatory systems have practically no direct relation to mental ability. Brain size is the one feature bearing directly on the question: white brain-weight, about 1360 grams, exceeds that of most other races, and cranial capacities accord—modern Europeans about 1560 cc., African negroes 1405 cc. Eminent men average larger brains, but the force of this must not be overestimated: some eminent men had unusually small brains, and most general series come from poorly nourished anatomical-institute populations, so the difference is not certainly due to higher ability.
Growth, Environment, and the Immigrant’s Body
Growth rates differ by body part: the skull is relatively large at birth and approaches its final size slowly, while limbs grow rapidly for years, so retarding or accelerating influences at different periods yield different results. Retardation appears lasting—a slowly grown child grows longer but ends too small—and illness, malnutrition, and lack of fresh air make a growing individual physiologically younger. Among members of the same race, prolonged growth accompanies unfavorable development, while abbreviated growth yields larger dimensions and superior mental activity. Rieger, Engel, and Walcher tried to explain head-form differences by mechanical conditions, muscle pressure, and infant cradle position; Ammon attributed city-country differences to natural selection, and Livi found similar contrasts in Italy, though Livi’s simpler explanation—that the city type resembles the average of the whole district—is adequate unless selection is demonstrated. Boas cannot give an example where selection’s influence on physical type is proved beyond cavil.
He demonstrated direct environmental influence by comparing European-born immigrants with their New York-born descendants: South Italians, Central Europeans, Northwest Europeans, and East European Hebrews. The results were unexpected. American-born Sicilians grew rounder-headed, narrower-faced, shorter, and lighter; American-born Central Europeans became more elongated in head and face and increased in stature and weight; the Scotch changed little beyond stature and weight; American-born Hebrews grew longer-headed, narrower-faced, taller, and heavier. Hair color showed no marked differences. The Hebrew cephalic index held near 83 among the foreign-born regardless of age at arrival, then dropped to about 82 for those born just after immigration and to 79 in the second generation—the American environment’s effect felt immediately and increasing with time. Sicilians and Neapolitans showed a similar though less sudden transition, blurred by the habit of migrating back and forth.
Domestication, Crossing, and Heredity
Crossing between distinct types has likely been very important in developing human races—common among primitive peoples, rare among wild animals, and endless among domesticated ones: Hamitic and Soudan negro intermarriage, Negritos and Malays, mixtures in Fiji, Ainu and Japanese, European and Mongol. Considering man as a domesticated being matters for understanding his mental activities, since domesticated animals behave decidedly differently from wild ones and their range of mentality seems wider.
Mental Difference as Social, Not Racial
Boas opens by crediting Waitz with the insight that a people’s culture is not simply the product of its mental faculty; rather, the faculty itself depends on the cultural stages a people has passed through and reached. Psychology, he argues, confuses two separate problems: the racial question of heredity and the social question of environment. Mental organization—the laws governing discrimination of perceptions, association with past experience, the passage from stimulus to action, and the emotions—may be hereditary, while environment works through habit, where repetition increases facility and decreases consciousness. The investigator must keep these causes apart. Since Waitz argued for the unity of the human species, mental characteristics have been treated as broadly the same everywhere, though whether races stand at different evolutionary grades remains open. The chief difficulty is that no one can say which traits of primitive man cause his low culture and which are caused by it; no large groups have been brought into real equality with whites, so their minds cannot be expected to work like ours.
Boas picks three traits for scrutiny: inhibition of impulses, power of attention, and original thought. Travellers’ tales of primitive fickleness, he says, rest on neglect of the occasions that demand control—the enraged traveller while his men chatter merrily is no fair comparison, since undertakings must be equally important to each side. Taboo prohibitions, such as the Eskimo rule against killing seals during starvation, show great self-control, as do perseverance in making utensils, the Indian youth’s fasting for his guardian spirit, and the endurance of torture by captives. Passions are simply controlled in different directions, as customs regulating relations of the sexes show. Spencer’s charge of improvidence is better called optimism: starvation is exceptional among primitive people as financial crises are among civilized ones, and provision is made for regular times of need. On concentration, Sproat’s Vancouver Island natives seemed mentally asleep and wearied by questions, but Boas, knowing those tribes personally, says the questions seemed trifling and the language foreign; their intricate exchange system requires foresight and application. On originality, prophets arise among newly converted and pagan tribes; myths change in dissemination; the ghost-dance doctrines were new yet built from their own people’s ideas, neighbors’, and missionaries’; the Nicaraguan Indians’ replies to Bobadilla show an independent attitude. Such thinkers resemble civilized philosophers, and Tarde showed imitation governs civilized and primitive alike. The differences are more apparent than real.
Structure, Heredity, and the Limits of Proof
Yet differences of structure must accompany differences of function: smaller size or fewer nervous elements would entail loss of mental energy. Some slight differences may exist between white and negro, but they are unproved; all structural differences are quantitative and overlap. Mental traits may be hereditary in families and tribes, but separating social from hereditary features seems impossible, and Galton’s work on hereditary genius opens a useful method. Boas declines to discuss hereditary traits of Jews, Gypsies, French, or Irish, since external and social causes are not eliminated; Wernich’s account of Japanese character, blaming improper nutrition, looks weak beside Japanese energy in modern development and the conflict with Russia. Malnutrition over generations might affect Bushmen and Lapps, but conclusions must be withheld. Experimental work—school-children studies, the Cambridge expedition to Torres Strait, Woodworth’s investigations at the St. Louis World’s Fair—yields results unfavourable to fundamental racial differences. On whether civilization improves the organic basis, anatomical changes resemble domestication in animals, but no progressive organic change or advance in the central nervous system can be proved; only forty or fifty generations have passed in Europe, probably fewer; highly cultured families tend to disappear; advance is more likely transmitted by education than heredity. Relapses of educated primitives—Darwin’s Fuegian, the West Australian girl who killed her husband and fled to the bush—are true but never analysed in detail; their social position was one of isolation, with ties of consanguinity linking them to uncivilized brethren. White men living alone among native tribes sink to semi-barbarous positions, and members of well-to-do families flee to the wilderness. Habits acquired in early childhood, following Freud’s assumption that forgotten incidents remain a living force, may explain traits believed inherited. These mental functions are common to humanity; present races, however primitive, have them highly developed; the average faculty of the white race is found to the same degree in a large proportion of individuals of all other races, and no reason exists to suppose they cannot reach the level of civilization represented by the bulk of our own people.
Race and Language
The negative conclusion does not prove a total lack of correlation between mental life and racial descent. Linguistic and racial relationships are still held interchangeable by some, as in discussions of the “Aryan race” identifying the blond northwest European type with the ancient Indo-European speakers. If distinct languages belonged to distinct racial types and exhibited different levels of thought, and if cultural types belonged to certain races, conclusions would be firmer. The question is whether types, languages, and cultures are so connected that each race is characterized by a combination of physical type, language, and culture—if so, classifications from any one viewpoint would agree. They have not: Blumenbach’s five races and Topinard’s schemes differ.
Type, Speech, and Culture Part Company
Anatomical type, language, and culture do not necessarily share the same fates. The Veddah of Ceylon differ fundamentally in type from the neighbouring Singhalese yet have adopted their language and borrowed cultural traits; the Japanese of northern Japan are largely Ainu in blood; the Yukaghir of Siberia retain old blood but have been assimilated in culture and language by the Tungus. Conversely, the Magyar kept their old language while mixing with Indo-European-speaking peoples and adopting European culture. The Athapascans of North America speak dialects so close they must stem from a language once spoken over a continuous area, yet the speakers differ fundamentally in type and culture. The plausible assumption is migration, intermingling, and physical change with retained speech—unprovable without historical evidence. Retention of type with changed language and retention of language with changed type often go together, as with Arabs along the north coast of Africa: the Arab element kept its language but intermarried and changed type, while natives gave up their languages but preserved type. Complete assimilation without mixture seems rare or absent. Permanence of type and language with changed culture is far more numerous; European development from prehistoric times is one endless series of such examples, since cultural assimilation occurs everywhere by imitation without blood-mixture. Every cultural area covers many languages: California, the coast of New Guinea, the area under Chinese influence. Classification based on type, language, or culture must therefore lead to different results; the Aryan problem is primarily linguistic, and assumptions of a blood-related people carrying the language and a fixed cultural type are arbitrary. Biological units appear wider than linguistic units: the European race includes Indo-European, Basque, and Ural-Altaic speakers; West African negroes speak diverse languages. The number of unrelated languages was greater in earlier times, while extinct types seem few, suggesting each early human type existed in small isolated groups each with its own language and culture; the diversity of languages in remote mountain areas is a survival of this older condition.
Custom as Feeling, Not Reason
Boas turns to the machinery of everyday conduct and finds that most of it runs without conscious thought. People in a society react alike to certain stimuli and cannot say why. Breaches of etiquette stir unpleasant emotion, and the untrained confuse traditional good manners with moral conduct—a confusion nearly inescapable even for vigorous thinkers when the subject is modesty. The history of costume shows that what was modest at one time was immodest at another; covering part of the body breeds the feeling that exposure is shameful. Propriety shifts with setting: a low-cut evening dress suits the ballroom and offends on a streetcar at midday. Fashion is not dictated by modesty; the feeling rises directly from contrast with the customary, and one would resist performing an act thought immodest or entering a society with different standards. A man in the fashion of two centuries ago invites ridicule; a hat worn indoors nettles us as rude, and the same hat in church or at a funeral stirs deeper resentment. Table manners are almost purely traditional. To smack one’s lips disgusts us, yet among the Indians a guest who failed to smack his lips would suggest he did not enjoy the meal. Constant performance makes acting otherwise practically impossible, both from unadjusted muscles and from strong emotional resistance. The reasons people give are attempts to explain existing manners, not their history—the claim that eating with a knife is improper because it might cut the mouth is doubtful, since older sharp steel forks could hurt the mouth as easily.
Taboo, Disgust, and the Reasons Invented Afterward
The taboo is where alleged reasons can best be traced. We ourselves have hardly any definite taboos, yet an outsider might view our refusal to eat certain animals as one. Ask why we do not eat dogs and the answer is only “it is not customary”; pressed, we might say it seems improper to eat animals that live with us as friends. We decline caterpillars from disgust. Cannibalism we abhor so deeply that we struggle to class it with ordinary aversions—the sacredness of human life and the fact that most animals will not eat their own kind set it apart as one of the most horrible aberrations of human nature. In all three cases disgust comes first; the reasons vary with the associated ideas. Customs once religious are continued and explained by utilitarian theories: the incest group has changed in extent, but abhorrence of marriage within it remains, now justified by ethical and utilitarian concepts rather than religious law. People with loathsome diseases were once shunned as stricken by God; now the same avoidance rests on fear of contagion. Profanity fell out of English speech first through religious reaction, then became a question of good manners. Not long ago dissent from accepted religious tenets was believed a crime; intolerance and persecution for heresy can be understood only when we recognize the violent feelings of outraged ethical principle aroused by deviation from the customary line of thought. The mind was agitated by opposition to an habitual form of thought so deeply rooted it had become part of mental life. In every case the rationalistic explanation draws on the group of concepts with which the excited emotions are connected—reasons why the new style is improper, proof that the new doctrine attacks eternal truth. Close introspection shows these reasons only interpret our displeasure; opposition is dictated not by conscious reasoning but by the emotional effect of an idea dissonant with the habitual. Custom obeyed so regularly becomes automatic, ordinarily without consciousness, its emotional value slight; yet the more automatic an action, the harder the opposite, and seeing another break the custom excites the strongest attention and displeasure.
Primitive Association and the Scientific Method
Primitive culture, Boas argues, is marked by associations of heterogeneous phenomena—natural events with individual emotion, social groupings with religious concepts, decorative art with symbolic meaning—connections that tend to disappear as civilization advances, though many persist. The primitive mind links a concept with ideas related by emotional states where the civilized mind links it with causality. Primitive associations are rational only to primitive man, and ours look heterogeneous to him. This explains primitive conservatism: emotional associations prevail and produce resistance to change, while civilized actions performed as means to rational ends carry little emotional value and are readily altered. Reasoning cannot overcome emotional resistance in the average primitive individual; change requires a powerful event or economic and political upheaval. The history of science shows old ideas overthrown only when a new generation arises. Civilization eliminates social associations of sense-impressions and activities, substituting intellectual ones, and the loss of conservatism does not extend to unconscious habitual activities. A footnote notes that some Australian tribes have four exogamic groups, which Cunow explains through two exogamic units and generation-based naming.
Summary of the Argument
The belief in gifted races, Boas concludes, rests on the assumption that higher achievement means higher mental faculty, and little evidence supports it. No proof exists that the races with the highest civilization are phylogenetically more advanced; there is no direct relation between physical habitus and mental endowment. Environment changes bodily form within limits, as rural-to-city transfer and European immigration to America show. Heredity determines fundamental racial features, and intermarriage of long-separated branches matters. Language, implements, and reasoning belong to all mankind; claims that primitive man lacks inhibition, attention, originality, or clear reasoning cannot be maintained. No correlation appears between human types, languages, and cultures; languages are moulded by thought, not thought by languages. Similarities in cultural traits are more apparent than real, often convergent; cultural stage depends on historical causes, regardless of race.
Race Problems in the United States
British immigrants found the Indians; the Dutch settled the Hudson, Germans Pennsylvania, Spaniards the Southwest, the French the Mississippi Basin and Great Lakes, with British immigration outnumbering the rest. Indian blood is insignificant; the Negro forms about one-eighth of the nation; Asiatic immigration has dwindled in importance. Immigration has shifted from northwestern Europe to Italians, Slavic peoples, Hungarians, Roumanians, and East European Hebrews. Dr. Ridolfo Livi showed northern and southern Italian types to be distinct. Europe shows no racial purity; Spain, England, and others were repeatedly mixed. Early migrations involved small numbers; modern transatlantic migration involves millions and favors segregation. The concern for racial purity is largely imaginary; no evidence predicts a lower status for new American types, and investigation, not speculation, is needed.
Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Negro Problem
If foreigners’ fertility stays high without a correspondingly higher child death-rate, the more fertile type’s physical influence will gradually grow—but southern and eastern European immigration is too recent to answer this for at least twenty years. Intermarriage between immigrant types matters equally, yet census data give no clear insight; Italian statistics are especially hard, since married men come, earn, return to families, and may send for them later. In large cities nationalities separate into quarters, but intermarriage between descendants is likely more common than figures suggest; experience with Americans whose grandparents immigrated is that most social traces of descent have vanished. Boas calculates that where two types intermingle equally, fewer than one person in ten thousand will be of pure descent in the fourth generation; at eight to one, fewer than thirty in a thousand of the more numerous part.
What the Anatomy and the Measurements Actually Show
Boas takes the anatomical case seriously before he rejects it. He surveys the features that supposedly recall lower animals — platycnemism, the interparietal bone, small nasal bones, variations in arteries and muscles — and finds them scattered through all races, differing only in degree of variability. Races can indeed be arranged so that one looks farther from the ape, but the gap between man and animal is so wide that racial variations shrink beside it. The European has the largest brain and a small face with a high nose; yet the European also shares with the Australian the strongest retention of ancestral hairiness, while the specifically human red lip is most developed in the negro, whose limb proportions stand more markedly apart from the higher apes than the European’s do. Divergence from the animal ancestor, in other words, ran in different directions, not up a single ladder.
Then the brain. Whites’ brains are heavier than those of most other races — about 1360 grams for the white male — and cranial capacities tell the same story. Eminent men average larger brains than the general population. Boas does not wave this away; he notes that not every eminent man has a large brain, and that most brains in the general series come from anatomical institutes whose subjects were malnourished and poorly circumstanced, while eminent men were well fed. Karl Pearson’s elaborate inquiry convinced him there is little relationship between external physical and psychical character in man. The physiognomic read — the receding forehead, the heavy jaw — belongs to muscular development from habitual activity, not to faculty.
Environment, Heredity, and the Immigrant’s Skull
The book’s most concrete evidence comes from the measurement of immigrants and their American-born children. Boas compared South Italians, Central Europeans, Northwest Europeans, and East European Hebrews, tracking head measurements, stature, weight, and hair color. The results surprised him. American-born Sicilians grew rounder-headed, with narrower faces, shorter and lighter. American-born Central Europeans grew more elongated, taller, heavier. Hebrews born in America developed longer, narrower heads and greater stature. Hair color barely moved. The cephalic index of Hebrews born abroad held steady around 83 no matter what age they arrived; for those born just after their parents’ immigration it dropped to about 82, and in the second generation to 79. The American environment acted immediately and then deepened with time.
Heredity still rules the essentials: the descendants of negroes will always be negroes, of whites, whites. Boas examines half-blood descendants of Indian mothers and white fathers and finds face width reverting to one parental type or the other rather than settling at an average — what Karl Pearson called alternating inheritance, and what Felix von Luschan saw in Asia Minor. His study of New York Hebrews shows that the more dissimilar the parents, the more variable the children. Each parent’s hereditary intensity he estimates at about one-third. He treats man as a domesticated being, and domestication — including the endless crossing that primitive peoples practice far more than wild animals do — widens the range of mentality.
The Primitive Mind Is Not a Lower Mind
Against the charge that primitive peoples lack inhibition, attention, and originality, Boas sets concrete cases. The Eskimo forbidden to kill seals during starvation exercises self-control no traveller’s anecdote credits him with. The intricate exchange systems of the North Pacific coast demand foresight and application; Sproat’s Vancouver Island natives seemed mentally asleep only because the questions put to them were trifling and the language foreign. Prophets arise among newly converted tribes; the ghost-dance doctrines were new even as they drew on native ideas, neighbours’ ideas, and missionaries’. G. Tarde showed imitation governs civilized and primitive alike. The differences, Boas concludes, are more apparent than real — and where structural differences exist, they are quantitative and overlapping. The average faculty of the white race, he writes, is found to the same degree in a large proportion of individuals of all other races.
Language gets the same treatment. Alleged “alternating sounds” are definite intermediate sounds, not vagueness. A limited sound system is a necessity for rapid speech, not a poverty. Every language classifies — the Eskimo’s separate words for snow in its various states, the Dakota stems for gripping — and which ideas get simple terms depends on what a people cares about. Race, language, and culture do not travel together: the Veddah adopted Singhalese speech, the Magyar kept their language while mixing with others, the Athapascans share close dialects across fundamentally different types and cultures.
Why Similar Customs Are Not One Story
Similar traits among distant peoples — the land of souls across a river, the Phaëton legend, the blow-gun in America and Malaysia — tempt the evolutionary anthropologist to arrange all cultures on one sequence from simple to complex. Boas refuses. Convergent evolution from distinct beginnings produces the same forms: geometrical decoration may come from realistic representation, from an artist’s play with technique, or from technique suggesting animal forms. Masks deceive spirits, represent them, commemorate the dead, or illustrate myths. “Totemism” bundles together unrelated psychological elements. And simplicity is no proof of antiquity — primitive languages are often more complex than Latin or English, primitive music and design tax a virtuoso. Diffusion, meanwhile, is everywhere: tobacco and cassava spread across Africa after the discovery of America; folk-tales travel from Morocco to the North American prairies. Custom itself, he shows in a brilliant closing movement, rests on emotion and habit, with reasons invented afterward — we call dogs inedible and cannibalism horrible and cannot say why, and the heretic was persecuted because the new idea jarred against habitual thought, not because anyone weighed its logic.
The Book’s Afterlife
The summary chapter states the negative conclusion plainly: no proof exists that the races with the highest civilization are phylogenetically more advanced, and no direct relation holds between physical habitus and mental endowment. The final chapter turns to the United States — the negligible Indian blood, the negro forming about one-eighth of the nation, immigration shifting from northwestern Europe to Italians, Slavs, Hungarians, Roumanians, and East European Hebrews. Racial purity, Boas observes, is largely imaginary; Europe was repeatedly mixed. Whether the newer immigrants’ fertility will shift the national type cannot be answered for at least twenty years, and intermarriage statistics are nearly impossible to collect. What is needed is investigation, not speculation. That demand — for measurement over assumption — is what the book left to the discipline that followed it.
