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American Popular Social Science: the Boasian Legacy

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American Popular Social Science: the Boasian Legacy American Popular Social Science: The Boasian Legacy Susan Hegeman ABSTRACT This essay considers the Boasian legacy in relation to popular social scientific writing. Franz Boas is widely remembered as a founder of academic anthropology in the United States. Yet his wider historical impact rests with his lifelong battle against scientific racism, which he waged both in his more specialized academic work and in publications directed to a readership of non- specialists. Many of his students followed Boas in writing for, and reaching, a broad reading public. Indeed, some of the best-known figures in American anthropology—Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston—achieved their fame through their popularly accessible writing. I argue that popular social science is its own genre, with a distinctive aesthetic appeal that rests with presenting “interesting” and sometimes useful infor- mation. Through an analysis of some notable Boasian examples of this popular social science genre, including Hurston’s Mules and Men, I identify a distinctively modernist version of this aesthetic, which I call the aesthetics of cultural relativism. Franz Boas had a long and multi-faceted career. Yet when he is remembered as a founder of American anthropology—indeed, when he is remembered as a significant historical figure—it is for one specific thing: his lifelong battle against scientific racism. His crusade has become an ethos for the entire field of anthro- pology in the American context. It also serves as a poignant narrative focus for Boas’s own life story: a German-Jewish immigrant who brought an Enlighten- ment humanist focus to a field of study that, until then, had been largely subservi- ent to the causes of justifying white supremacy and the conquest of indigenous peoples (see Pierpont). In an era of craniometry and eugenics, and the rise of the KKK and the Nazis, Boas projected to the end of his life a consistent message about the shared intellectual and physical capacities of humans across racial and cultural divides. And indeed, by the late 1930s, when a photo of the elderly Boas graced the cover of TIME magazine, he was widely recognized as a central social- scientific opponent of racist and eugenic theories. It is an oddly fitting homage to his lasting legacy that, in the ugly circles of the racist far-right, he remains notori- ous as the founder of a “Jewish conspiracy” to destroy scientific racism (cf. Baker 156-219; Jackson). The intellectual history of Boas’s various battles against scientific racism is documented in a series of well-known episodes, including his challenge to evolu- tionary biases in displaying ethnological artifacts, his deployment of the tools of craniometry against scientific racism to demonstrate the impact of environmental factors on the skull shapes of immigrants, and his use of linguistics to prove that so-called primitive languages were systematic and capable of supporting complex abstractions (cf. Patterson 44-65). But there is perhaps less focus on the means 442 Susan Hegeman by which these fairly specialized studies reached a wider audience and made Boas such a prominent figure in broader social debates about race. It is generally understood that his contributions to the development of the culture concept— memorably described by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as “race repellant” (100)—had something to do with the popular dissemination of the anthropological critique of racism, but here as well the connections are somewhat obscure. Rather, we would do well to look at Boas’s actual contributions to popular dis- course on race as a source for his legacy. Scholars generally point to his popular book, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) as the text in which he fully developed his antiracist critique and, specifically, tied it to a discussion of African American social advancement (cf. Baker 137; Stocking 161-94). But it is also with this book, along with his public rebuttals of popular racist tracts like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920) and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), that Boas developed his lasting reputation as a key voice in debates on racial equality.1 When, in the late 1930s, the New Republic ran a series of articles on nonfiction books that had a significant impact on modern thought, The Mind of Primitive Man was counted along with works by Sigmund Freud, Oswald Spengler, Vladimir Lenin, John Dewey, and Thorstein Veblen (cf. Whitfield 431). Boas’s need to “explode periodically in print” to express his position on a wide range of political and social concerns was imitated by a significant number of his students (Boas, qtd. in Patterson 45), many of whom regularly appeared in publication venues outside of academic journals, wrote with popular audiences in mind, and achieved widespread success. Just focusing on the pre-World War II period, it is possible to develop an impressive list of books by Boas and his students that were written for nonspecialists, or that reached a broad audience. In addition to The Mind of Primitive Man, we can also count Boas’s Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). Elsie Clews Parsons was already a well-known writer of popular social science (The Old-Fashioned Woman, 1913; Fear and Convention- ality, 1914; Social Freedom, 1915; and Social Rule, 1916), when she began working closely with Boas in the mid-1910s. The prolific Margaret Mead—still the most famous American anthropologist—wrote numerous widely read books, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Growing up in New Guinea (1930), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942). Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) were both best- sellers. Benedict, the author of Race: Science and Politics (1940), co-wrote (with Gene Weltfish) the widely distributed antiracist pamphlet The Races of Mankind (1943), which was subsequently adapted into an animated cartoon and an illus- trated book (cf. Mickenberg and Nel 267-73). Zora Neale Hurston’s collections of 1 See Boas, “Rising” and Boas, “This Nordic Nonsense.” Outside of white supremacist circles, these books are mostly remembered as a footnote to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), when the stupid and snobbish Tom Buchanan references them in a portmanteau: “‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?’” (14). American Popular Social Science 443 folklore and ethnography Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938) were both written and marketed with an eye toward attracting popular readers.2 Other notable examples of Boasian anthropology written for a wider reading public are Edward Sapir’s Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921) and the collection American Indian Life (1922), with contributions by Parsons, Sapir, Paul Radin, Robert H. Lowie, and Alfred L. Kroeber.3 By emphasizing the achievement of Boasian anthropology in relation to the genre of popular social science writing, I hope to address several issues. First, it offers an occasion to consider some of the formal aspects of the Boasian writ- ten tradition. Specifically, I will give an account of the aesthetic appeal of some genres of social scientific writing and consider the possibility that popular Boas- ian anthropology possessed its own distinctive aesthetics.4 But I also hope to provide some context to an important issue in the history of Boasian anthropol- ogy, namely, the fact that some of the most lastingly famous of Boas’s students, including Mead, Benedict, Parsons, and Hurston, did not achieve conventional academic success commensurate with their historic and subsequent public reputa- tions. Though one cannot discount the role played here by prejudice against them as women, and in Hurston’s case, as an African American woman, the reasons for this relative lack of academic prestige are complex and different for each case. Hurston never earned her doctorate, in part due to insufficient financial support. But she was also an active writer of literary fiction, plays, essays, and journalism who at least at one point expressed a lack of interest in teaching, and thus in an academic career (cf. Hernández 153). Parsons, on the other hand, did not pursue a traditional professional path in part because she was born and married into a wealthy and politically powerful family (her husband Herbert Parsons served in the U.S. Congress for three terms). Mead’s predominant institutional home was the American Museum of Natural History, and both she and Benedict devoted substantial service to government agencies. Quite a bit has been written about how Benedict was overlooked for the chair of Columbia’s anthropology depart- ment after Boas’s retirement (cf. Caffrey 259-81; Young 39-51). Despite these differences in their professional histories, all these writers’ work has served as a kind of proxy for the problem of professional marginality (see Gor- don). Indeed, at various moments, Mead, Benedict, Parsons, and Hurston all re- ceived significant criticism by academic anthropologists. Perhaps most notorious is the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman’s aggressive and highly public posthumous attack on Mead—and through her, on American cultural anthropol- ogy as a whole (see Hempenstall; Murray and Darnell). One strategy to recuper- ate some of these figures for professional anthropology has been to reconceive of their writing as formative of the discipline as it should currently be practiced. 2 Both Mules and Men and Tell My Horse were published by Lippincott, which marketed them to a popular audience, often deploying racist stereotypes and sensationalism in their ad- vertising materials.
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