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What's New in Science and Race since the 1930s?: Anthropologists and Racial Essentialism

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 72; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-6563.2010.00263.x

1540-6563

Hamilton Cravens,

History of Science and Medicine

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Hamilton Cravens is professor of History at Iowa State University where he teaches courses in intellectual history. He is the author or editor of nine books, including the forthcoming Imagining the Good Society: The Social Sciences in the American Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).Notes Hamilton Cravens is professor of History at Iowa State University where he teaches courses in intellectual history. He is the author or editor of nine books, including the forthcoming Imagining the Good Society: The Social Sciences in the American Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).1. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, New York: Oxford UP, 2006, 48–174; on Iberian "racism" on the eve of colonization, see ibid., 64, 70–76. See also Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black. American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1968.2. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975.3. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind. The Debate on Afro‐American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, New York: Harper and Row, 1970; William B. Stanton, The Leopard's Spots. Scientific Attitudes Towards Race 1815–1859, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1960; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist UP, 1963; George W. Stocking, Jr, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1968.4. See, for example, Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution. The Heredity‐Environment Controversy, 1900–1941, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988 (first ed. 1978).5. On this divorce, see, for example, Paul L. Farber and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Race and Science. Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America, Corvallis, OR: Oregon State UP, 2009.6. An excellent general history of anthropology is Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. I have relied to a considerable extent on this work. Harris's work is essentially a treatment of scientific theory, thereby providing a perspective different from recent histories of anthropology (and other social sciences) that stress institutional and "professional" history.7. Franz Boas, "Human Faculty as Determined by Race,"Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 43, 1894, 301–27, as reprinted in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, New York: Basic Books, 1974, 231–42.8. See Cravens, Triumph of Evolution, 89–120, especially 105–110.9. See John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, & The Birth of Anthropology, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 2002; Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann, eds., The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth‐Century Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. See note 19 for some of Dilthey's key works.10. See for example Franz Boas, The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, New York: AMS Press, 1975.11. Franz Boas, "What is a Race?,"The Nation 120, 1925, 89–91; Alexander A. Goldenweiser, "Can There Be a 'Human Race'?,"The Nation 120, 1925, 462–3; Edward Sapir, "Let Race Alone,"The Nation 120, 1925, 211–13.12. Melville J. Herskovits, The American Negro: A Study in Race Crossing, New York: Knopf, 1928.13. Franz Boas, "Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,"United States Senate Document 208, Sixty‐First Congress, Second Session, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911, passim; see also Boas, "Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants" in Franz Boas, Race, Language, and Culture, New York: Macmillan Company, 1912, 60–75.14. Herskovits, American Negro.15. Clark Wissler, The American Indian: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the New World, New York: D.C. McMurtie, 1917; Clark Wissler, The American Indian, New York: Oxford UP, 1938 (first ed. 1922); Alfred Louis Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, Berkeley, CA: U. of California P., 1938.16. See, for instance, A.L. Kroeber, "Stimulus Diffusion,"American Anthropologist 1, 1940, 1–20.17. Alfred L. Kroeber wrote probably the most important and thoughtful of the Boasians' "culture‐area" studies (see A.L. Kroeber, ed., Handbook of the Indians of California, Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 78, 1925; A.L. Kroeber and H. Driver, "Quantitative Expression of Cultural Relationships,"University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 29, 1932, 253–423; A.L. Kroeber, Configurations of Culture Growth, Berkeley, CA: U. of California P., 1944. For the growing scientific skepticism and of criticism, see for example Harris, Rise, 333–42.18. See for example Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, eds. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989, and Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern & Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society, ed. H.P. Rickman, New York: Harper, 1962 (first ed. 1961).19. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.20. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.21. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, New York: William Morrow, 1928; Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea, New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1930; Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York: William Morrow Books, 1935.22. See Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008, 83–112.23. An excellent account of this development is Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology. Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, CA: U. of California P., 1995); see as well James Capshew, Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969, New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.24. Geoffrey Gorer, "Themes in Japanese Culture,"Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 5, 1943, 106–124; Geoffrey Gorer and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character, A Photographic Analysis, New York: The Academy, 1942; Geoffrey Gorer and J. Rickman, The People of Great Russia, London: Cresset, 1949; Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper, 1950. Recent assessments of these studies include Thomas Wheatfield, The Frankfurt School in Exile, Minneapolis, MN: U. of Minnesota P., 2009; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Significance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994; and Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.25. Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry. An Anthropologist Looks at America, New York: William Morrow, 1942.26. The reader will forgive us for omitting the major works by these social scientists, which can be easily traced in university and other libraries across the world, many of which are available on line.27. Illustrating this mindset at its purest is Bernard Berelson, The Behavioral Sciences Today, New York: Basic Books, 1963.28. See for example Claude Lévi‐Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969 (published originally as Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949).29. A.R. Radcliffe‐Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London: Oxford UP, 1952.30. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York: The Free Press, 1949 (first ed. 1937). Exceptions were the scholars who belonged to the Frankfurter School (largely made up out of people who had fled the Nazis), such as Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, or Erich Fromm, but none of them were anthropologists.31. David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States, Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2008, 89–121; see also Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990, 85–132.32. Harris, The Rise, 290–318, 373–568.33. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, New York: Norton, 1950.34. On Hull, see Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, second ed., New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1950 (first ed. 1929), 651–3; Clark L. Hull, "Mind, Mechanism, and Adaptive Behavior,"Psychological Review 44, 1937, 1–32; Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1993, 222–6; John Dollard, Neal E. Miller, Leonard W. Doob, O.H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1969 (first ed. 1939).35. See Anthony F.C. Wallace, "The Modal Personality of the Tuscarora Indians as Revealed by the Rorschach Test,"Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, no. 150 Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952; A. Wallace, "Mental Illness, Biology, and Culture," in F. Hsu, ed., Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality, Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1961, 255–94; A. Wallace, "The New Culture‐and‐Personality," in T. Gladwin and W. Sturtevant, eds., Anthropology and Human Behavior, Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1962, 1–12; A. Wallace, "The Problem of the Psychological Validity of Componential Analysis,"American Anthropologist 67 part 2, 1965, 229–48; A. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View, New York: Random House, 1966; A. Wallace, Culture and Personality, New York: Random House, 1970; A. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999; A. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, New York: Knopf, 1970; A. Wallace, Rockdale: the Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, New York: Norton, 1978.36. John Whiting, "Socialization Process and Personality," in Hsu, ed., Psychological Anthropology, 355–380; John Whiting and I. Child, Child Training and Personality: A Cross Cultural Study, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1953.37. John Whiting, Becoming a Kwoma: Teaching and Learning in a New Guinea Tribe, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1941.38. John Whiting, C. Kluckhohn, and A. Anthony, "The Function of Male Initiation Ceremonies at Puberty," in E. Maccoby, T.M. Newcomb, and E.L. Hartley, eds., Readings in Social Psychology, New York: Holt, 1958, 359–70.39. See the curious example of Horace Miner, "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," American Anthropologist 58, 1956, 503–7.40. Franz Boas, "Race and Progress,"Science 74, 1931, 5–8.41. Otto Klineberg, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration, New York: Columbia UP, 1935. See also Klineberg, Race Differences, New York: Harper, 1935; Klineberg, "A Science of National Character," Journal of Social Psychology 19, 1944, 147–62; Klineberg, "Negro‐White Differences in Intelligence Performance: A New Look at an Old Problem," American Psychologist 18, 1963, 198–203.42. Klineberg, Negro Intelligence, 59.43. For a fuller discussion of these trends in the history of intelligence testing and so on, see, for example, Cravens, Triumph; Cravens, Before Head Start, 151–216; Cravens, "Race, IQ, and Politics in 20th Century America," in Farber and Cravens, eds., Race and Science, 152–84. See also Raymond E. Fancher, The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy, New York: Norton, 1980; Ulrich Neisser, ed., The Rising Curve. Long‐Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998; Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, eds., From Neurons to Neighborhoods. The Science of Early Childhood Development, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000, 19–88.44. John Jackson and Andrew Winston, "The Last Repatriationist: The Postwar Career of Earnest Sevier Cox," in Farber and Cravens, eds., Race and Science, 58–80.45. See for example E.A. Hooton, "Development and Correlation of Research in Physical Anthropology at Harvard University," Proceedings of the American Philospohical Society 6, 1935, 499–516; on Coon, see John P. Jackson, Jr., "'In Ways Unacademical': The Reception of Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races," Journal of the History of Biology 2, 2001, 247–85.46. Carleton S. Coon, A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent, 1941–1943, Ipswich, MA: Gambit, 1980.47. Carleton S. Coon, The Origins of Races, New York: Knopf, 1962; see also Theodosius Dobzhansky, M.F. Ashley‐Montagu, and C.S. Coon, "Two Views of Coon's Origins of Races with Comments by Coon and Replies," Current Anthropology 4, 1953, 360–7; Jackson, "'In Ways Unacademical'."48. See among many others Garland E. Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century, New York: Cambridge UP, 1978, 113–45; Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology. The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996; William Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1971. Provine provides a rigorously technical account of a major architect of the synthetic theory (see W. Provine, Sewell Wright and Evolutionary Biology, Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1986). See also Cravens, Triumph.49. Theodosius Dobzhansky and M. F. Ashley‐montagu, "Natural Selection and the Mental Capacities of Mankind," Science 105, 1947, 588–91. For other early examples of this theory, see Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943; T. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Evolution of Species, New York: Columbia UP, 1941; Leslie Clarence Dunn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity, Race, and Society, New York: Penguin Books, 1947; T. Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving; The Evolution of the Human Species, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1962.50. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, New York: Cambridge UP, 1988; David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008; D.H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004; John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. The number of examples of the Cold War‐era sciences could be multiplied ad infinitum.51. George P. Murdock, Our Primitive Contemporaries, New York: Macmillan, 1934; Graham Sumner and Alfred Keller, The Science of Society, New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1927.52. See for example George P. Murdock, "Feasability and Implementation of Comparative Community Research," American Sociological Review 6, 1950, 713–20.53. The HRFA website supplies a useful overview: http://www.yale.edu/hraf/about/html; see also Harris, Rise, 605–33.54. On Marxist and other "conflict sociology," see Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions, New York: Oxford UP, 1994, 47–120.55. See further Harris, Rise, 605–87.56. Virginia Morrell, Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981; D. Johanson and Blake Edgar, From Lucy to Language, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.57. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, eds, The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992; B. Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, London: Bantam, 2001; Michael G. Kenny, "Genomics, Genetic Identity, and the Refiguration of Race," in Farber and Cravens, eds, Race and Science, 213–27.