Franz Boas' rejection of scientific racism

[struggle4progress]

[struggle4progress]

1. Biography of Franz Boas

[struggle4progress]

2. The Shackles of Tradition

[struggle4progress]

3. Two books in the intellectual tradition of Boas

(Various authors including) Margaret Mead (student of Boas and of his student Ruth Benedict): Science and the Concept of Race

Ashley Montegu (student of Ruth Benedict, a student of Boas): Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race

[rjsquirrel]

4. Well, good as far as it goes

Seems like someone's school project, not a serious critical historical take on the subject.

George Stocking's *Victorian Anthropology* and Stephen Jay Gould's *The Mismeasure of Man* are where I'd start.

[struggle4progress]

6. Boas remains extremely important because of his context: at a time when white supremacist ideas

were commonplace, he challenged them on an entirely scientific basis, and he produced a generation of American anthropologists who followed in his footsteps

... Boas pressed against the rigid boundaries of racial thinking with all of his theoretical, statistical, and logical industry and might. By resorting to the data and methodology of physical anthropology, Boas presented his arguments in an acceptable way that his scholarly readers would find compelling, and to which his popular audience would positively respond. He fought fires of racism with an inferno of science, using the very tools esteemed by racist thinkers to point out the dearth of evidence supporting and the illogicality undermining their conclusions. In doing so, he influenced not just the opinions of scholars and scientists, but also those of politicians, lawyers, judges, and other private citizens, forever altering the paradigm of race in America, and its significance within legal, political, and social realms ...

[cab67]

5. ironically -

I'm pretty sure the images in the video showing men in red uniforms were set in Australia, not Africa. Their intent was to convince Aboriginals that British justice would be applied equally to Aborigine and Briton - both would be hanged for murder, even if the victim was an Aborigine and the perpetrator an Englishman.

Whether this is actually how things worked out is, of course, another matter.