Many voices: Medical anthropologists explore the meaning of health,illness, and cure

Franz Boas organized and shaped American anthropology. No academic discipline of similar scope owed so much to just one person. Within three decades of coming to the United States from Germany he had trained the anthropologists who established its place within the universities and redirected its tone and ethos as well as its theories. The biographies under review help us understand the background, aims, and drive of the man. We shall consider, in particular, the impact he had on the political and ethical tone of the field, the prevalence of women in it, and the importance of his scientific background.     

Franz Boas and Friends? Not Really

Blackhawk, Ned, and Isaiah L. Wilner. 2018. Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas. New Haven: Yale University Press.

The editors of this volume proclaim their intention to demonstrate the revolutionary influence of Indigenous thinkers on the ideas of Franz Boas, but the work falls far short of their aim. Despite the inclusion of a number of interesting contributions dealing with remarkable individuals, with one exception none of the fourteen papers attempts to make such a case.     

The Legacy of Greece

This article compares two radically opposed views concerning “race” in the first half of the 20th century: the one of Franz Boas (1858–1942), the founder of American cultural anthropology, and the other of Hans F.K. Günther (1889–1968), the most widely read theoretician of race in Nazi Germany. Opposite as their views were, both derived from a similar non-evolutionist German anthropological matrix. The article reconstructs their definitions of racial objects and studies their analyses of racial intermixture. Although both believed that contemporary peoples were racially deeply mixed, Boas moved towards an antiracist conception of race-as-population, whereas Günther moved towards a racist conception of homogenous races in mixed peoples. The comparison shows that the major difference between them concerns their ideals or guiding principles. Their respective ideals seeped into their versions of science and transformed the nature and the significance of their respective ideas.     

The World Upside Down: Boas,History, Evolutionism,and Science

A new wave of neo‐Boasian anthropologists advocate retrieving Boas’s sense of historicity. In his theoretical writings, and especially his early exchange with Mason and Powell in 1887, Boas linked history to Alexander von Humboldt’s “cosmographical” method and to inductive science, accusing evolutionists of reasoning deductively on the basis of artibrary classifications. Boas, on the contrary, would not classify but would consider the “individual phenomenon”. Strangely enough, Boas’s presentation of his scientific procedure has more or less been taken at face value, and I question this Boas‐centric view of Boas. Examining Boas’s theoretical statements, his onslaught against evolutionism and his ethnographic practice, I find the accusation of deductive reasoning against evolutionists totally polemical. Furthermore, I discover neither induction nor history or cosmography in his practice, but a Linnaean‐type natural history. In brief, I uncover an inverse image of what Boas presented of himself, and no basis whatsoever for retrieving a historicity for contemporary anthropology.     

Arctic Explorer Robert E. Peary’s Other Quest: Money,Science, and the Year 1897

American Robert E. Peary is famous for his claim of being the first person to reach the North Pole. However, too little historical attention has been paid to independent parts of his long exploratory career. A closer examination of one year, 1897, in his two‐decade quest, reveals the substantial difficulties of being an explorer at the turn of the twentieth century. Peary used specially crafted arguments to endear himself to the recently organized but poorly connected professional scientists who proved to be his most earnest, if inconsistent, backers before 1898. Peary worked on the scientists’ behalf to locate, and sometimes create, publishing venues and stateside audiences for them, in exchange for their patronage. The money chase was difficult and time‐consuming, but did more than help the scientists and ensure Peary’s future backing. It introduced him to the young American scientific community, with whom he learned to “sell” the Arctic. Peary also used his scientific credentials to maintain a public image of the Arctic that allowed Americans to celebrate both the rugged hero and cultural superiority in this remote region.     

In the shadow of Franz Boas: the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems and the physical assimilation of immigrants (1938–1955)

ABSTRACT

Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demographic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938.