The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism

Chapter 11. The Growth of Scientific Standards from Anthropology Days to Present Days

383 Anthropology is by its very nature a reactive science. It arose as an academic specialty largely in opposition to late-nineteenth-century racism and Social Darwinism—whence E. B. Tylor’s assertion, from the last page of Primitive Culture (1871), that anthropology is “a reformer’s science.” A generation later in America, Franz Boas established academic anthropology largely in opposition to hereditarian thought, publishing The Mind of Primitive Man the same year as Charles Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911). Davenport’s book was the first major post-Mendelian text of human genetics in America, and proceeded to explain class, civilization, and individual intelligence in terms of the global distribution of genetic factors, with particular reference to a major gene for “feeble-mindedness.” Boas would wage a decades-long intellectual war to establish anthropology in the face of such powerful scienti fic opposition. Anthropology in the early twentieth century existed in a small handful of universities; to the extent that it was acknowledged as a field of scholarship, it was located in museums. The most intellectually progressive museums were in Germany, but the museums with the most ready access to the materials of “savage man” were in America, where the indigenous peoples had been “pacified” for a generation and could now be examined as the objects of dispassionate scientific study. Franz Boas entered the American anthropological scene in the 1880s, one Chapter 11. The Growth of Scientific Standards from Anthropology Days to Present Days jonathan marks marks 384 of a few practitioners equipped with a doctorate—since the advanced degree was still quite rare in America. His experience with the German conception of museum anthropology clashed with the established practice of American anthropology, and Boas leveled a sharp criticism of that practice in the pages of the journal Science in 1887. Boas had found the Smithsonian’s collections nearly useless for his interest in peoples of the Northwest Coast, not because the museum lacked materials, but because the materials were organized according to their degree of advancement in relation to similar objects, and not by what we would now call “cultures.” The Smithsonian’s senior anthropologist defended the scheme on the grounds that cultural evolution proceeds everywhere similarly, since “like causes produce like effects,” but Boas argued that this approach was unhistorical, since commonly “unlike causes produce like effects.”1 Boas was employed at the time as the geography editor for Science. Later thwarted by the Smithsonian’s securing an anthropology position for one of their own in Chicago in 1894, Boas would only find permanent academic employment at Columbia in 1896. He was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology (his research expertise lay in “collecting” Eskimo bones and measuring schoolchildren). In 1902, the Smithsonian bypassed WJ McGee as the successor to John Wesley Powell as the head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a position for which McGee had been groomed for nearly a decade. Boas published a strong letter in Science in protest, to no avail. McGee, however, became the first president of the American Anthropological Association that year, and shortly thereafter directed the anthropology exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition. The paper Boas composed for the occasion was published in 1904 as “The History of Anthropology,” and somewhat notoriously situated anthropology as an outgrowth of German philosophy, entirely ignoring the intellectual contributions of the American practitioners. And although those same American practitioners had instituted the simultaneous study of physical form, material remains, activities, and languages as the basic The Growth of Scientific Standards 385 constituents of anthropological research, Boas’s 1904 paper is one of the earliest documents to articulate in a formal way the constitution of anthropology as “the biological history of mankind in all its varieties; linguistics applied to people without written languages; the ethnology of people without historic records, and prehistoric archaeology.”2 At the time Boas wrote, the American Anthropological Association was but two years old, and the dominant figures of its first generation were all recently deceased (Lewis Henry Morgan, John Wesley Powell, and Daniel Garrison Brinton). It was an opportune time to write a mythic history for the discipline, which already had little theoretical coherence. Boas was an innovator in using local history and intellectual integration as an anthropological framework. This was tied to his innovation of using “culture” as a plural noun, and to his suggestion “that civilization is not something absolute...