Toward a Pragmatist Anthropology of Race

I. Introduction

As we have discussed elsewhere, Franz Boas and John Dewey were intellectual and political allies at Columbia University for over thirty years.¹ Dewey advocated for an increased role of anthropology (and other sciences) for philosophical insight, and he often used anthropological knowledge as a starting point for his ethics and politics, including such knowledge as learned from Boas. We hold that Boas and Dewey shared a common core understanding of human global and evolutionary diversity, and that this shared understanding itself forms a core component of their progressive projects.

However, with regard to the problem of racism in the United States, Boas and Dewey had different engagements. Boas made the questioning of scientific racism a central feature of American anthropology, while Dewey barely addressed the problem in his writing.² Nonetheless, as far as political activism is concerned, both Boas and Dewey were involved in the NAACP and pushed for political amelioration of social inequality through education and civil rights. In what follows, we examine the intellectual milieu of Boas and Dewey in order to problematize the ideal and idealized relationship between critical scholarship and socio-political engagement with race. We aim to elucidate part of the socio-cultural context in which much scholarship engages the problem of racism—both in the past and today. In this paper, we first describe how a general anthropological understanding of human global-evolutionary diversity is a significant aspect of the scholarship of both Boas and Dewey. We then briefly trace their engagements with racism in the United States, after which we analyze the socio-cultural factors that limited the anti-racism of Boas and Dewey. We propose, finally, a pragmatist anthropological approach to the question of race-building upon existing philosophical and anthropological studies.

II. The Dissonance between Global and Local Diversity

Some have criticized Boas and Dewey for their approach to questions of race, particularly as it pertains to what we will broadly call here the problem of attainment of civilization, which refers to differential attainments of an ideal state of society. Thomas Fallace argues that Dewey did not embrace a pluralistic understanding of culture until the 1910s—suggesting that he accepted the linear historical narratives of evolution that placed Western civilization above all others.³ On the other hand, Vernon Williams questions Boas’s anti-racism as limited because of statements he made about primitive peoples and US Blacks as not having attained the same level of civilization as Whites (Rethinking Race). More significantly, Williams argues that Boas’s shift from a racial to a cultural paradigm for understanding human diversity was still entrenched in the assumption that Euro-American peoples enjoyed (in Boas’s time) a higher level of civilization. For both Boas and Dewey, the problem of attainment of civilization meant that, regardless of a substantial change in how they understood the configuration of human diversity, they both implicitly and explicitly assumed that their Euro-American cultural existence was the most ideal state of existence in the world.⁴

In 1894, Dewey taught a course entitled “Anthropological Ethics.”⁵ Dewey’s notes for this course demonstrate that he was well versed in anthropological knowledge and employed it as the starting point for ethics—and he was sharply critical of Herbert Spencer’s social-evolutionary method (Dewey, “Anthropological Ethics”).⁶ Dewey continued to use anthropological knowledge throughout his career as a starting point of his scholarship, and, by the 1910s, he had embraced the research of Boas and of Boas’s students as authoritative on human diversity. Boas’s understanding of human diversity is, of course, the foundation of North American anthropology, and his conclusions remain decidedly anti-racist. Indeed, his Mind of Primitive Man (1911) constitutes an extended argument against the idea of intrinsically lower and higher races, and this argument was seminal in shifting anthropology’s emphasis from assumed immutable biological categories to an approach interpretive of humans by way of contingent cultural factors.⁷ Boas argued that there is no necessary connection between culture, language, and race—and that there is no essential difference between so...