Franz Boas - Scientist As Activist

Scientist As Activist

There are two things to which I am devoted: absolute academic and spiritual freedom, and the subordination of the state to the interests of the individual; expressed in other forms, the furthering of conditions in which the individual can develop to the best of his ability—as far as it is possible with a full understanding of the fetters imposed upon us by tradition; and the fight against all forms of power policy of states or private organizations. This means a devotion to principles of true democracy. I object to teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind, of whatever kind they may be. (letter from Boas to John Dewey, 11/6/39)

Boas was known for passionately defending what he believed to be right. During his lifetime (and often through his work) Boas combated racism, berated anthropologists and folklorists who used their work as a cover for espionage, worked to protect German and Austrian scientists who fled the Nazi regime, and openly protested Hitlerism.

Many social scientists in other disciplines often agonize over the legitimacy of their work as "science", and consequently emphasize the importance of detachment, objectivity, abstraction, and quantifiability in their work. Perhaps because Boas, like other early anthropologists, was originally trained in the natural sciences, he and his students never expressed such anxiety. Moreover, he did not believe that detachment, objectivity, and quantifiability were required to make anthropology scientific. Since the object of study of anthropologists is different from the object of study of physicists, he assumed that anthropologists would have to employ different methods and different criteria for evaluating their research. Thus, Boas used statistical studies to demonstrate the extent to which variation in data is context-dependent, and argued that the context-dependent nature of human variation rendered many abstractions and generalizations that had been passing as scientific understandings of humankind (especially theories of social evolution popular at the time) in fact unscientific. His understanding of ethnographic fieldwork began with the fact that the objects of ethnographic study (e.g., the Inuit of Baffin Island) were not just objects, but subjects, and his research called attention to their creativity and agency. More importantly, he viewed the Inuit as his teachers, thus reversing the typical hierarchical relationship between scientist and object of study.

This emphasis on the relationship between anthropologists and those they study—the point that, while astronomers and stars; chemists and elements; botanists and plants are fundamentally different, anthropologists and those they study are equally human—implied that anthropologists themselves could be objects of anthropological study. Although Boas did not pursue this reversal systematically, his article on alternating sounds illustrates his awareness that scientists should not be confident about their objectivity, because they too see the world through the prism of their culture.

This emphasis also led Boas to conclude that anthropologists have an obligation to speak out on social issues. Boas was especially concerned with racial inequality, which his research had indicated is not biological in origin, but rather social. Boas is credited as the first scientist to publish the idea that all people—including white and African-Americans—are equal. He often emphasized his abhorrence of racism, and used his work to show that there was no scientific basis for such a bias. An early example of this concern is evident in his 1906 commencement address to Atlanta University, at the invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois. Boas began by remarking that "If you did accept the view that the present weakness of the American Negro, his uncontrollable emotions, his lack of energy, are racially inherent, your work would still be noble one". He then went on, however, to argue against this view. To the claim that European and Asian civilizations are, at the time, more advanced than African societies, Boas objected that against the total history of humankind, the past two thousand years is but a brief span. Moreover, although the technological advances of our early ancestors (such as taming fire and inventing stone tools) might seem insignificant when compared to the invention of the steam engine or control over electricity, we should consider that they might actually be even greater accomplishments. Boas then went on to catalogue advances in Africa, such as smelting iron, cultivating millet, and domesticating chickens and cattle, occurred in Africa well before they spread to Europe and Asia (evidence now suggests that chickens were first domesticated in Asia; the original domestication of cattle is under debate). He then described the activities of African kings, diplomats, merchants, and artists as evidence of cultural achievement. From this, he concluded, any social inferiority of Negroes in the United States cannot be explained by their African origins:

If, therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently look to the home of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored people the strength that was their own before they set foot on the shores of this continent. You may say that you go to work with bright hopes, and that you will not be discouraged by the slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost in transplanting the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your ancestors ever had attained.

Boas proceeds to discuss the arguments for the inferiority of the Negro race, and calls attention to the fact that they were brought to the Americas through force. For Boas, this is just one example of the many times conquest or colonialism has brought different peoples into an unequal relation, and he mentions "the conquest of England by the Normans, the Teutonic invasion of Italy, the Manchoo conquest of China" as resulting in similar conditions. But the best example, for Boas, of this phenomenon is that of the Jews in Europe:

Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had not been able to efface, and which is strong enough to find -- not only here and there -- expression as antipathy to the Jewish type. In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.

Boas' closing advice is that Negroes should not look to Whites for approval or encouragement, because people in power usually take a very long time to learn to sympathize with people out of power. "Remember that in every single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast insistence on full opportunities for your powers."

Despite Boas' caveat about the intractability of white prejudice, he also considered it the scientist's responsibility to argue against White myths of racial purity and racial superiority, and to use the evidence of his research to fight racism.

Boas was also critical of one nation imposing its power over others. In 1916 Boas wrote a letter to the New York Times which was published under the headline, "Why German-Americans Blame America". Although Boas did begin the letter by protesting bitter attacks against German-Americans at the time of the war in Europe, most of his letter was a critique of American nationalism. "In my youth I had been taught in school and at home not only to love the good of my own country, but also to seek to understand and to respect the individualities of other nations. For this reason one-sided nationalism, that is so often found nowadays, is to me unendurable." He writes of his love for American ideals of freedom, and of his growing discomfort with American beliefs about its own superiority over others.

I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how slow they may be in utilizing the resources of their countries, or how much opposed their ideals may be to ours... Our intolerant attitude is most pronounced in regard to what we like to call "our free institutions." Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy. That the wishes and thoughts of the people should find expression, and that the form of government should conform to these wishis is an axiom that has pervaded the whole Western world, and that is even taking root in the Far East. It is a quite different question, however, in how far the particular machinery of democratic government is identical with democratic institutions .... To claim as we often do, that our solution is the only democratic and the ideal one is a one-sided expression of Americanism. I see no reason why we should not allow the Germans, Austrians, and Russians, or whoever else it may be, to solve their problems in their own ways, instead of demanding that they bestow upon themselves the benefactions of our regime.

Although Boas felt that scientists have a responsibility to speak out on social and political problems, he was appalled that they might involve themselves in disingenuous and deceitful ways. Thus, in 1919, when he discovered that four anthropologists, in the course of their research in other countries, were serving as spies for the American government, he wrote an angry letter to The Nation. It is perhaps in this letter that he most clearly expresses his understanding of his commitment to science:

A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on deception and secretiveness, a politician whose very life consists in compromises with his conscience, a business man whose aim is personal profit within the limits allowed by a lenient law -- such may be excused if they set patriotic deception above common everyday decency and perform services as spies. They merely accept the code of morality to which modern society still conforms. Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth. We all know scientists who in private life do not come up to the standard of truthfulness, but who, nevertheless, would not consciously falsify the results of their researches. It is bad enough if we have to put up with these, because they reveal a lack of strength of character that is liable to distort the results of their work. A person, however, who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.

Although Boas did not name the spies in question, he was referring to a group led by Sylvanus G. Morley, who was affiliated with Harvard University's Peabody Museum. While conducting research in Mexico, Morley and his colleagues looked for evidence of German submarine bases, and collected intelligence on Mexican political figures and German immigrants in Mexico.

Boas' stance against spying took place in the context of his struggle to establish a new model for academic anthropology at Columbia University. Previously, American anthropology was based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and these anthropologists competed with Boas' students for control over the American Anthropological Association (and its flagship publication American Anthropologist). When the National Academy of Sciences established the National Research Council in 1916 as a means by which scientists could assist the United States government prepare for entry into the war in Europe, competition between the two groups intensified. Boas' rival, W. H. Holmes (who had gotten the job of Director at the Field Museum for which Boas had been passed over 26 years earlier), was appointed to head the NRC; Morley was a protégé of Holmes.

When Boas' letter was published, Holmes wrote to a friend complaining about "the Prussian control of anthropology in this country" and the need to end Boas' "Hun regime". Opinion was influenced by anti-German and probably also by anti-Jewish sentiment. The Anthropological Society of Washington passed a resolution condemning Boas' letter for unjustly criticizing President Wilson; attacking the principles of American democracy; and endangering anthropologists abroad, who would now be suspected of being spies (a charge that was especially insulting, given that his concerns about this very issue were what had prompted Boas to write his letter in the first place). This resolution was passed on to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the National Research Council. Members of the American Anthropological Association (among whom Boas was a founding member in 1902), meeting at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard (with which Morley, Lothrop, and Spinden were affiliated), voted by 20 to 10 to censure Boas. As a result, Boas resigned as the AAA's representative to the NRC, although he remained an active member of the AAA. The AAA's censure of Boas was not rescinded until 2005.

Boas continued to speak out against racism and for intellectual freedom. When the Nazi Party in Germany denounced "Jewish Science" (which included not only Boasian Anthropology but Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian physics), Boas responded with a public statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists, declaring that there is only one science, to which race and religion are irrelevant. After World War I, Boas created the Emergency Society for German and Austrian Science. This organization was originally dedicated to fostering friendly relations between American and German and Austrian scientists and for providing research funding to German scientists who had been adversely affected by the war, and to help scientists who had been interned. With the rise of Nazi Germany Boas assisted German scientists in fleeing the Nazi regime. Boas helped these scientists not only to escape, but to secure positions once they arrived. Additionally, Boas addressed an open letter to Von Hindenburg in protest against Hitlerism.

Boas, and his students such as Melville J. Herskovits opposed the racist pseudoscience developed at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics under its director Eugen Fischer: "Melville J. Herskovits (one of Franz Boas' students) pointed out that the health problems and social prejudices encountered by these children (see Bastard studies) and their parents explained what Germans viewed as racial inferiority was not due to racial heredity. This "...provoked polemic invective against the latter from Fischer. "The views of Mr. Boas are in part quite ingenious, but in the field of heredity Mr. Boas is by no means competent." even though "... a great number of research projects at the KWI-A which had picked up on Boas' studies about immigrants in New York had confirmed his findings - including the study by Walter Dornfeldt about Eastern European Jews in Berlin. Fischer resorted to polemic simply because he had no arguments to counter the Boasians' critique."