ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2026)
August 18, 2026
Slides available at https://anthrograph.rschram.org/1002/2026/03.
Main reading: Baker (1998); King (2019)
Other reading: Boas ([1931] 1940)
pseudoscientific racism, W. E. B. du Bois
This is not just a story of “That was then; this is now.” Anthropology 2 does not come after Anthropology 1.
Anthropology 1 may sound antiquated, if not offensive, but it is still present today in popular understanding of human difference, even when people are more familiar with the concepts of multiculturalism and cultural diversity.
In the late nineteenth century and in Boas’s time, evolutionary biology was a huge inspiration for Anthropology 1.
In Anthropology 1, humans can be grouped into types and ranked on a scale
Others, like Tylor, reject racial explanations. They assert the psychic unity of humanity. But in some people’s hands this still lets Anthropology 1 sneak back in.
Each culture is an integrated whole. An individual trait cannot be taken out of its context, which is the whole life of people in a community
Culture is not just the things that stand out in the eyes of an outside observer. From the point of view of the insider, everything they do adds up to being normal daily life. An acquired way of life is like second nature, like speaking a language.
An observer of a distinct culture must adopt a premise of cultural relativism in which the value and meaning of a specific trait can only be found when seen as part of a larger system of thought or worldview.
Boas was already a controversial and influential figure at the turn of the 20th century. As the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, he had a position from which he could argue for a new, holistic anthropology.
Boas was invited to participate in a US government commission on the effect of immigration on the US, and his contribution was to study the effect of the US on immigrants and their descendants.
Boas and his students measured the head shapes of children of immigrants and found that the children born in the US had heads shaped more like their peers and less like their parents (Boas 1912).
Boas’s choice seems deliberate. The “cephalic index” was a common measurement technique used by scientists claiming that they could prove that some races were inferior to others (see Gould 1993).
Boas’s results showed that what pseudoscientific racism claimed was innate was actually acquired. Children’s heads are shaped by their environment. Head shape isn’t a “racial” trait because it’s not fixed.
There was still a lot to do to change people’s minds. When mass media reported on these findings, they said Boas had discovered the existence of a new American race (Boas 1912, 550). He was actually showing that environment matters more than genetics.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” (Du Bois 1903b, 13)
“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois 1903a, 3)
First, read these quotations and notice your thinking about them. Make a note of what you are thinking.
Second, turn to the people around you and talk about the highlighted phrases. What do they mean?
Can you think of examples of these?
Third, talk about the “the problem of the color-line”. Du Bois was writing from a US perspective but generalized from it to the whole world.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” (Du Bois 1903b, 13)
“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois 1903a, 3)
Boas defines cultural anthropology specifically as a holistic, particularistic, and relativist perspective on acquired differences.
He opposes this to racial explanations. Anthropology is an antiracist way of thinking.
Boas argued
Boas and Du Bois both collaborated and influenced each other’s thinking (Baker 1998; see also Harrison 1992; Muller 1992).
Arguably, Du Bois goes one step farther than Boas, by also critiquing whiteness:
Boas would, I think, approve:
Anthropology 1 has never gone away. Since Boas’s time, scientists have continued to argue for a biological basis for human behavior, social patterns, and differences in human behavior and differences in societies.
While most scholars accept that race is not biological, racial categories are still used to classify people, in medical testing for instance.
When differences are observed in these tests between people of different racial categories, people often conclude that there must be biological cause for these racial differences.
Du Bois also describes what is like to be an African American sociologist and thinker:
“HIGH in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.
“Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know.” (Du Bois 1921, 29)
What does clairvoyance mean here?
It seems to be more than just knowledge of the oppressed, so what is it?