Renegades or liberals? Recent reflections on the Boasian legacies in American anthropology

Abstract

Introduction

The past few years have seen a noticeable uptick in the publication of works in the history of anthropology (see, for example, Blackhawk and Wilner, 2018; Bruchac, 2018; Darnell and Gleach, 2017, 2018, 2019; Harrison, Johnson-Simon, and Williams, 2018; Mattina, 2019; Milam, 2019; Vermeulen, 2015; Wickwire, 2019; Zumwalt, 2019). Given the slew of critical contributions in a such short period, one might justifiably ask why I have chosen to put only two particular texts into conversation with each other. This is an especially pertinent question given the noticeable differences in form, scope, and intended audience between the two books discussed below.

With Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, Charles King provides a sweeping account of the work of famed anthropologist Franz Boas and the circle of maverick scholars that formed around him during the first half of the 20th century. Intended for a wide audience, the book has already received praise from several mainstream outlets (B. King, 2019; Szalai, 2019). King presents this epic tale of the formation of social science in a deliberately digestible manner without sacrificing methodological or analytical rigour. Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology clearly has a more circumscribed audience in mind. As with most theoretically rich tomes that appear from university presses (in this case Stanford), Anderson’s book is not likely to see the heights of the New York Times bestsellers list; however, I suspect that it will receive great attention on seminar syllabi in departments of anthropology, the history and sociology of science, and Africana studies. While Anderson’s book overlaps with the chronology and historical figures featured in King’s book, From Boas to Black Power draws attention to the post–World War II milieu and the critical contributions of anthropologists of colour in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, Anderson frontloads his narrative with a highly comprehensible discussion of critical race theory and the paradoxes of ‘Americanist liberalism’ – two themes woven throughout his core chapters.

Indeed, these are different kinds of text. And yet, there are noticeable points of overlap between King and Anderson and the books they offer readers that necessitate a synthetic discussion of what are undeniably two salient contributions to the history of anthropology. First, neither King nor Anderson is what one might call a ‘historian of anthropology’. King is a professor of international affairs and government whose research has focused on issues of nationalism and ethnicity in post-Soviet Eastern Europe (King, 2010), with more recent forays into popular history with accounts of the rise of 20th-century cosmopolitan cities (King, 2012, 2015). Anderson, despite a handful of previous engagements with writing the history of the discipline (Anderson, 2008, 2014), is a practising anthropologist whose work is rooted in themes of racial formations, diaspora, and transnationalism in Central America (Anderson, 2009). This is by no means a problem, as these differential backgrounds and academic commitments make for unique and valuable analytical perspectives, which emerge throughout the course of each book (such as King’s attention to Boasian critiques of aggressive nationalism and Anderson’s re-assessment of Brazilianist anthropology during the 1950s). Second, both texts address the legacy of Boas and his anthropological scions, which makes perfect sense as the Boasians are in many respects the cornerstones of modern, mainstream American anthropology (Darnell, 2001). Third, while it might seem like an unnecessary invocation of identity politics, there is something to be said for the fact that both authors are white, American men with what appear to be deep and sincere commitments to anti-racism – both as a historical object of analysis and a lived praxis. Fourth, both books appear to be, on some level, in conversation with the politics of the present. While King is not as explicit on this matter as Anderson (although see C. King, 2019: 92), themes of xenophobic nationalism, de jure and de facto racism, and white supremacy – all perennial concerns in the United States – echo throughout both books.

Thus, despite the obvious distinctions in form, style, and audience, the two texts are, in a sense, already in conversation with one another. Recognizing such overlays, this review article seeks to do two things: (a) summarize and assess each book’s contributions to scholarly understandings of the history of anthropology in the 20th-century United States; and (b) explicate the factors that lead King and Anderson to arrive at starkly different assessments of what is in many ways the same history. I suggest that the division between the two authors is a matter not so much of method but of a disjuncture in their conceptions of the relationship between liberalism and racism as played out in the history of the US.

Synthesizing and humanizing the Boasians

In Gods of the Upper Air, King details the impact of Boas and his students on a whole host of discourses that permeate the present, namely race, gender, and sexuality. King traces this ‘fundamental shift’ (7) through the intertwining lives of several noted Boasians, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. In addition to these stalwarts of the anthropological canon, King highlights the often obfuscated work of women of colour and Indigenous women in the Boasian circle with a discussion of Zora Neale Hurston, the influential African American novelist of such works as Their Eyes Were Watching God (2018[1937]), and Ella Deloria, an equally venerable Native American writer perhaps most known during her lifetime for the biting political commentary Speaking of Indians (1998[1944]). While both have been effectively reclaimed by black studies and Indigenous studies, respectively, King considerately situates Hurston and Deloria and their literary and ethnographic texts within the history of anthropology. As students of and interlocutors with Boas, Hurston and Deloria, despite their somewhat second-class status in elite intellectual circles, appear in King’s narrative as vital rejoinders to ethnographic quests for uncontaminated Africanism (280–93) and Indianism (236–44). Despite the glaring differences in social upbringing and intellectual notoriety, King identifies a common pattern across this cohort of ‘renegade’ thinkers – being perpetually out of step with, but never fully divorced from, the American mainstream.

King begins in familiar territory – the early life of Boas and his climb to intellectual notoriety. While this is well-tilled historiographic soil (Baker, 1998; Cole, 1999, Lewis, 2001, 2018; Zumwalt, 1992, 2019), King manages to extract new insights from Boas’s itinerant life and career. In contrast to the canned disciplinary narratives that appear in introductory textbooks, King does not describe a Boas destined for greatness. If anything, Boas’s moniker as the ‘father of American anthropology’ must be seen as the contingent upshot of numerous (failed) attempts to gain institutional grounding in the United States following his relocation from Germany. King sees Boas’s ‘revolutionary’ views on the equality and interconnectedness of humanity and cultures as being the primary hiccup in his numerous attempts to court mainstream institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and state-sponsored research opportunities such as the Dillingham Commission’s study of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Perhaps the most glaring of Boas’s radical contributions was his long-term efforts to systematically undermine biological conceptions of human difference and social evolutionary frameworks that endorsed racial hierarchies. King is careful to contextualize Boas’s subtle and not so subtle career moves within an unfolding narrative of political exclusion and violent xenophobia that paralleled Boas’s relocation from Germany to the US. In a country where eugenics permeated public and private institutions and boosters of white racial supremacy such as Madison Grant curried favour with the mainstream, Boas’s views on race and culture were, to put it in Gramscian terms, counterhegemonic. Carefully chosen selections from Boas’s legion of correspondences provide empirical insight into the evolution of his thinking as he moved through a variety of intellectual networks before establishing his own institutional node at Columbia University in 1899.

The narrative progresses in a manner that will be familiar to anthropologists and historians of the discipline. King moves generationally (although not quite chronologically) to the ‘children and grandchildren’ (313) of ‘Papa Franz’ (as he was known to his students). However, as with King’s treatment of Boas, the reader is presented with new angles on and biographical insights into each of these now famed figures. As far as I can tell, King’s synthesis of the many lives and careers of Benedict, Mead, Deloria, Hurston, and others is the most comprehensive of its kind. Despite the occasional romantic flourishes of the author’s exquisite prose, King’s biographical portraits are by no means without criticism. For example, King rightly underscores the essentializing limitations of Melville Herskovits’s search for ‘uncontaminated Africanism’ in the Americas and contrasts this with Hurston’s underappreciated work in Jamaica and Haiti (281).

To be sure, King has benefited from the prior studies of countless scholars (for instance, Baker, 1998, 2010; Darnell, 2001; Darnell et al., 2015; Stocking, 1968) who have worked tirelessly to pull the Boasians back from the clutches of Leslie White’s (1963) insistence that Boas and his followers sacrificed the development of anthropological theory to the collection of trivial ethnographic particulars. In many respects, Gods of the Upper Air is a truly marvellous synthesis of these prior arguments presented for a wide audience and augmented with principled archival research.

Anthropology, liberalism, and the deferral of whiteness

Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power overlaps with, but ultimately extends, King’s chronology of the Boasian legacy. King’s narrative essentially ends with World War II and Benedict’s contributions to and criticism of the Office of War Information. Anderson, by contrast, carries the story into the 1970s, with more explicit attention paid to the work of black anthropologists. Like King, Anderson examines the foundational and impactful contributions of the early Boasians to the discourses of race in the United States. However, Anderson sees a far more contradictory history riven with ‘the quintessential paradoxes of U.S. anti-racist liberalism’ (6). Due to the promotion of the freedom of the individual and the rejection of racial consciousness, the ideals of classic liberalism, Anderson argues, have rendered a reckoning with the dynamics and lived experiences of racialized exclusion null and void (200). Anderson is concerned with the ways in which such ideals have come to inflect the work of American anthropologists.

In the first half of the book, Anderson identifies the ways in which Boasians and their sincere critique of the presumed biological reality of race ‘ultimately deferred a confrontation with racism, the color line, and the power of whiteness as constitutive features of the U.S. social order’ (13). This is most overtly represented, Anderson argues, in Boas’s own rather shocking conclusion in Race and Democratic Society (1945) that ‘“the black problem” in the U.S. could only be resolved by the lightening of the Black population via miscegenation between Black women and white men’ (11). For Anderson, Boasian anthropology is less a driving force behind a paradigmatic shift in hegemonic thinking than it is ‘an important part of a larger stream of twentieth-century liberal anti-racist Americanist discourse that simultaneously contested, instantiated, and denied white domination’ (14).

The latter half of the book turns toward what Anderson calls ‘the social life of race and racism’ (10) in the post–World War II milieu. Beginning with noted shifts in the institutional make-up of the discipline – namely the limited inclusion of anthropologists of colour in an otherwise ‘awfully white’ discipline (211), Anderson qualifies a persistent strain of historicist critique that insists that anthropological anti-racism dissipated after the war along with Boas’s ‘renegade circle’ (to borrow King’s phrasing). Anderson argues that what many historians and anthropologists have failed to recognize is how ‘post-war scholars of color…along with an increasingly militant cohort of students…would bring critiques of racism to the academy itself and help force a reevaluation of anthropology as a discipline’ (126). Thus, ‘the question is not whether cultural anthropologists ignored race but what they did with it’ (129).

The remaining chapters shed light on underexplored instalments in the entwined histories of anthropology and anti-racism, including the Brazilian studies of Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris in the 1950s. Following from the first half of the book, Anderson highlights a slew of contradictions that may cause readers to see certain scholars in a different light. This is especially true of Harris, whose presentist history of anthropological ideas (Harris, 1968) and widely read (but ultimately reductive) cultural materialism (1975, 1979) render him a much-maligned figure in most introductory anthropology courses. Focusing on Harris’s early work in Brazil as part of a UNESCO study of race relations in Latin America, Anderson sees an inchoate assessment of the paradoxes of liberalism, which, despite ultimately parroting a ‘U.S.-centric perspective on race and racism’ (137), came closer than many Boasians to conceptualizing the white hegemony that hides behind and benefits from the absence of overt racial conflict (147).

The final substantive chapter turns to internal critiques of the discipline voiced by women anthropologists and anthropologists of colour in the 1960s and 1970s. Homing in on the writings of William Willis, Diane Lewis, and Charles Valentine, Anderson identifies what he believes to be ‘the first collective and concerted effort to “decolonize” U.S. anthropology from within its ranks’ (165). In a book that is otherwise suspicious of talk of epistemic breaks and revolutionary transformations, this is perhaps Anderson’s boldest and most impactful argument. The very fact that these scholars and their works are rarely spoken about as the source of subsequent critiques of anthropological knowledge production and the politics of representation validates the ire of past and present characterizations of institutional anthropology’s anti-blackness (described below).

Anderson concludes with a self-reflexive meditation on what his account of anthropological anti-racism means for the current moment in mainstream American politics. Anderson points to a final irony – the ‘surprise’ he felt when learning of Donald Trump’s presidential election (203–4). Anderson pauses and follows contemporary anthropologists like Jonathan Rosa and Yarimar Bonilla, who have urged others to ‘deprovincialize Trump’ and qualify the impulse to see the present moment as an aberration in an otherwise progressive march toward the universal realization of liberal values (202–3; see Rosa and Bonilla, 2017). In a way, his own surprise in the face of Trump’s victory betrays the palpability and persistence of the very paradoxes that Anderson describes throughout the book. Thus, the book ends with a rather strong indication that anthropologists and the US more generally have yet to fully reckon with the social life of race and racism and its entanglement with liberalism.

The concluding tones of Anderson and King’s texts could not be any more different. Where King sees a legacy of anti-racist thinking that we would all do well to uphold in the present, Anderson describes a history of unrealized potential in which a critical examination of the interdigitation of whiteness and Americanist liberalism was ultimately deferred by much of anthropology’s mainstream.

Weaving biographies, ideas, and politics

These contradictory conclusions should in no way cause readers to view the texts with a jaundiced eye, for their individual strengths are legion and their interpretations quite complementary. Despite what some might see as a lack of originality in scope and interpretation, King’s assessment of the Boasian inner circle is a treasure trove of original archival research that makes great strides in underscoring the phenomenological dimensions of knowledge production. King frames the study as something of a rapprochement between biography and the history of ideas, with special attention paid to the fleeting moments of epiphany and frustration in and out of the mythologized ethnographic ‘field’. This is a most effective strategy for reaching a wider audience, for the individual lives of the figures chronicled are nothing less than captivating. Such biographies, salacious as they may be at times (especially in the case of King’s soap opera-esque detailing of Mead’s romantic liaisons), are the Trojan horse ushering in a focused analysis of critical ideas about human variation and the power-laden contexts in which such ideas have been constituted and disseminated. This approach is most effective in King’s treatment of Hurston’s work in Haiti as he weaves Hurston’s inclusion in and exclusion from her southern roots, the Harlem Renaissance, the Boasian circle at Barnard and Columbia, and a racialized North America with the construction of her underappreciated ethnography Tell My Horse (2008[1938]) and her celebrated novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (2018[1937]). Such an approach causes King to conclude that ‘no other member of the Boas circle could claim to have gone as deeply into the lived experience of the people she was trying to understand’ (292).

Anderson’s strengths are equally impactful, though quite different in substance. Anderson’s historicization of the contributions of black anthropologists to critical assessments of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s represents a much-needed response to critiques from anthropologists like Faye Harrison, who argues that mainstream disciplinary history and practice has long ‘peripheralized or erased significant contributions made by people of color and women’ (Harrison, 1991: 6). To be fair, King has done this as well with Hurston. However, Anderson goes much further with his treatment of Willis, Lewis, and Valentine and their intersections with the Black Power movement. It is a cogent reminder that the postmodern turn of 1980s did not emerge de novo. Rather, it was built on the backs of women and scholars of colour for whom anthropology was both indispensable and (at times) disappointing.

Importantly, Anderson is not merely seeking a more inclusive history of anthropology, one in which the historian writes obfuscated voices into a pre-existing narrative. Individuals like Willis become vital to the story because of the ways in which they diagnosed the discipline’s fraught relationship with race, racism, and ‘America’. That is to say, Anderson has not written marginalized voices into a pre-existing narrative. He has used said voices to construct a wholly different plot, one that underscores the enduring legacy of anthropologists of colour.

This is a timely contribution for historians of science and practising anthropologists alike. Those plugged into the maelstrom of academic social media will recall the recent and much-used Twitter hashtag #anthrosowhite.¹ What began with the anthropologist Laurence Ralph’s dismay at the findings of the Open Syllabus Project, which showed that black anthropologists are woefully under-represented in (if not erased from) most anthropology syllabi, metastasized into a multiplatform discussion of the discipline’s deferral of racism within its own ranks.² This is the very heart of Anderson’s book. Perhaps as anthropologists and historians of science reconstruct their syllabi to account for the contributions of black anthropologists, they will take cues from Anderson and the anthropologists of colour with whom he is aligned as they revisit the work of Willis, Lewis, Valentine, and others.

That being said, one should not assume that Anderson has levied a categorical renunciation of prior anthropologists. In fact, he is careful to qualify the more damning critiques of the Boasians, which have argued that Boas and company effectively substituted biological conceptions of race with ossified notions of ‘culture’, thereby failing to consider the structural conditions of racism. This comes through quite clearly in Anderson’s careful consideration of Benedict’s wildly underappreciated Race: Science and Politics (2019[1940]).

Anderson’s book, however, is not without its shortcomings. One area that begs further consideration is the position of Native Americanist anthropology in the paradoxes of liberal discourses on race and racism. As numerous scholars have shown, liberalism and, of course, neoliberalism also intersect with and embolden the persistent dispossession of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nation states (see, for example, Coulthard, 2014; Povinelli, 2002; Simpson, 2014). On the one hand, the omission of Indigenous peoples from Anderson’s narrative makes sense. As he notes, Native Americans were ‘conspicuously’ absent from Boasian anti-race discourse despite being so central to Boasian ethnography (44). This is a keen and valuable observation. However, I would have appreciated a more thorough examination of this lacuna and its significance. Without it, the deferral of Native Americans unintentionally mirrors a common narrative within the history of anthropology, which suggests that American anthropologists abandoned the study of Indigenous peoples of North America after World War II (Starn, 2011; Yanagisako, 2005; see Adams, 1998 for a complication of this received narrative). To be sure, Anderson makes no such argument, but the omission is noteworthy. King’s discussion of Deloria makes some inroads into addressing this issue, but the treatment of the interrelations of anthropology, Indian country, and settler colonialism remains incomplete (see Kehoe, 2014; Reinhardt, 2005; Smith, 2015).

A weightier concern, for me, is King’s framing of Boas’s ‘little group’ as a drastic epistemic upheaval in anthropology and American discourses of ‘ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and disability’ (6; though the latter is never actually addressed in any substantive manner). The venerable historian of anthropology George Stocking (1965, 1968) struggled with this as well in his attempts to incorporate Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the ‘paradigm’. Invocations of paradigm shifts have a tendency to obfuscate structural continuities within discourses (Foucault, 1972), thereby downplaying ‘invisible genealogies’ (Darnell, 2001). There is certainly good reason to underscore the radical valences in Boas’s writing. David Dinwoodie has done this most recently with an analysis of Boas’s castigation of ‘chauvinistic nationalism’ informed by his engagements with the ‘Young Intellectuals’ of New York City (Dinwoodie, 2017). However, the history that King characterizes as a tectonic shift has been qualified by many anthropologists (Baker, 1998; Briggs and Bauman, 1999; Dinwoodie, 2015; Trouillot, 2003; Williams, 1996) and virtually rejected by others (Simpson, 2018; Visweswaran, 1998). King’s argument would benefit from a more thorough engagement with these qualifications. This is where Anderson’s critical assessment of the interdigitation of liberalism and whiteness is so important and where I see the source of King and Anderson’s interpretative departures.

Histories of anthropology, histories of the United States

Prior debates in the history of anthropology have on occasion been chalked up to differential methodological commitments (for instance, the classic distinction between ‘presentism’ and ‘historicism’ [Bashkow, 2019; Darnell, 1977; Stocking, 1965]).³ King and Anderson, however, are divided not so much by different approaches to writing history as by differing understandings of the historical terrain itself – that is, the United States and its entanglement with entwined forces of liberalism and racism. To be sure, both see the resurgence of white supremacy and chauvinistic nationalism that rides roughshod over the rights of individuals and marginalized groups as something that needs to be fundamentally called into question, to be unsettled. However, their diagnoses of the source of this iterative animosity are, I think, fundamentally different, which results in divergent assessments of the history of anthropology in the US.

King presents a narrative that frames the revival of anti-immigrant, racist, sexist, and homophobic rhetoric as the result of a deficit in empirical understandings of ‘the other’. It stands to reason that in King’s view, Boasian anthropology, with its insistence upon cultural relativism and its rejection of biologized conceptions of difference, should be seen as a progressive (but hardly uncomplicated) path out of the doldrums of xenophobia and reductive universalism. Anderson, by contrast, sees the same ‘resurgences’ as the inevitable outcome of the limits of Americanist liberal anti-racism, which leaves intact the structures of white supremacy. It follows that in Anderson’s view, Boasian anthropology and all other paradigms that promoted liberal anti-racism – without a thorough interrogation of whiteness – are subject to the same paradoxical outcomes.

Would it be facile to suggest that, in a sense, both are correct? The Boasians did interrupt the biological view of race that undergirds the more overt forms of white supremacy, a necessary step in the creation of a future where the acknowledgement of difference does not automatically result in a hierarchy of humanity. That being said, the Boasians also did not fully interrogate the lived reality of racism/white supremacy or its imbrication in American liberalism, and this academic neglect of the social life of race and racism appears to mirror (if not support) some of the worst tendencies in mainstream politics. Reading King and Anderson in concert does not so much provide a definitive history of anthropology in the American context as underscore the plurality of the themes and resonances to be examined.

To be sure, this a great boon to historians of the social sciences, especially as we revisit seemingly settled debates about foundational figures, paradigms, and their legacies. However, readers benefit from these debates in more ways than one. In particular, the differential reception of the two books may suggest something not just about the state of the history of anthropology. What might the widespread praise for King’s book by popular news outlets and the confinement of Anderson’s to insular academic circles say about the state of the nation? If King is correct, such a fact might indicate that we are on the cusp of a more progressive chapter in US history – a return to renegade intellectualism and the realization of liberal values. If Anderson is correct, there is still much work to be done and liberalism remains a compromised project. Either way, the history of anthropology is more than mere hagiography. Prosaic as it may seem, it is a reminder, as William Faulkner suggested, that the past is neither dead nor past.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nicholas Barron

Notes

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