Anthropologists and decent humans alike! Please help report this. This is the first thing that comes up on google and it’s unacceptable!
Archaeologist problems: When some lame Wordpress page insults Franz Boas with racist bullshit.
(For my followers not in the know: Franz Boas is basically the progenitor of North American schools of anthropology. He determined correctly that race is a social construct wherein we have created separate categories for physical and cultural traits that actually exist on a spectrum with no true biological boundaries.)
I provided feedback to google that this is the wrong answer, and I encourage my followers to run this search and do the same thing.
Let’s not forget that Boas::
Was a German-American Jewish immigrant who hated Nazis. Like. HATED Nazis and Hitler. And when everyone else was making noises about how Hitler wasn’t so bad, he’d calm down, etc. - Boas was publishing article after article about what a monster Hitler was and how he should be removed immediately.
At the time Boas was beginning his career, Anthropologists had been incorrectly using skull measurements to determine who was what race and then participate in the associated racism that is innate to the Great Chain of Being (<– idea that society is a progression from grass hut to modern western society. Has been debunked over and over, but it’s pervasiveness still shows in many still popular cultural ideas.). Boas was so ticked off by both the racism and the lack of scientific integrity inherent in the skull measuring that his ass traipsed all over and measured *thousands* of skulls - the largest study ever of the subject - and not only debunked the correlation between race and skull measurements, but proved that skull sizes could be influenced by environment and weren’t even genetically dictated. He was like “me and my 12,000 skulls say fuck you and the racist horse you rode in on.”
Debunked the Great Chain of Being - or the idea that culture is a strict progression.
He was involved with the early NAACP - his writings can be found in their early publications.
His influence on social perceptions of race helped end the Jim Crow laws.
Really hated the lack of scientific integrity in anthropology at the time, hence his role in the founding of the current 4-field approach of American anthropology (Cultural anthro, physical anthro, archaeology, and linguistics.). He was extremely prolific and had a lot of great connections so he had lots of influence.
He not only approved of women having a place in academia, he mentored several, including one of the most famous anthropologists: Margaret Mead.
And, yeah, he correctly determined that race is a social construct based on phenotypical characteristics not a biological reality.
He had a PhD in physics before coming to anthropology and a diverse scientific background, so he had wide and varied interests. He seems like he was a pretty cool guy.
