by Bobby McCann
Undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania
1 Introduction
This paper has two aims: 1) to trace the history of the inclusion of evolutionary theory within American anthropology, and 2) to uncover at each step the implicit or explicit racial views that result from this inclusion. In particular, this paper aims to elucidate how race itself changes as a concept and how reactions to reform the field carry implicit racial assumptions (El-Haj, 2007). This paper takes race as its focus because it is arguably the “problem of the century” both writ large and within anthropology itself as the field developed from its earlier status as a “science of race” (Dubois, 2018, p. 5; García, 2020; Teslow, 2021, p. 350; Harrison, 1998). By focusing on two time periods that roughly map onto major changes in the field (“golden era” holism and genetics/biocultural synthesis), this paper argues that anthropology as a science is shaped by socio-cultural influences, which can then be mapped to biology in a largely pernicious way.1
This claim relies on the following larger proposition: science itself, and not just the “parasitic” ideologies that can arise from it, reflects normative assumptions (Chimisso, 2015, p. 9, 12; Canguilhem, 1988).2 That is, science, far from being a “pure” self-correcting pursuit of truth, is conditioned by social and cultural influences. Many tend to accept this claim as obvious in relation to past scientific pursuits that have been largely proven incorrect. For example, it is common to decry pursuits like “phrenology”—in which one measures the skull—as pseudoscience. This makes two assumptions: 1) as the prefix “pseudo” suggests, it was not actually science, and 2) even if it were science, it is somehow “tainted.”
When it comes to contemporary scientific research, however, many tend to take its truth claims for granted, unlike these earlier pursuits.3 While this paper does not argue that science isn’t connected to truth in the relevant sense, it does argue that its connection to truth does not always present one with the cause to believe what it is saying outright. In fact, sometimes, we must question what it is saying, and uncover the assumptions or “hidden arguments” that underlie it (Tesh, 1988).
The following sections will break down the main throughlines of biological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the racial implications that are revealed at each step. Finally, this paper will make the case for a cautionary approach to biological thinking in anthropology.
2 Origins: Anthropological “Holism”
Franz Boas, known by some as the “Father of American Anthropology,” proposed Holism in the early 20th century as a unity of four fields: linguistics, archaeology, biology, and cultural/social anthropology (Riley, 2019, p. 15).4 Additionally, Boas holds the legacy of staunchly opposing forms of scientific racism, consistent with the influence from his teacher Virchow, showing consistently “an appreciation for the racial type as an empirical fallacy, a distrust of biologistic explanations of human social difference, and especially a distrust of the invocation of Darwin in support of the doctrine of racial inequality” (Marks, 2012b, p. S162). In his scholarly works and public teachings, Boas consistently critiqued what he saw to be fallacies in biologistic reasoning about race, even making surprisingly modern claims, such as “the formation of the racial groups in our midst must be understood on a social basis” (Boas, 1962, p. 71).
However, recently some have argued that Boas was not as anti-racist as might appear. Biological science does not happen in a vacuum, and his utilization of his authority and research to call for a form of assimilationism will prove to be the starting point of a critique of Boas and early American anthropology (Baker, 2021). By trying to show that even some of the more “unproblematic” thinkers of the age are not untouchable, I hope to support the thesis that our science and its truth claims do not always warrant submission to them.5
In addition to the section on Boas, I will broach the creationism vs. evolution debate, and also evaluate the extent to which anthropological holism was a “myth,” so as to elucidate the key strains of biological thinking in early American Anthropology that will continue into the present day.
2.1 Boas on Race
Boas is well known for a landmark study of children of immigrants, which used anthropometrics—the measurement of body parts—to show that supposedly “stable” racial types exhibited a high level of plasticity, throwing into question strict categories of different races (Boas, 1911; Baker, 2021, p. 127). He is also known for his humane view of different groups of people, writing “If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be represented” (Boas, 1962, p. 79). He argued against common views that black Americans would “dilute” the bloodline, and that they were somehow racially inferior (Boas, 1974).
However, there is more to the story: situated as a public intellectual and speaker, Boas argued for the social advancement of American blacks. There are a few subtleties to Boas’s argument that should be drawn out, however. First, he “never explicitly nor categorically declared that Blacks and whites were equal, just that we cannot prove they are not” (Baker, 2021, p. 138). Additionally, and somewhat contradictorily, he emphasized a difference between whites and non-whites in a way that he had not for white racial “types”: “The anthropologist recognizes that the Negro and the white represent the two most divergent types of mankind” (Boas, 1910, p. 22). Baker writes about the speech from which the above quotes were taken, which Boas gave to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Du Bois’s invitation:
Franz Boas was engaging in racist anti-racism. “The Real Race Problem” was written as he was wrapping up Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants (Boas 1911). He believed that to show how little white racial groups diverged, he must emphasize the vast gulf between whites and other races…With his so-called solution of amalgamation, one could surmise that for Boas in 1910, the real race problem was that the Negroes were not white and the New Negro should be no Negro at all.
(Baker, 2021, p. 140)
The “vast gulf” described by Baker was solved by Boas through an assimilation of the two races, where eventually, the American black would mix in with the white population. This idea of assimilation, as Baker points out, can be quite dangerous. Consider the Native American boarding schools and the “orphan train” movement, where Indigenous peoples and impoverished immigrants respectively were taken—sometimes forcibly—and “Americanized” (Baker, 2021, pp. 128-132).
Race “amalgamation,” as Boas recognized himself, would result in the influx of white “blood” into the black population, and a relatively small countervailing influx of black “blood” into the white population, such that it would be impossible that the “pure negro type” was preserved (Boas, 1974, p. 330). In other places, including the speech and the works cited above, Boas continued to emphasize the few differences between white “racial types” and the vast differences between black ones, which would prove to be advantageous for his science, but disastrous for society. He gave scientific backing to ideas of assimilation and also the “consolidation of whiteness” (Baker, 2021, p. 137).
A few points on Boas to get clear: 1) The context of the time influenced what knowledge was produced. Perhaps the “upper limit” of even the most progressive of Anthropologists was still drawn on the color line. Promoting his ideas of the plasticity of white racial “types” came at the expense of the American blacks. 2) His science was carried out rigorously, following all the accepted rules and procedures at the time, including meticulous data analysis. However, the historical context limited Boas from seeing that in taking up the question of white racial “types,” even if his science was good, came with large societal consequences. His science held the status of “truth,” but insofar as it was produced in a racist society, at a time with prevalent ethico-political debates, we recognize an inability to take everything Boas said at face value, without critically evaluating how his science came to be viewed as knowledge. Insofar as Boas laid the groundwork for four-field holism and continues to be taught today in Anthropology classes, this should be concerning.6
Boas was not the only figure that shaped anthropology with consequences far into the century. By turning to a key debate in early anthropology, I hope to continue building upon the importance of cultural debates within biology at the turn of the century, and by extension biological anthropology.
2.2 Creationism vs. Evolution
The ramifications of supporting pseudoscience in the early 20th century are well known (consider the popularity of eugenical thinking). But there is another piece to this puzzle: creationism vs. evolution, stemming back to 19th century Germany, but continuing on into 20th century America. Creationism holds that God created the universe, as the Bible said, fully formed, with plants, animals, and humans all concurrently created, with everything being the same age. This flies in the face of not only Darwin’s theory of evolution but also geological findings and physics research. Needless to say, many scientists, especially biologists, were eager to refute creationism. But in their zeal, ethics seemed to be lost.
Indeed, as Marks states, there are obligations placed on biological anthropologists that are not on the biologist: “Where someone trained as a biologist might well avoid the matter entirely and stick to fruit flies, someone trained as an anthropologist ought to be uniquely situated to confront issues that are both epistemological/scientific and cultural/semiotic” (Marks, 2012c, p. 96). Anthropology, as the study of humans, cannot merely take sides without evaluating the cultural implications of doing so.
Marks asks, “Was winning the rhetorical battle against the creationists so crucial that we could afford to sacrifice the non-white peoples of the world on its front lines, or was that cost too great, leaving us post-Darwinians with an original sin of racism at our birth?” (Marks, 2012c, p. 97). What constitutes this original sin of racism? For one, situating non-white people as lesser or somehow evolutionary “in-between” humans and apes.
How this was justified scientifically has to do with the meaning we impose on data (fossil records, for example). Specifically, the issue of continuity and discontinuity, in this case between species, is relevant. Privileging one over the other (either continuity or discontinuity) stands at a crossroads with the thesis of this paper, namely “reading meaning” that has social implications/premises into data:
Privileging continuity over discontinuity is an epistemic, not an empirical, issue, because continuity itself is constructed. In particular, the first-generation German Darwinians managed to see continuity—with Africans intermediate between Europeans and apes— where in fact no continuity existed…relationship to the apes could probably be more usefully seen as one in which continuity and discontinuity coexist in tension with one another; and whose cultural meanings suffuse the data produced on their behalf.
(Marks, 2012c, p. 100)
Marks is here showing how prejudices/assumptions are necessarily part of the science we do. However, this relationship between continuity and discontinuity, wearing the face of this time of ancestry and emergence, still has important implications for not only early anthropological history but also all the way into the present day and the rise of genetics.
The basic question is: when do species break off, and form new species? What does it mean to descend from an ancestor and be different from them? Further, what are our limits in determining descent and emergence? Marks writes, “If we cannot know just how many distinct evolutionary lineages there were among our ancestors, then what justification is there for pretending that we can, much less that we do?” (Marks, 2012c, p. 96). The importance of an epistemological reflection of anthropology again rears its head. How is our science created? What are its truth claims? Merely stating that this is an old and defunct scientific debate “obscures the invocation of science in every generation for political ends, the misrepresentation of ideologically or politically loaded rhetoric for Darwinism itself, and the consequent obligation on the part of the scholarly community to identify and to repudiate its more odious expressions” (Marks, 2012a, p. 301). In fact, as will be seen in following sections, this debate of descent and emergence is far from defunct and has implications for the present day “revival” of genetics.
So, while creationism did not require the ethical dilemma of supporting racist ideologies, evolutionary theory (largely) did. The ethico-political fight for/against science thus shaped the very science that was produced, who produced it, what questions were asked, etc. Scientific racism helped to form the eugenics movement, with far-reaching implications for anthropology and the world writ large. Many early American anthropologists were eugenicists, with notable exceptions, including Boas. Understanding the tangled history of scientific racism, I argue, is crucial for seeing that less “problematic” or ideologically “tainted” science is still suspect, as societal concerns continue to put pressure on what knowledge is produced.
2.3 Was holism a myth?
The data suggests that golden era “holism” was essentially a myth, much like the myths studied by anthropologists themselves (Borofsky, 2002). Through an analysis of a century of articles in American Anthropologist, Borofsky concluded that only 9.5% contained substantive sub-field integration. If anything, there has been more integration post-1970 than pre-1970, suggesting that the so-called “golden era” contained even less integration than more recent research.
Borofsky points to websites of anthropology departments, which “structurally gesture” at holism, but “if one scratches below the surface, subfield specialization appears dominant, and subfield collaboration ambiguous” (Borofsky, 2002, p. 469). If there was no substantive sub-field integration in the past, and ambiguous integration currently, why do so many anthropologists push for anthropology as a holistic discipline? One answer: “Returning to the four-subfield mentality/organization— “reliving” the “golden era myth,” that is to say—offers a way toward renewed social solidarity and, through that, increased power in wider arenas” (Borofsky, 2002, p. 468). Through a reification of “bureaucratic structures” it is possible to gain support and in turn support the “status quo” of anthropology (Borofsky, 2002, p. 473). The next section will return to holism in its discussion of the biocultural synthesis.
3 Modern Genetics and the Biocultural Synthesis
In recent times, a profound shift has occurred from the mid-century: “At midcentury, social scientists believed that they had won the battle with hereditarians over who could better explain the great human concerns of our era…yet in the last few decades, gradually, almost imperceptibly, our thinking about human social life has shifted to accept a greater role for genetics” (Duster, 1990, vii).7 While the initial enthusiasm for endeavors like the Human Genome Project has largely subsided, the pull of genetics can still be felt.8 First, the importance of genetics in an understanding of humans will be critically analyzed, followed by the newest integration in anthropology, called the “biocultural synthesis.”
3.1 Modern Genetics
By starting at the same debate of ancestry and emergence, this section will pick up largely where the last section left off. It is now common, especially after the rise of modern genetics, to view humans as apes, however, “we were not always apes” but rather “became apes as a consequence of the cultural privilege accorded to genetic data and approaches at the end of the 20th century” (Marks, 2012c, p. 101). Instead of the complex interrelation of descent and modification, a reductive view of descent which genetics is able to explain fairly successfully came to prevail over the story of modification (Marks 2012c).
This cultural significance placed on genetics impacted the science that was created in a profound way. This, along with the startling conclusion that “probabilities can be enough” for racism might fly in the face of commonly held notions (El-Haj, 2007, p. 287).
“Population thinkers” can be what we might call “statistical racists.” “Population thinking” precludes stereotyping of the form “person A is a certain way because all individuals belonging to that group are that way” and the differential treatment of entire groups. However “population thinking” is consistent with the stereotyping of individuals based on the statistical properties of the group. Such stereotyping takes the form: “person A is probably/likely/may be a certain way because most/many/some individuals belonging to that group are that way.”
(Gannet, 2001, p. S490)
Just because we have moved away from overt racial typologies anti-racism is not entailed. While biologists have ceased to view races as distinct ontologically significant entities, the concept of populations does not preclude race (Gannet, 2001; El-Haj, 2007; Barker, 2004).
Rather, race is “reinscribed” in data (El-Haj, 2007). Here we see our thesis of the cultural influence of science, even good science, in this case in population thinking: “DNA differences are conceptualized and categorized within particular contexts of investigation and these contexts of investigation are themselves historically, socially, and culturally situated” (Gannet, 2001, p. S488). Thus, how we define variables, construct questions, and evaluate DNA differences between populations by necessity cannot be separated from our ideas of race.9 This conclusion that the exchange of DNA is culturally relevant holds true even if our definitions of race change or are displaced to “ethnic groups.”10
The subsequent changes in medicine were stark as well, especially with the classification of so-called inherited disorders, which “takes outcomes that are the result of complex multifactorial (even an interaction between genes and environment), and by naming them ‘genetic disorders’ inadvertently shapes a way of seeing and understanding diverse conditions including diabetes, alcoholism, heart disease, breast and cervical cancer that favor a genetic approach to medical intervention” (Duster, 1990, p. 56). There is a corresponding reification of race. Consider the testing for sickle cell anemia, which “has reinforced preexistent racial and social categories even though the distribution of the gene is far wider than the ‘black’ community. In complicated and often insidious ways, the older categories may even take on a renewed force as the new genetics begins to spread not only in the obvious racism so rampant today but more subtly in studies of ‘blacks’” (Rabinow, 1997, p. 103). In agreement with Rabinow, this paper takes the perspective that the reification of older racial categories in new ways at the very least warrants skepticism and monitoring, if not opposition.
In the case of medicine, there are doubtless ethico-political ramifications for the reification of race into “genetic diseases.” El-Haj points out two main ones: 1) Exclusion, because “those citizens who fail to perform that norm to act prudently to avoid or at least try to deter the ‘diseased’ outcome indicated by their genetic profiles are citizen-subjects and patients worthy of moral reprobation” and 2) the political dimension of Identity Politics, as the “novel practices of both race and medicine (as ‘expertise’) have been borne” (El-Haj, 2007, p. 292). How the individual is seen as a citizen-subject now has a level of importance in medical practice, including how that individual responds to being “at-risk” (El-Haj, 2007).
Beyond medicine, many have even tried to link genes to crime, IQ, depression, and even cultural differences between races (Duster, 1990; Marks, 2012a). The latter is the most dubious of all, but the former three should also catch our attention as suspicious. As Duster points out, why do “no ‘appropriated genetic’ studies exist for the crimes of the privileged, i.e., of white-collar and corporate crime. The answer lies in the cultural frame of the questions being asked” (Duster, 1990, p. 111). Here, the science might not be as compelling, but it sheds light on exactly how cultural considerations bear on the questions being asked. While these examples might be overtly controversial, it is up to anthropologists to evaluate ones that might not draw public condemnation but still hold assumptions that reify racial discrimination.
3.2 The Biocultural Synthesis
The biocultural synthesis arose as a new integration and is “often invoked as a unifying theme in a holistic vision of anthropology” (Wiley & Cullin, 2016, p. 554). However, statistical analyses dispute the widespread use of the synthesis for all but a minority of anthropologists, as the use of biocultural only was present in 3 percent of articles in major anthropology journals from 2000-2014 (Wiley & Cullin, 2016). Despite this fact many introductory textbooks begin with the frame of the biocultural synthesis (Yanagisako & Segal, 2005).
In many ways, the biocultural synthesis recapitulates debates around holism (see Schultz, 2009; Calcagno, 2003). One way to critically approach the biocultural synthesis is to look at it from a perspective of interdisciplinarity: “As typically practiced, bioculturalism reproduces the hierarchical ordering inherent in nature/culture dynamics such that not all projects melding biological and sociocultural methods and theories are fully able to claim an interdiscipline” (Cabana et al., 2022, p. 486). This concern of the ‘correct’ meshing of the socio-cultural and biological anthropology is seen in Segal and Yanagisako, who aim to show that the necessity of biological data and ‘positivist’ scientific methods yields a privilege of, if not a reduction to, biological anthropology (Segal and Yanagisako, 2005).
From a broad perspective then, the biocultural synthesis is not immune to criticism already placed on population thinking, genetics, and anthropology’s exploration of the non-European “other” (Wynter, 2003). Biocultural anthropology (no matter how “critical,” c.f. Hoke & Leatherman, 2017), is never non-racist or anti-racist in fact. The extent to which biocultural studies reify, replicate, or alter racial constructs remains to be evaluated. Hoke and Leatherman’s presentation of an approach that speaks to the “dialectical” nature of the interaction between the “social” and “biological” is laudable, in that it makes significant advances to distance itself from the dark past of biological anthropology. However, I aim to show that 1) it should not be accepted blindly, and 2) it should not be seen as the necessary or only approach to anthropology (it should not be the “new synthesis” that brings the dream of holism to fruition, but rather one among many approaches, which can be fruitful in its own right).
Hoke and Leatherman state many objections to how culture is integrated into bicultural studies:11 for example, “it is impossible to distill relations of power and global economic forces into single variables that can be readily measured and used” (Hoke & Leatherman, 2017, p. 288). The acknowledgment that forcing complex interrelations into single variables is taken well. Hoke and Leatherman can be pushed one step further on this point, however: these complex interrelations
between culture, society, history, etc. are already being forced into a reduction by being forced into dialogue with biology and evolution. Hoke and Leatherman are mistaken in that just because they aren’t reducing culture to variables, it is already being reduced insofar as it is being viewed primarily or exclusively as having an impact on biology. Instead of seeing biology as just another one of the variables of input, it privileges it as the location to see the output of sociocultural influences. This is not to say an acknowledgment of the role of biological impacts in producing and reproducing the “social machinery of inequality” is not made (Hoke and Leatherman, 2017, p. 297). But it is made merely as an afterthought, not as motivating the study itself (which I argue holds more generally). The question the biocultural approach must answer, then, is why even run the risk of reducing power relations?12
Hoke and Leatherman note (lament?) that “We live and work within a political economy of specialization and expert knowledge …that promotes and rewards depth over breadth and believes that success is better ensured by developing more narrowly conceived and specialized academic departments” (Hoke & Leatherman, 2017, p. 283). The most common solution for this problem is to revert to a notion of holism (or an integration like bioculturalism). However, some rightly point out that this would be to fall into the “myth” of holism: “The contradiction anthropology lives with is its tendency toward specialization, all the while aspiring to be an intellectually, holistic discipline” however holism “does not really resolve the discipline’s tensions regarding specialization and fragmentation. Rather, it highlights the discipline’s inability to cope with them” (Borofsky, 2002, pp. 472-3). Specialization develops, is hard to stop, and does not mesh well with holism; and yet, many people still advocate for holism—which I extend to other integrations—when it is impractical (or outright impossible) to conduct.
I argue for taking this one step further to include danger or at least the potential for it. Does the biocultural synthesis not run the risk of enclosing the field into a “dominant paradigm” that stifles problematization (Segal and Yanagisako, 2005, p. 13)? This would mean that the enclosure of the field around an integration—and as a delimitation—of fields of inquiry, methods, and frameworks, makes it difficult to oppose it from a critical social perspective, which would be seen as necessarily outside of the purview of the perspective of biocultural anthropology as a science. Anthropology as science is necessarily opposed to “non-science,” a term inclusive of many critical approaches that have been long labeled “relativistic.” The implications for this in applications of biocultural theory could be stark: how are we using biocultural perspectives to inform criminology? How are we using them to inform medicine? How are these approaches bearing on constructs like race?
4 Conclusion
Through two time periods of the development of anthropology—early American and late-20th century—this paper has looked at biological thinking through a critical lens, to the end of evaluating racial assumptions that are mapped onto biology. In each time period, a few examples were evaluated. In early America, Boas was singled out as a “racist anti-racist,” the creationist vs. evolution debate was elucidated to expose its ethical and political stances, and finally holism was
evaluated and found to be largely a myth. In the time period of genetics, advances in medicine, and biocultural synthesis, a new cultural weight placed on genetic explanations was evaluated. It was found that population and statistical thinking are not immune from racism, and we must proceed carefully in all of these endeavors.
Not submitting to the truth claims of science, in this case biology, might have very practical consequences for anthropology. It might mean the death blow to holism, or at least a less coveted position for integration. This leads to the obvious question; in which cases should we accept (submit) to the truth? There are a few straightforward ways to evaluate whether or not we should accept scientific truth, (moving from the micro to the macro level):
- Research questions: Should we be asking questions with assumed/ascribed racial categories? Should we be asking these questions? Why these questions about race, and not others? What do these choices mean for other potential inquiries into race? By choosing certain questions, what other questions are precluded?13 How are variables defined, and populations circumscribed? Just because something is constituted as knowledge, does not mean that it is the only knowledge possible, that it is the most liberatory, emancipatory, etc.14
- Cultural/social motives: What are the motives behind research? How is this research motivated? What larger debates is this research involved in? Just because something holds the status of “scientific research” does not mean it is automatically not racist.
- Reaffirming race? Does this research reaffirm racial distinctions? Does it lazily accept norms, or does it actively and introspectively evaluate its own possible biases? Just because authors or groups say –implicitly or explicitly—that they are acting in a non-racist way, does not mean that they are/are not.
References
Baker, L. (2021). The Racist Anti-Racism of American Anthropology. Transforming Anthropology, 29(2),127–142.
Barker, J. (2004). The Human Genome Diversity Project: “Peoples”, “Populations” and the cultural politics of identification. Cultural Studies, 18(4), 571–606. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238042000232244
Boas, F. (1910). The Real Race Problem. The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, 1(2), 22–25.
Boas, F. (1911). Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (Reports of the Immigration Commission 38). United States Immigration Commission.
Boas, F. (1962). Anthropology and Modern Life. Norton.
Boas, F. (1974). Race Problems in America. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), The Shaping of American Anthropology: 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader. Basic Books.
Borofsky, R. (2002). The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers. American Anthropologist, 104(2), 463–480.
Cabana, G. S., Mendoza, M., Smith, L. A., Delfino, H., Martínez, C., Mazza, B., Rossi, L. T., & DI Fabio Rocca, F. (2022). Crossing at y/our own peril: Biocultural boundary crossing in anthropology. American Anthropologist, 124(3), 479–489. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13729
Calcagno, J. M. (2003). Keeping Biological Anthropology in Anthropology, and Anthropology in Biology. American Anthropologist, 105(1), 6–15.
Canguilhem, G. (1988). Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). The MIT Press.
Chimisso, C. (2015). Narrative and epistemology: Georges Canguilhem’s concept of scientific ideology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 54, 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2015.08.016
Collins, H. M. (1983). The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Studies of Contemporary Science. Annual Review of Sociology, 9, 265–285.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (2018). The Souls of Black Folk (P. H. Hinchey, Ed.). Myers Education Press, LLC.
Duster, T. (1990). Backdoor to Eugenics. Routledge.
El-Haj, N. A. (2007). The Genetic Reinscription of Race. Annual Review of Anthropology, 36, 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120522
Gannet, L. (2001). Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of “Population Thinking.” Philosophy of Science, 68(3), S479–S492.
García, J. D. (2020). Race and Ethnicity. In N. Brown, T. McIlwraith, & L. T. de González (Eds.), Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (2nd ed.). American Anthropological Association.
Greenwood, D. J. (1984). The Taming of Evolution: The Persistence of Nonevolutionary Views in the Study of Humans. Cornell University Press.
Hacking, I. (2006). Genetics, Biosocial Groups & The Future of Identity. Daedalus, 135(4), 81–95.
Harrison, F. V. (1998). Expanding the Discourse on “Race.” American Anthropologist, 100(3), 609–631.
Hoke, M., & Leatherman, T. (2017). Critical Biocultural Anthropology: A model for anthropological integration. In S. Coleman, S. Hyatt, & A. Kingslover (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology (1st ed., pp. 283–302). Routledge.
Howells, W. W. (1952). The Study of Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 54, 1–7.
Marks, J. (2012a). Evolutionary Ideologies. In A. Poiani (Ed.), Pragmatic Evolution: Applications of Evolutionary Theory (pp. 297–312). Cambridge University Press.
Marks, J. (2012b). The Origins of Anthropological Genetics. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S161–S172.
https://doi.org/10.1086/662333
Marks, J. (2012c). Why Be Against Darwin? Creationism, Racism, and the Roots of Anthropology. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 55, 95–104. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22163
McCann, Robert. (2024). Embodiment and Race Lab.
Rabinow, P. (1997). Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton University Press.
Riley, E. P. (2019). The Promise of Contemporary Primatology. Routledge.
Schultz, E. (2009). Resolving the Anti-Antievolutionism Dilemma: A Brief for Relational Evolutionary Thinking in Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 111(2), 224–237. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15481433.2009.01115.x
Stocking, G. W. (1960). Franz Boas and the Founding of the American Anthropological Association. American Anthropologist, 62, 1–17.
Swyers, H. (2016). Rediscovering Papa Franz: Teaching Anthropology and Modern Life. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(2), 213–231. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.015
Tesh, S. (1988). Hidden arguments: Political ideology and disease prevention policy. Rutgers University Press.
Teslow, T. (2021). The Historiography of Race and Physical Anthropology. In M. R. Dietrich, M. E. Borrello, & O. Harman (Eds.), Handbook of the Historiography of Biology (pp. 343–370). Springer.
The Human Genome Project. (2023). https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project
Wiley, A. S., & Cullin, J. M. (2016). What Do Anthropologists Mean When They Use the Term
Biocultural? American Anthropologist, 118(3), 554–569. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12608
Yanagisako, S. J., & Segal, D. A. (Eds.). (2005). Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. Duke University Press.
- See Rabinow (1997) for the concept of “bio-sociality” which I will be drawing from in the formulation of this thesis. For Rabinow, “bio-sociality” can be seen as a reversal of the sociobiology of the late 20th century: “In the future, the new genetics will cease to be a biological metaphor for modern society and will become instead a circulation network of identity terms and restriction loci, around which and through which a truly new type of autoproduction will emerge, which I call ‘biosociality.’ If sociobiology is culture constructed on the basis of a metaphor of nature, then in biosociality nature will be modeled on culture understood as practice.” (Rabinow, 1997, p. 99). In this paper, I have taken the underlying thesis of “bio-sociality” and tried to show how concepts of race have evolved very much in line with Rabinow’s thesis (see especially section 3.1). Hacking also recognizes an extension of Rabinow’s thesis: “new societies form along newly recognized (or, at any rate, newly asserted) biological or genetic lines, forging new alliances and loyalties. Forging new identities…” however, Hacking also emphasizes that Rabinow “was not primarily interested in the use of genetics for racial identification, the current bone of contention” (Hacking, 2006, pp. 81, 84). ↩︎
- A classic example of what Canguilhem takes to be a parasitic ideology that arises from scientific endeavors, but notably applies findings to other fields of human domains, is Spencer’s “evolutionism,” which was a kind of social application of Darwinian theory. This is distinct from the other aspect of what Canguilhem sees as scientific ideology, which is the precursor to a given field of scientific inquiry. See Canguilhem (1988, pp. 27-40). ↩︎
- A notable exception to this is a phenomenon like vaccine skepticism. While vaccine skepticism is in fact an instance of people not taking the claims of science seriously, I do not take it to be the predominant view of science as a whole. Quite the opposite, if there is one thing that people tend to rely on for healthcare, information, etc., it is science. ↩︎
- Boas’s own skepticism of the project of holism is not treated in this paper but should be pointed out. See Stocking
(1960) for more on Boas and the founding of American anthropology. ↩︎ - I take it for granted that much of the science evaluated in this article is carried out rigorously and follows the rules set out in the game of truth corresponding to scientific inquiry. While some have pointed out the misapplication or
appropriation of Darwinian theory in anthropology (see Greenwood, 1984), I do not believe this is the case for some of the major developments within anthropology concerning biology and biological thinking. See the last section of this paper for a discussion on what it might mean to not submit to truth claims from science. ↩︎ - For example, Boas’s 1928 Anthropology and Modern Life, from which I have quoted above, has been used in an introductory four-field course by Swyers (see Swyers, 2016). Swyers, while explicating how “Papa Franz” broke down racial purity in Anthropology and Modern Life, in my view unsatisfactorily comes to grips with what Baker calls Boas’s “racist antiracism.” As a four-field introductory class, it seems that the more subtle racial implications of anthropology are already being missed. It is undoubtable that Boas is taught in other University classes, albeit perhaps not one of his whole books. In any case, his formative influence on American Anthropology is inherited regardless of whether his name is or is not mentioned, and so the point is still well taken. ↩︎
- One of many pieces of evidence for this can be seen through the initial popularity of Wilson’s “Sociobiology,” which aimed to give human behavior an evolutionary and genetic basis. ↩︎
- As stated on the National Human Genome Research Institute website, the Human Genome Project “was a voyage of biological discovery led by an international group of researchers looking to comprehensively study all of the DNA
(known as a genome) of a select set of organisms.” (The Human Genome Project, 2023). This overall positive evaluation does not adequately expose its complex and ambiguous ethical commitments, which will be enumerated verbatim by Marks, (2012b, p. S167-8):
First, they invoked the tropes of “salvage anthropology,” namely, the imminent extinction of indigenous peoples, which they complemented with discourses of isolation and purity (Barker 2004).
Second, in a post-NAGPRA era, one could hardly fail to take note of the complexities associated with making collections of blood as museums were being obliged to return their collections of bones. Issues of informed consent, financial interests, and the responsibilities of the researchers were raised reactively, if at all.
Third, the issue of consent itself in a cross-cultural context was complicated by the possible use of the samples against the wishes or interests of the subjects.
And fourth, the HGDP appropriated to itself the cultural authority of science in matters of ancestry and very casually delegitimized any other ideas about kinship and descent (Atkinson, Bharadwaj, and Featherstone 2006; Egorova 2007; Tutton 2004). The Genographic project followed the Human Genome Project in response to criticism but still had problems concerning indigenous peoples and a lack of a nuanced explanation of ancestry (see Marks 2012b). ↩︎ - A further point should be made, which goes one step further towards the exchange of genetic information in the first place (and not our recognition or evaluation of the information): “Since any barriers that limit gene exchange in Homo sapiens will be socially constituted and/or embedded in cultural signification practices, group DNA differences will always be culturally meaningful and socially relevant” (Gannet, 2001, p. S490). ↩︎
- Gannet points out that lead theorists behind the switch to population thinking and the move away from the term “race” –prominently Dobzhansky—did not intend to liquidate race, but rather transmute it. Race still remained an empirical reality, even if our methods or ways of identifying it were flawed (Gannet, 2001, S484). While this is clearly
preferable to the previous conclusion that our concepts of race coincided perfectly with the biological reality, it is still not quite the “race is a social construct” that we are familiar with and shows how we have maintained concepts of race even through time. ↩︎ - It should be noted that after their presentation and defense of the critical biocultural approach, they immediately
followed it up with a study of Peruvians, with an eye toward showing how inequalities affect health. I would like to
highlight here a larger issue in anthropology, namely the gaze and hyperfocus on non-European societies and cultures. Is studying the “agro-pastoralist” Nuñoans not reminiscent of holism’s status as “a carrier of social-evolutionary figure of the division of humanity into a civilizational Self and relatively backward (less and pre-civilized) Others”? (Hoke and Leatherman, 2017, p. 292; Segal and Yanagisako, 2004, p. 8). This relatively surface-level critique hinges upon not the content of the study but its relation to the historical reality of biological anthropology (which Hoke and Leatherman are right to acknowledge). It is sufficient to note here that in relation to other disciplines which are hyper-focused on the West, anthropology should not be wholly blamed for its hyper-focus on non-Western subjects, as this would contribute to “the academy’s provincialism” (Segal and Yanagisako, 2004, p. 10). ↩︎ - A similar question: why not leave socio-cultural anthropology to its own autonomy generally, save when the biological impacts are so important we must have a view of them? Why force a synthesis reminiscent of holism, trying to force anthropology into a unified discipline? ↩︎
- This phenomenon is recognized by Duster in the context of heritability, which he compares to a “prism”: “Why, when, and how a given society’s members employ that prism on any one of an infinite variety of possible human traits is a matter for an approach that attempts to illuminate the prior question of knowledge production (including the choice and formulation of questions), and later reception and application of that knowledge” (Duster, 1990, p. 35). It should be noted that the subsequent reception of knowledge is also important. Perhaps how we react to knowledge, including critiquing it, is a way to make it better. ↩︎
- Some of this wording was used in Robert McCann, “Embodiment and Race Lab,” April 26, 2024. ↩︎
