Utter Confusion and Contradiction: Franz Boas and the Problem of Human Complexion

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, Franz Boas joined other men of science who sought to establish a rational method of labeling and organizing variations in human complexion. For Boas, it was imperative to include Native Americans, especially given the prevailing notion that, in collision with white civilization, they were soon to become extinct. Thus, Boas undertook the massive endeavor of calculation and quantification of Indian bodies. This chapter argues that when Boas published his key work, The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911, he had taken important, if tentative, steps toward disrupting the scientific drive toward racial classification. By reading Boas's raw data sheets from the early 1890s along with his writings on an array of topics, one can speculate on the significance of this little-studied aspect of his progressive assertions about race in The Mind of Primitive Man.

Dis/possession Afoot: American (Anthropological) Traditions of Anti‐Blackness and Coloniality

“…Less discussed is that his practice also included digging up the graves of the same Native American communities—knowingly against their will—and amassing a collection of over 300 skulls and the entire remains of least 150 Native Ancestors with the intention to benefit financially from their sale to the very phrenology market within anthropological departments and institutions he worked to discredit (Thomas 2002; Simpson 2018). He also presided over the creation of the largest living "human zoo" at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis that displayed Indigenous peoples from colonial settings throughout the world for white public enjoyment (and for anthropological studies measuring skin color) (Hodes 2018). Meanwhile, Black people in the Americas (largely de‐Indigenized via chattel slavery; Smalls forthcoming) were generally bequeathed to biological anthropology and the other biological sciences, as well as sociology (and sociolinguistics), and were not so much a curiosity as local, familiar, and pervasive problem, or “intellectual specimens” for advancing scientific knowledge of the Human and/or for re‐legitimizing White Supremacy (Baker 1998; Hogarth 2017).…”