Analyzing the Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History of American Physical Anthropology

SKULL DOCTORS
Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History

of American Physical Anthropology.
With Special Reference to the Work of Ale&scaron; Hrdli&ccaron;ka
Michael L. Blakey, Howard University, Smithsonian

Institution
ABSTRACT 7
Prior to World War II research in physical anthropology functioned within its
social and political context to produce an inegalitarian ideology. Ale&scaron; Hrdli&ccaron;ka,
1869-1943, held a prominent place in these developments. Subsequent contextual
changes (not simply hypothesis testing) produced epistemological
changes.Although the field has been liberalized, many of the research interests
and beliefs regarding the concept of race of the pre-war period remained for
reasons having little to do with analytical efficacy. The continuing emphasis
placed on naturalistic explanation in general is shown in continuity with the
apologetic politics of pre-war anthropology. Yet, its promise for political
application has dimished. Alternatives with broader application exist in social
science approaches to comparative human biology, but social constraints upon
the field limit the focus of physical anthropology to natural history. Moreover,
this historical analysis shows socio-scientific articulation is intrinsic to the process
of scientific discovery and change.
’Pure impersonal science ... has nothing to do with safeguarding the human society, or
with the directing of human progress. It is, however, next to nature and in some respects
even above nature ... But scientific research is carried on by men and women who ...
are members of human society, and hence cannot be but deeply interested in its needs
and its difficulties. They are conscious that they are not an independent caste, but a
corps of intellectual tools of society ... Because of these conditions science cannot be
wholly abstract, impersonal; it cannot, and would not if it could, be asocial.’ Ale&scaron;
Hrdli&ccaron;ka, 1869-1943 Human Welfare and Science (Hrdli&ccaron;ka Papers, NAA/NMNH)
INTRODUCTION
Anthropological theory has changed with society just as macro-evolutionary

change occured in the transformation from religious to scientific epistomological
Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

species. Physical anthropology is atavistic in some respects despite its many
advances. Its natural historical theories and interests have often been
inappropriate for understanding biological and social variations brought about in
the human-determined world into which we have long since arrived. It nontheless,
has served to bolster or undermine political ideologies. It has an ideological
function which, historically, has often outweighed the ability to comprehend or
predict, as fas as the institutional support and public acceptance of
anthropological knowledge is concerned. And wherever biological anthropology
proceeds from here, by all historical indications, will be politically sensitive
precisely in relationship to its social importance.
Allen (1975) showed the political and economic interests to which eugenical and
anthropological ideas were tied during the first half of this century. Gould (1981)
has convincingly shown the influences of cultural and political assumptions on
theory. Uniquely, Gould describes the flexibility of biometric methods and
8 procedures by which data are made to conform to theory, thus producing results
that fulfill the a priori assumptions that researchers hold. By combining these
approaches, this paper explains a system of articulation between political
interests, scientific theory, and research results in the historical record of the
field.
A further way of testing these relationships is to examine the process of
historical change. Gough (1968), Stocking (1968), and Drake (1980) have
described the cultural or political changes which bore upon this science and
pressed it to become more self-critical and to change towards alternative socio-
political interests. These views of the sociology of paradigmatic change will also
be applied here to explain both stasis and the evolution/revolution of knowledge.
I focus on the mainstream of American physical anthropology before 1960 with
special reference to Ales Hrdlicka, its most energetic worker before the Second
World War. Spencer (1979) has compiled an extensive corpus of information on
Hrdlicka which, though thorough in many important respects, gives little
attention to the socially significant racist, classist, and sexist aspects of his work
explored in this analysis. It is my view that neither Hrdlicka nor the field are
understandable without these substantial missing pieces. This paper goed further
by applying the analytical framework described above, to explain how and
perhaps why physical anthropology followed the paths it did. Some
uncomfortable and harmful implications of Hrdlicka’s work (and of the field in
general) have been considered inasmuch as these are areas of great significance to
the development of anthropology in the past and the kinds of pitfalls one might
most wish to avoid repeating in the present.
It is important for new generations of scholars to become aware of many of the
anthropological dilemmas that earlier generations may wish to forget. It would be
unreasonable to assume that all of the racist, classist, and sexist assumptions,
once central to physical anthropology, have been discovered and resolved. As
relevant social functions for these ideologies are maintained or re-emerge, so may
scientific biases that are influenced by and supportive of those ideologies. One’s
decisions as to the direction of whatever may be perceived as ’progress’ in this

field can be more intelligently discerned by bringing the lessons of historical
experience into direct association with the present through the application of
generalizable models. The exercise is of both philosophical and practical interest.
Professional physical anthropology has, from its inception been a powerful
ideological force. It successfully competed with Christianity as elucidator of
human origins and gave a new, naturalistic meaning to human social relations. In
this important ideological role scientific knowledge has been subject to systematic
and continuous influences of broad political and economic interests.
Physical anthropology first appeared in America offering biological
justifications for social inequality (Jordan, 1968; Fishman and Weiner, 1982;
Brace and Livingstone, 1971; Gould, 1981 and others). The founder of American
physical anthropology, Ales Hrdlicka noted that the pre-professional roots of the
field extend to Dr. Samual Morton’s early 19th century work (Hrdlicka, 1918).
Morton helped justify slavery and racial inequality by using cranial comparisons
that were biased in favor of Euro-American cranial capacity and intelligence 9
(Gould, 1978; 1981:50-68). Christian ideology was becoming increasingly
contradictory with respect to the institution of slavery and (Jordan, 1968;
Higginbotham, 1978:199-201) and Morton’s work on polygenesis and the
biological inferiority of non-white races came at a time when slavery was
especially threatened.
One supporter of slavery wrote that the South need no longer be ’so much frightened’,
by ’voices of Europe or of Northern America’ in defending its ’peculiar institutions’.
When Morton died, the South’s leading medical journal proclaimed (R.W. Gibbs,
Charleston Medical Journal, 1851 ...) ’We of the South should consider him as our
benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an
inferior race (Gould, 1981:69).’
Then, as throughout the history of the field, scholarly debate arose from the
social group such ideas sought to desenfranchise. Frederick Douglass (1854)
cogently explained the work of Morton and Agaziz as an attempt to reconcile the
economic convenience of slavery with the moral mandates of Christianity by
making blacks out to be sub-human. Later, at the turn of the century evolutionary
theory would give new interpretations of craniometric data providing a rich
natural historical conceptual framework, yet one in which social inequality
continued to be attributed to human biological differences. With the abolition of
slavery and Morton’s death, however, physical anthropology attracted very little
attention among the succeeding generation of American scientists (Hrdlicka,
1914, 1918).
In Europe during the 19th century anthropology addressed the question of
national differences. Paul Broca and his contemporaries were engaged in heated
scientific debates about the innate superiority of Frenchman over other European
groups. Their craniometric methods were also used to demonstrate the
superiority of academics, men, and whites. As Gould (1981) has shown, mental
capacities were inferred from measurements of head shapes (dolichocephaly vs.
brachycephaly), cranial size (with and without controlling for age and height),
brain weight, morphological complexity of the brain, and the position of the

foramen magnum. The criteria for superiority which would be used in any
particular argument were selected from among these and other measurements to
conform to the desired results based on the researchers ethnocentricities and
assumptions of superiority (Gould, 1981:73-112).
The ensuing debate over craniometric methods coincided with a schism
between French and German schools, leaving for Hrdlicka’s generation the task
of reunifying anthropometric methods. Hrdlicka, however, appeared to be
unaware of the role which ethnocentrism played in that ’great loss of effort’
(Hrdlicka, 1918:7). As the first curator of physical anthropology at the United

States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution), founder of the American
Journal of Physical Anthropology and principal advocate for the founding of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Ales Hrdlicka may indeed
have been ’America’s most distinguished physical anthropologist’ (Montagu,
1944:117).
10 By the turn of the century the most successful and established area of physical
anthropological study concerned so-called inferior groups who were unable to
contest the anthropological interpretations. These institutionalized groups were
both available and of special interest to the physicians who were engaged in
anthropometric work. According to Hrdlicka, the study of ’the pathological
groups of mankind - the alcoholics, epileptics, insane, idiots, perverts and other
defectives or degenerates, and also criminals’ by 1918 was an ’already fairly well
advanced’ research area, while the study of racial groups (meaning national
groups as well) could still be characterized as ’rudimentary’ and ’not yet emerged
far above the stage of amateurism’ (1918:19).
Abnormal or racial, the basic definition of physical anthropology was group
comparison. If one compares a feature or condition in several racial, social or
other groups of humanity it is anthropological, if not it is merely anatomy,
physiology, pathology, etc.’ (Hrdlicka to Davenport, Dec. 10, 1917:NAA/
NMNH). Hrdlicka’s anthropology would rise from and support the premise that
social differences between human groups were attributable to racial
characteristics that reflected the extent of their evolution. Thus, the racial ranking
of Morton was not changed, but simply explained by the new evolutionary
paradigm. This perspective gave the field a convenient function for its
development under contemporary social and political conditions.
By the turn of the century the issues for American evolutionary anthropology
had changed from those of slavery to those of a free yet unequal wage labor
system. Hrdlicka put cranial comparisons forward to explain the social and
economic disadvantages of blacks during segregation and of Southern and
Eastern European immigrants; the new urban underclass and cheap labor
associated with the rise of American industrial capitalism. America’s democratic
and egalitarian ideals stood in stark contrast to the glaring social and economic
inequalities between black, immigrant, and other workers and a predominantly
Anglo-Saxon landed and industrialist class. Class differences were often viewed
in racial terms and scientifically justified on biological grounds. Thus racial and
biodeterministic theories (which attribute disadvantages to natural causes)

resolved the contradictions between inegalitarian relations of production and an
ideology of ’equal opportunity’. In fact, this is precisely the role Douglass had
claimed of Morton’s work which obscured the contradictions between Christian
philosophy and slavery (Douglass, 1854).
In addition to this, emphasis grew around the prospective practical utility of
physical anthropology. If racial inheritance explained social en economic
ir.equalities, national progress in social and economic development would depend
on the way in which the nation was bred. Hrdlicka, like others in the field, was
concerned about the increasing potential for intermarriage between whites,
blacks, and Indians, but that was ’largely controllable by law and general
enlightenment’. The racial quality of the swarthy immigrant workers of Southern
and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, needed to be more clearly discerned for
the future of ’American’ (white) society.
A question of perhaps even greater concern than ’mixture of the coloured races with the
white’ is that of the immigration of whites of every extraction. What do these diverse 11
strains bring in the way of physical and intellectual endowments, and what in these
respects are the results of their mixture with the native population (Hrdlicka, 1918)?
The social and biological future of the ’native’ or ’old American’ people (defined
as those of Western European descent who could claim at least three generations
in the United States) was the principal question for which Hrdlicka’s comparative
research was conducted. During this period of accelerated sociocultural change
and ambiguity Americans were deeply concerned about national identity and
national ’progress’ (a concept which the Wilson administration was responsible
for introducing to its current level of ideological significance). Hrdlicka would
propose, as a major practical thrust of his field, to illuminate the significance of
organic evolution in the future of old American whites.
Physical anthropology may not be of special benefit to the more primitive groups
themselves, but we must have it not alone for descriptive and statistical purposes, but
for a proper understanding of the fundamental problems of our own race and of
humanity in general (Hrdlicka, 1928:20).
These key issues constitute much of the fertile ground in which professional
physical anthropology was institutionalized and the practical interest implicit in
many evolutionary and racial studies during the first half of the 20th century.
THE EVOLUTIONARY THESIS

Theories of organic evolution, coupled with precise anthropometric
measurements were perceived to be more rigorous than strictly sociological
theory and method. In fact, Hrdlicka equated ’nature’ with objectivity (see the
quotation on page 1). What he fails to recognize, however, is that objective
though nature may be, one’s understanding of nature is derived from the
enculturated perspectives of human minds. Evolutionary theory and biometry
were enormously malleable. They were conveniently manipulated as ’tools of

society’ to depict nature in the image of Western society, and that society in the
image of nature.
Hrdlicka’s pre-Mendelian concept of evolution was a Lamarckian-Darwinian
synthesis in which environmental stimulation of the ’germ plasm’ or ’protoplasm’
of the blood could, in properly predisposed individuals or groups, produce
developmental changes and inheritable traits (Hrdlicka, 1919:1921). Tanning by
ultraviolet light or immunity through prior exposure to pathogens were given as
examples of environmental effects on protoplasm, such that tanning or
’immunity which originally has been conferred upon individuals only, has in the
course of ages through repetitions of the same process, become implanted in that
particular race or stock, has become hereditary’ (Hrdlicka, 1921:6). This
Lamarckian component, however, could be omitted when results were
inconsistent with predictions.
Now a great many variations and injuries are merely superficial, even though they may
12 be sometimes very mutilating. In many other respects you might produce effects ... and
these effects will not become hereditary because their influence has not reached, has not
been impressed upon the germ plasm. The germ plasm very fortunately, is not easily
changed (1921:6-7).
Evolution, to Hrdlicka’s thinking, involved continuous differentiation of
protoplasmic characteristics. This process was driven by ’forces of nature’ and
vitalistic ’influences of cosmic forces perceptible in protoplasm’ (1921:3). An
aggregation of differentiated features intensified under Darwinian selection.
Once maladaptive traits had aggregated, selection brought about their
’elimination’. However, in Hrdlicka’s view, evolution or ’differentiation’
occured prior to natural selection.
The extent to which a race had evolved was fundamental to the limits
(predisposition) within which their blood could be stimulated towards an
adaptive inventory of physical and social traits. In social terms, economic success
and cultural assimilation represented ’adaptation’. Not only were whites
considered better adapted and phylogenetically superior, but with the ’greater
quantity’ of environment to which they were exposed, were presumably becoming
ever more substantially advanced (Hrdlicka, 1921).
Natural selection also served as an explanation for the mortality produced by
colonial expansion and the adversity of urban poverty. Non-whites and the poor
were presumed deficient in ’the main trend in evolution today ... the evolution of
the brain of the mind and of the intellect’ (Hrdlicka, 1921:14).
We see that the higher civilized white man has already in some respects out distanced
others, that he is rapidly diversifying, and that all about us those who cannot keep the
accelerated pace are being eliminated by nature (Hrdlicka, 1915, emphasis added).
Social, morphological, and pathological traits were also thought to be expressed
as atavisms, the re-emergence of the primordial animal lingering behind on the
phylogenetic ladder.
Time and again you will encounter in the brain where the brain is more animal, persons
who cannot be taught certain things, who cannot agree with society although there is no

pathological evidence in them and discernible in their immediate ancestors and there is
one possible explanation for those particular individuals and that is that their brain has,
through one form or another of reversion, reproduced an earlier form (Hrdlicka,

1919:7).
The quote, above, from a lecture given at George Washington University Medical
College (1919) is indicative of the subtlety of evidence required for Hrdlicka’s
authoritative conclusions. Under the protoplasm-stimulus interaction model, any
biological or social phenotype would ultimately be explained in terms of an innate
component. Individual behavioral variation, inconsistent with the expected or
stereotyped attributes of a particular family or race could always be explained as
the result of an apparent effect of stimulation or a lack thereof. Yet stimulation,
learning, and environment were thought to be incapable of bending behavior
beyond the innate limitations of a race at its current evolutionary stage.
13
APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY AND EUGENICS
The practical value of evolutionary and biodeterministic anthropology hinged
upon its application to eugenical engineering of American biological and social
progress (racially selective immigration and controlled breeding of human
populations).
From now on evolution will no longer be left entirely to nature, but it will be assisted ...
and even regulated by man himself. This is into what we are coming, and I think it will be
one of the greatest manifestations of humanity - the fact of assisting intelligently in its
own evolution along the right lines, and thereby doing away with the immense waste
which would otherwise happen ... This particular line of activity is known to-day under
the name Eugenics, which is not, as is often supposed, a separate branch of science; it is
merely applied anthropological and medical science - applied for the benefit of
mankind ... (Hrdlicka, 1921:16: see also, Hrdlicka, 1918).
The eugenics movement proper, which grew during this period, dealt with racial
eugenics in an openly politicized and popular way. Although he was at times in
opposition to members of the eugenices movement (Spencer, 1979) Hrdlicka also
allied with them for common purposes. He encourged the membership of
notorious racists and eugenicists, Madison Grant and Charles B. Davenport, on
the Anthropology Committee of the newly formed National Research Council
(NRC) when they served his research and career interests (Spencer,
1979:645-660), John H. Kellogg, industrialist and founder of the Race
Betterment Foundation, was able to buy his way onto the editorial board of the
American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA) (Ortner 1979). Davenport
of the Eugenics Records Office, Cold Springs Harbor, New York, (involved in
eugenics research) also joined the editorial board of the AJPA. Only after Grant
and Davenport began to compete with Hrdlicka for professional power would he
begin to oppose them.
The eugenics movement and mainstream evolutionary anthropologists like
Hrdlicka had much in common in their use of evolutionary theory although the

eugenicists were more explicit about its social implications as political ideology.
Madison Grant was representative of the movement. He had no formal training in
anthropology or medicine, a fact which had not prevented him from popularizing
his views. Having been born to wealth, Grant apparently spent much of his time
’dictating and signing thousands of letters dealing with causes dearest to his heart’
the dearest of which appears to have been the ’annihilation of the Jews’ (Spencer,
1979:650-651 ). Grant was co-founder and Chairman of the New York Zoological
Society, Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, and Councilor of
the American Geographical Society. His most popular works, his Passing of the
Great Race (1916) and his Introduction to Lothrop Stoddard’s comparably
popular and racist treatise, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-
Supremacy (1920), interpreted world history and contemporary social problems
in biological terms.
If this great /nordic/ race with its capacity for leadership and fighting, should
14 with it would pass that which we call civilization (Grant in Stoddard,
ultimately pass,
1920).
By this time immigrant labor was no longer in demand. Harsh recession began to
displace all workers from 1918 throughout most of the 1920s. Yet for the
industrial elite these were years of growing prosperity (Goldston, 1968:13-29).
Labor had begun to organize for better salaries, work conditions, and benefits.
Racist eugenical ideology helped create divisions within organized labor and
blamed economic hardships on Asian and non-Nordic European immigration,
and as the reasoning behind immigration restriction (Allen, 1975).
’The real hope of the future here in American lies in the realization of the working class
that competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal ... (Grant in Stoddard, 1920).’
Hrdlicka was more conservative and empirically oriented. Eugenics could not be
applied as he naively put it, until ’people learn more and more of what is right and
what is not’ (Hrdlicka, 1921:16). His goal for the anthropologist of his day was
the accumulation of comparative racial data in ’preparation’ for eugenical
application (Hrdlicka, 1918). He seemed less anxious than Grant (1916) or
Stoddard (1920) about the threat of a ’rising tide of color’ that could sweep
against the ’Nordic’ gene pool threatening the biosocial advance of Western
civilization. If anything, Hrdlicka had greater confidence in the future of white
supremacy. That assumption, if fundamentally unaltered by later research,
would lead to the same racist/classist conclusions regarding the victims and
beneficiaries of racial eugenics as those already reached by the eugenics
movement.
There is no question that there are today already retarded peoples, retarded races, and
that there are advanced and more advanced races, and that the differences between them
tend rather to increase than to decrease ... And there is no acceptable possibility, there
is nothing that we can conceive or accept unless it be some unforeseen calamity ... that
would make the white man wait upon the Japanese or Chinaman who is only a little bit
behind, or the Negro who is a long way behind... From the scientific point of view there
is no such prospect at all according to all indications and simply through the continuous

process of evolution that the order of the world in the future will be quite different from
what it is today (Hrdlicka, 1921:12-14).
According tothis evolutionary scheme social inequality was innate, justifiable,
and insoluble. Eugenics could serve only to protect the socially privileged (and
national progress) from the retarding influences of inferior blood. Although
Hrdlicka considered himself objective, the accumulation of data, however
contradictory, never altered his a priori assumptions. The flexibility of theory and
method under the constraints of ’common sense’ made the persistence of bias
inevitable.
IDEOLOGICAL-THEORETICAL-METHODOLOGICAL
ARTICULA TION
15
Craniometry was attractive to the American physicians, anatomists, and
biologists - medical and natural scientists - who wished to address the pressing
social issues of their day in terms of a physical structural-functional model.
Craniometry was the principle method for showing a linkage between biology and
social behavior, although we now know that the size and shape of the head
normally has nothing whatsoever to do with how people think and act. It is very
important to note that this biometric method (a natural science procedure) in no
way prevented the influences of socio-political bias. It was no more objective than
other fields for being biological. These methods served, moreover, to strengthen
the legitimation of social inequality with the presumed ’hard facts’ of biological
measurement.
A particular theory may be intimately related to the domain assumptions and
needs of cultural, class, and other interest groups. Methodological flexibility,
especially in the case of correlational methods, insures that data can be organized
so as to validate the particular theory in use. Data subjected to the most
appropriate methods of analysis (selected so that results make sense in terms of

the assumptions of the theory) need never contradict the validity of the theory
itself. Instead, data may only invalidate a model, a method or an analysis until
alternatives are found to give results that are consistent with the major theoretical
assumptions. Political interests may thusly be served once individual researchers
or institutions subscribe to a politically useful theory and conduct research in its
terms.
The Old Americans

Hrdlicka’s study of 1925, The Old Americans, is his most important work. It was
meant to provide an anthropometric standard of normalcy, representing people
of Western European descent who were the third generation Americans, that is,
the American ’sub-type of the white people’. Toward that purpose Hrdlicka
received aid in obtaining subjects from the Daughters of the American
Revolution (Mag. Daughters Am. Revol. 1915:XLVII, 168-171, 1915), from

Bean of the University of Virginia, and Yale (Old Americans File, Hrdlicka
Papers:NAA/NMNH). His sample prominently included distinguished
Washingtonians, university staff and students. These he compared with data he
had obtained on Appalachian whites and new immigrant groups from Ellis
Island, New York (Old American File, Hrdlicka Paper:NAA/NMNH).
The study was meant to show the mental and cranial evolution of American
whites. Hrdlicka believed colonial Americans were above average ’sturdiness and
energy’ and that ’weaklings’ had been eliminated through ’pioneer’ hardships.
He wrote that ’broad natural and political freedom’ and abundance had
supplemented these evolutionary advantages (1925a:1). Thereby, Americans had
become ’a university acknowledge, separate and fairly distinctly characterized
unit of the white race.’
Hrdlicka took great store in his method of measurement. Although he
occasionally vacillated on the issue, absolute head or cranial size (cranial module)
16 was the least helpful measurement for intelligence because large people would
appear to be smarter by virtue of overall somatic growth. That left cranial size
relative to height (cranial module vs. height or cephalic module-stature index) as
the preferred measure of adaptive intelligence (1925a:188).
However, as an artifact of the greater stability of brain size relative to height,
smaller people tended to appear more intelligent than larger ones when relative
cranial size was used. Much to Hrdlicka’s disappointment, women measured
considerably higher than men. To adjust this incongruity between social bias and
data he first invoked a special variable ad post hoc: the relationship between
external dimensions and brain size was different in men and women. The air head
argument. Yet, there was no adequate substantiation for the idea that women had
more space between brain and skull.
Hrdlicka then proceeded to reorganize his old American sample into new sub-
groups based on stature in order to match his counter-intuitive data with intuitive
biases. Comparing like-sized men and women makes sense on the face of it, but
would seem to tell little, given his assumptions, about the endowments of sexual
groups who, in reality, do vary in size. Finally, after showing that the remaining
differences were still small, and after a patchwork of special considerations, he
concluded that his observations were ’but gross morphological facts and no index
of the higher qualities of the brains of the two sexes’ (1925a).
Contrary to this empirical data, he would not conclude that women are
smarter. Who would have accepted this as fact? And Hrdlicka’s male supremistic
beliefs fit quite well within the common, popular view (see Literary Digest
interview with Hrdlicka, 1935:15). Nor did he question the validity of
craniometry upon which the social and ideological significance of his profession
depended.
Similar incongruities between bias and data arose in comparisons of national
‘sub-racial’ groups. The relative cranial size of immigrants was also larger as these
tended to be smaller statured people than the old Americans. Hrdlicka selected an
old American sub-sample which was partially shorter than the average immigrant
(or the average American for that matter) but whose crania were larger than those

of immigrant groups. Finally, having honed his data into the mold of ’common
sense’ with a new method, het concluded that, unlike sexual dimorphism ’What
differences there are, according to all indications, are matters of greater or lesser
functional development of the brain ... a matter of great scientific as well as
practical importance’ (1925a:19).
Hrdlicka’s large-headed American sub-groups, were not representative of the
American population in general. Even divided into the sub-samples he chose, the
average height of an Old American falls in the 170-180 cm range having a cranial
module-stature index of between 9.35 and 9.58 which is within the range of the
cranial module stature index of immigrant groups. He might have achieved
greater consistency in his comparisons had he also sub-divided the immigrants
into stature sub-samples. Immigrant groups were not reduced to comparable sub-
samples, but were organized according to their average height and cranial size.
His original figures (comparing average cranial module-stature indexes) were
actually the most relevant to the question of group differences. 17
Hrdlicka was also able to show an enlargement of American cranial over those
of the Western European or parental sample. Although the ’evolution’ of old
Americans was slight, surely the new immigrants were phylogenetically
backward, a burden to ’American’ progress and biologically suited to their
economic and social disadvantages. Although his concluding statements were
egalitarian, his data spoke clearly to the point. This study simultaneously
supported the assumptions of popular prejudice and unilineair evolutionary
theory. Yet, one has to wonder how Hrdlicka, a Bohemian immigrant, saw
himself in this scheme of things.
Being selective about his methods and interpretations Ales Hrdlicka was able to
discover much of what he initially wanted to find. Ernest Hooton, however,
praised The Old Americans as a ’magnificant piece of work’ and ’the most
complete anthropometric study ever made’ (Hooton to Hrdlicka, Nov. 5,
1925:NAA/NMNH).
Hrdlicka on Afro-Americans
In 1926 (two years after the passage of the Johnson Act restricting no-Nordic
immigration) the National Research Council began to turn its attention away
from European ethnics and towards the ’American Negro’. A Committee on the
Negro was established with R.J. Terry as chairman, Franz Boas, Charles
Davenport, Hrdlicka, Hooton, T.W. Todd, and A.V. Kidder (ex-officio) among
the anthropologists, and R.W. Woodworth and R. Dinlapp from psychology
(Hrdlicka, 1927a:205). Hrdlicka’s first assignment was to review what had been
accomplished in Afro-American studies and to compile a bibliography for the
Committee. The result was an article entitled ’Anthropology of the American
Negro; historical notes’ (1927a) which emphasized physical anthropology and
included a fair amount of sociological research including the work of black
scholars W.E.B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Carter Woodson. In
Hrdlicka’s opinion most previous work was too shoddy for generalities, was not
rigorous, and ’commonly tinged with more or less bias for or against the Negro’

(1927a:206-207). Yet, he was quick to express his own biased (and careerist)
assumption, that the Negro Problem was an organic one,
The real problem of the American Negro lies in his brain, and it would seem, therefore,
that this organ above all others would have received scientific attention. To some degree
this is true; yet the collective amount of research even in this direction is far from
sufficient or in a satisfactory condition (1927a:208-209).
Another of Hrdlicka’s perspectives in the NRC report is that ’pure races’ were the
most appropriate units of evolutionary study. Hrdlicka was less interested in the
biology of Afro-Americans as such (an admixed and unique group), than in a
conceptual or ideal ’race’ which conformed to his evolutionary model. His
principal interest in blacks (similar to the current use of non-human primate
analogues) was the light which they as a pure race and extant primitive type could
shed on issues in human evolution.
Hrdlicka’s contribution to the primary research of the Committee on the Negro
18 was a re-examination of data he had gathered in an aborted attempt to study
Afro-Americans at Howard University from 1903-1904. In his research on the
’Full-Blood American Negro’ (1927b) he obtained a modest sample of 26 Afro-
Americans (mostly male) who allowed him to take cranial measurements. Part of
the difficulty in obtaining subjects may have been the fact that D.S. Lamb,
Professor of Anatomy at Howard University Medical School, was not in full
agreement with his purpose (Cobb, 1982:1202). According to Hrdlicka, he had
difficulty finding ’full blooded’ Negroes (under his assumptions as to what such a
person would look like) and the problem of mutual disaffection between the
scientist and his reluctant prospective subjects.
It is quite a different thing to measure among the pliant, trusting savage, and then
among the semi-civilized, suspicious, scattered free laborers and servants of a big city
(Hrdlicka, 1927b: 15).
Hrdlicka may simply have encountered the fact that Afro-Americans were
familiar with demeaning uses of cranial measurements (Drake, 1980).
The results were more noticeably biased than The Old Americans. The superior
measurement used to represent ’old America’ or white males (9.60) for
comparison in the Negro study appears nowhere in The Old Americans. In fact,
his metric for ’old American’ females (9.82) is the same as that used to compare
with immigrant males in the Old Americans study. The 9.82 statistic appears to
have been used fallaciously in at least one of the studies and was consistently
applied to give ’old American’ whites an intellectual and evolutionary advantage
when, in fact, blacks and immigrants were slightly superior in cranial size when
individual heights had been controlled for (cranial module vs. height).
THE BOASIAN ANTI THESIS

As a whole, the racial evolutionary theory of Hrdlicka and his contemporaries
was neitherquestioned nor changed by contradictory empirical data. Nor did

contrasting theories compete objectively in a singularly scientific process. The
argument can be made that broader social and political forces than science were
responsible for a mid-century shift in theory.
Franz Boas, professor of Anthropology at Columbia University since 1899, a
prominent member of the American Anthropological Association and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, posed the most venerable
opposition to evolutionary human biology. Boas argued against racial ranking
and unilinear schema, giving root to the notion of the discontinuity or non-
covariance of traits (Boas,1931) and preferred auxiological studies over the
evolutionary framework as a whole (Herskovitz, 1953). By 1918 Boas had written
at least 50 publications on racial and biological topics alone, comparable to the
number written by Hrdlicka at that time.
The work which shook evolutionary physical anthropologists hardest was
Boas’s study of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in New York,
Changes in Bodily Form of Descendents of Immigrants (1912) for the Senate 19
Immigration Commission. Changes in Bodily Form emphasized anatomical
flexibility by demonstrating significant developmental change in human cranial
morphology within a single generation of American life. Boas’s analysis of
anatomical plasticity attributed much of the change that had occured in the bodily
form of immigrant populations to their acculturation. He inferred that the
departure from the European tradition of dressing infants and children in skull
caps which were meant to ’bind the ears closer to the head’ produced marked
changes in cranial morphology in some European groups; a biological effect of
acculturation. Greater frequencies of ’rachitis’ caused by the poverty of some
foreign born communities were associated with their more plastic facial and
cranial bones. Changes in stature could be attributed to nutritional changes. By
showing ’how far the instability or plasticity of types may extend’ Boas had
thrown a monkey wrench into the rigid evolutionary perspective in which group
morphology changed only by natural selection over several generations. Any
evolutionary study should require more substantial proof.
His perspective, however, was doubtlessly subjective as well. Boas, a German
Jew by birth, had little intuitive reason to assume the superiority of Western
European descent groups. Unilinear evolutionary theory at that time, as he well
knew, rested upon that assumption.
The assertion of a higher aptitude of the European nations leads at once to a second
inference relating to the significance of difference in type between the European race
and races of other continents or even of differences between various European types.
The line of thought which we unconsciously pursue is about as follows. Since the
aptitude of the European is highest, and every deviation from the white type necessarily
represents a characteristic feature of a lower type (Boas, 1911:3).
Variation and change was not necessarily evolutionary and, in any event, no
single line of ’progress’ toward a particular European ideal existed. Nor could one
so-called race be ranked as more primitive than another on the basis of similarities
with the apes.
Single traits can be brought into ascendin series in which the racial forms differ more

and more from animal forms, but the arrangement is a different one for each
independent trait. The acenstral form had a flat nose. Bushmen, Negroes and
Australians have flat, broad noses. Mongoloids, Europeans and particularly
Armenians have narrow, prominent noses. They are in this sense farthest removed from
the animal forms. Apes have narrow lips. The lips of whites are thin, those of many
mongoloid types are fuller. The Negroes have the thickest, most excessively ’human’
lips [etc.] (Boas, 1931:125 First Published 1911).
Because evolutionary theory was bound to unilinear and biodeterministic
assumptions, Boas’s ’anti-evolutionism’ was specifically anti-racism and anti-
biodeterminism (Harris, 1968:290-300). Evolution had occurred of course, but
had virtually ended with the speciation event that brought about modern Homo
sapiens. If anatomy was so developmentally plastic as to be substantially
modified by the environment, then modern variation in culture, intellectual
ability, and health, must be all the more changeable (Boas, 1912).
20 Boas did believe in inherited traits, mental and physical, although he explained
that there was no reason why anatomical traits need correspond to mental ones.
Whether they did or not, the organism was so plastic that cultural environment
could irradicate differences in both (Boas, 1931). Furthermore, heritable
differences were familial in origin. Races, as distinct biological entities, did not
exist except as folk taxonomy in Boas’s view (Boas, 1931).
CONTRASTING SOCIO-POLITICAL VIEWS
Like their epistemological differences (Boas, the cultural theorist, and Hrdlicka,
the naturalist) Boas’s and Hrdlicka’s other ideological conflicts represented
distinct socio-political alignments. Boas was a liberal ’socialist’ in the 19th
century vein (Hervkovitz, 1953:118-119). His perspective on the side of the
racially and economically oppressed resulted, at least in part, from his
identification with his Judaic fellows and other minorities who were intent upon
national acculturation as a means of obtaining full respect and partnership in
German and American societies (Glick, 1982). Boas’s well known anti-
evolutionism and cultural relativism were opposed to the notion of innate racial
inequalities. The non-interventionistic political aspect of cultural relativism was
consistent with his pacifist and internationalist politics which set him against
American involvement in World War I and the involvement of anthropologists in
military intelligence. He was particularly outspoken on this issue in a letter to the
editor of The Nation (1919) in which he also suggested that President Wilson was
a hypocrite and that the United States fell short of true democracy.
The letter was published in the December 20, 1919 edition and on 23 December
Hrdlicka recommended that a special meeting of the Anthropological Society of
Washington (ASW) be called to submit the letter to the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) and other scholarly organizations ’with
request for complete elucidation and justification’ (Hrdlicka to Holmes, Dec. 23,
1919:NAA/NMNH) of its unpatriotic message. For some members of the Bureau

of American Ethnology at the U.S. National Museum, Boas’s letter came as
something of a Christmas gift. They expected it to ’accomplish what has long
been desired, namely the elimination of the author of that article from connection
with the Bureau’ (Hewett to Bushnell, Dec. 24, 1919:NAA/NMNH) where he had
been Honorary Philologist since 1901. Not only did the AAA vote for Boas’s
censure, but it was further suggested that all those who voted in Boas’s favor
(several of his former students) be ’excluded from participation in any service
respecting which any question of loyalty to the United States Government may be
properly raised’ e.g. the NRC (Attachment to the Resolution Adopted by the
American Anthropological Association, Dec. 30, 1919, as it appears in
Hrdlicka’s copy:NAA/NMNH).
Antithetically, Hrdlicka performed intelligence services (albeit unprofes-
sionally) for the State Department and Department of War while undertaking
scientific research (although he was not one of those to whom Boas had referred).
Correspondence on this subject appears soon after Boas’s censure. Hrdlicka 21
encouraged the U.S. Government to step up its intelligence activity and to
intervene in Japan to impose democratic patronage (Hrdlicka to Colby, July 30,
1920 and Mason to Hrdlicka, June 18, 1920:NAA/NMNH).
Boas’s opposition to using anthropologists as spies and his pacifism were used
by the Washingtonians to undermine his influence in several powerful scholarly
organizations. These conflicts did not only reflect political concerns in the broad
sense of ’American’ nationalism. They also related to politics in the narrow sense
of Hrdlicka’s professional competition with Boas who had recently blocked
Hrdlicka from the AAA nominations to the NRC and blocked Hrdlicka’s
nomination to the National Academy of Sciences (Spencer, 1979:689-708;
Holmes to Boas, Oct. 28, 1919; Boas to the Committee and Holmes, Oct. 30,
1919:NAA/NMNH; also see Stocking, 1976:292-296). This same arena affected
competition between their theories of human variation in the scientific
community and the divergent political messages rooted in their scholarship.
INSTITUTIONAL BIASES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE

RIGHTS TO MAN
The competition between evolutionary and social science approaches was far
removed from fair debate. The wealthy and influential interest sector upon whom
the material support of science depended was generally biased against Boas,
favoring the evolutionary perspective which served their apologetic political and
economic interests. Hrdlicka realized that the nascent field was in great need of
funds and organization. He indicated the necessity of research funds sufficient to
attract some of the best medical students away from private practice.
Anthropology would need to become part of the regular college curriculum. All
of this would require a stronger financial and institutional structure (Hrdlicka,
1918). Furthermore, the legitimacy of anthropology required the backing of

major scientific organizations.
Evolutionary physical anthropology had a decisive advantage so far as
financial sponsors and scientific legitimacy were concerned. Since much of the
available funding for novel institutions derived from elite philanthropy (often via
the eugenics movement) and secondarily from the Government (NRC, BAE, and
U.S. National Museum) the superiority which evolutionary studies attributed to
white upper class males, conferring upon them an innate right to profit and
power, gave leverage to the institutional development of the new science. There
was substantial support for the social Darwinist and eugenical perspectives in
Congress (Allen, 1975; Patterson, 1970) and material backing for genetic and
anthropometric research in that vein was provided by leading American
capitalists (Ludmerer, 1972; Allen, 1975).
The eugenicists also had a clear advantage in acquiring resources from private
foundations. Along with individual elite supporters, eugenic research was
22 sponsored by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations (Ludmerer, 1972).
However, when Boas attempted to obtain funds from those elite philanthropists
for an African Museum in the United States he was turned down ’flatly’ (Allen,
1975 after Beardsley, 1973). Boas would, however, have his day when an anti-
evolutionary and social science approach to biological and cultural variation
could gain wide acceptance. But, more important than empirical data in support
of Boas’s view, the American political climate would have to change.
The biological methods and theory of physical anthropology provided some
currency among natural scientists who were gatekeepers of scientific legitimacy.
So-called ’hard scientists’ seem to have associated naturalism with ’real’ science,
evolutionism with naturalism, biodeterminism and racialism with evolutionism.
As long as anthropology was a parochial adjunct to a general scientific evolutionism, its
status was not a serious issue among scientists in other fields. But when it vocally
proclaimed its independence from biology, relegated the study of man as a physical
organism to a distinctly secondary position, denied in large part the significance of
biological race, and raised to a central theoretical importance a concept /culture/ which
had not yet shed the aura of dilettantish humanism, some scientists in other fields began
to wonder whether it had any pretense to being a science. The fact that its most vocal
advocates were a group of men of suspect Americanism [the ’Boasian school’] simply
gave its critics further reason to question its legitimay (Stocking, 1968:289).
What has also been shown of course is that evolutionary anthropologists and
eugenicists also had political views. Contrary to Boas, many were engendered
with the excessive American nationalism of the period; a perspective which
accepted an exclusively white and emphatically Anglo-Saxon model of
’American’ national identity. Connected with this nationalist fervor, particularly
during World War I, was the notion of the inherent superiority of Western
European and ’American’ racial stock.
Further in defense of Western civilization and ’American’ society, the natural
preeminence of laissez faire (read ’survival of the fittest’) social and economic
competition (a la capitalism) was hailed as the driving force in the history of
civilization. These ideas, of course, rested upon the groundwork of Thomas

Malthus and Herbert Spencer, both social theorists, who had influenced and been
influenced by Darwin, respectively. The inegalitarian economic and political
structure of American society was legitimized and the poor had no natural
precedent for more than a Malthusian struggle for existence. Obviously, this view
of American society and early evolutionary theory gained both the legitimacy of
the natural science community and the support of the Government and the
industrial elite.
This advantage is reflected in the winners and losers of political power in
Government science. The National Research Council (NRC) was formed in 1916
under the Wilson administration as a vehicle for scientific contributions to the
war effort. The NRC Committee on Anthropology was an important vehicle in
Hrdlicka’s early efforts to institionalize physical anthropology and to put it
squarely on the map of legitimate American science. The American Journal to
Physical Anthropology was born as the principal organ of the Committee. When
it was founded (1918) the Journal included a section on War Anthropology 23
devoted to reports on the physical criteria for the selection of military recruits and
the eugenical implications that the World War might have to the American
people. War anthropology, seen as a practical and patriotic line of research was
an opportune service provided by the new and striving discipline.
However, the NRC was strategically important for the professional goals of
others as well. As Spencer (1979) reports in greater detail, during the first few
years of the NRC Grant and Davenport rose to leadership through a series of rude
political maneuvers. They were encouraged to join the Committee by Hrdlicka in
an attempt to obtain research funding through Grant and to keep Boas out by
filling a newly vacant post with Davenport. Grant and Davenport soon united in
an effort to undermine Hrdlicka and Holmes (his ally), who chaired the
Committee, and thereby gain control. Finally, the eugenicists acquired control
through the influence of their zoologist friend Henry F. Osborn. Osborn, head of
the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society
(where Grant was a trustee and co-founder, respectively) wrote to the head of the
NRC to affirm that the support of the Zoological Society was behind Davenport.
Hrdlicka, although defeated in his attempt to lead the Committee, remained an
influential member and saw most of his plan for an anthropometric survey of
Army recruits put into effect (Davenport, 1921).
Boas, who had once been nominated for membership because of his eminence
as a statistician and his high qualifications in immigrant and racial studies, was
subsequently accused of pro-German and un-American sympathies because of his

open pacifist and non-interventionistic politics. Twice at crucial times during the
internal political fights of the Committee (1917 and 1919) Boas was forced to
wjthdraw from the NRC for purely political reasons (including the Nation letter,
Spencer, 1979:630-730). Access to the resources of the National Research Council
was a political affair in addition to credentials. Notably, the open racism of
Hrdlicka and Davenport, and Grant’s lack of scientific training did not detract
from their standing with the NRC.
The preceding examples serve to show how lines of institutional support were

drawn in favor of an evolutionary and eugenical point of view and Hrdlicka’s
essentially successful attempt to tap those resources. The mutual interests of
leaders in the eugenics movement, evolutionary geneticists, and anthropologists
often revolved around the funding and institutional support which the former
could generate from the industrial elite to serve the individual career interests of
the latter (Spencer, 1979; Allen, 1975). These mutual interest, at the very least,
suppressed open objection by credible scientists to the popular scientific racism of
Grant and colleagues. Both Hrdlicka and T.H. Morgan, eminent scientists of the
period, chose not to publically associate with opposition to Grant because of the
detrimental effect that would have on their individual careerist interests.’ As a
result the eugenics movement became increasingly effective in introducing
courses into college curricula and in pushing the non-’nordic’ immigration
restriction act (1924), sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws through Congress
(Allen, 1975) and as further fuel for racial segregation (Patterson, 1970).
24 The natural or ’hard science’ approach to society was favored. A biological
explanation of society (where the causal variables are natural) supports the status
quo by explaining that social relationships exist as they are for fixed and natural
reasons in a class, ethnic, and gender stratified society. Eugenical and
evolutionary science lent legitimacy to the privileges of its sponsors and the deep
inequities of American political and economic systems.
NEW TRUTH
If the internal workings of science did not bring about progress toward the ’New
Physical Anthropology’ then what did? The turning point in the mainstream
paradigm came later along with growing anti-fascist, labor, and civil rights
movements during the F.D. Roosevelt administration. The New Deal favored
tightening controls on industrial exploitativeness and consented to many labor
demands for a greater share of their surplus value - the national wealth which
they had produced (Figure 1). During the Great Depression class privilege and
racism were objected to increasingly by rising leftist and liberal tendencies
(Drake, 1980).
In this transforming political context Boas and his former student, Ruth
Benedict, were instrumental in an American Anthropological Association
resolution against ’scientific racism’ in 1938 (Stocking, 1976:30-37). The fascist
advance in Europe under the banner of racial superiority intensified North
American opposition, both popular and Federal, to racism. Even Hrdlicka spoke
out against ’Aryan’ supremacy in particular (Schutz, 1945) though he had always
advocated racial hierarchy m general. That was certainly not a contradiction for
Hrdlicka who had often expressed a deep hatred for Germans (Spencer, 1979). He
wrote, ’The basic fallacies by which the young of Germany were indoctrinated by
the Nazi party, were those of racial purity and general inborn superiority of the
German people’ (‘The German Race’, Hrdli~ka Papcr~:NAA/NMNH, published
1943).

Moreover, the awesome experience of racial eugenics in Nazi concentration
camps clearly delineated the moral and social implications of racial supremacist
ideology and brought public opposition against the scientific concepts upon
which that ideology was built. Boasian studies of the plasticity of culture and
personality gained broad acceptance (Stocking, 1976; Murphy, 1976). Notably,
the patriotic rhetoric of the United States surrounding the Second World War
opposed fascist racial supremacy, while the nationalistic and xenophobic fervor
during World War I, as beforementioned, was partly built upon the concept of
’American’ or ’Nordic’ racial supremacy. After the war the United Nations
mitigated agaist racial evolutionism and eugenics as the underpinnings of
genocide (Montagu, 1971, first published by UNESCO in 1951). The Afro-
American left also petitioned the U.N. to include American white supremacy as
tantamount to Nazi ideology and documented its genocidal effects. The U.S. and
Germany had embarked upon a common path.
With the post-World War II United Nations Convention for Prevention and 25
Punishment of Genocide, Afro-American leaders submitted the Petition to the
United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against
the Negro People (Patterson, 1970 first published 1951 ) showing genocide, on the
order of thousands per year perpetrated by government, industry, local police,
Ku Klux Klan and other private citizens. The petition claimed that genocide,
through direct and indirect means, had been effected by ’propped up ideology’ in
the service of monopoly interests. Their examples demonstrate the results of an
ideology that this paper has shown in the making:
We cannot forget that in many American states it is a crime for a white person to marry a
Negro on the racist theory that the Negroes are ’inherently inferior as an immutable fact
of nature’. The whole institution of segregation, which is training for killing, education
for genocide, is based on the Hitler-like theory of the ’inherent inferiority of the Negro’.
The tragic fact of segregation is the basis for the statement, too often heard after
murder, particularly in the South, ’Why I think no more killing a n----r, than killing a
dog’ (Patterson, 1970:8).
Their documentation illuminated the scientific origins of modern American
racism.
I believe in white supremacy, and as long as I am in the Senate I expect to fight for white
supremacy, because I can see that ... if the amalgamation of whites and Negroes in this
country is permitted, there will be a mongrel race, and there will come to pass the
identical condition under which Egypt, India, and other civilizations decayed ... A race
which has not shown creative genius may be assumed to be an unfit type so far as
progress in civilization is concerned and is a matter of concern for the eugenicist. Those
who seek to maintain the white race in its purity within the United States are working in
harmony with the ideals of eugenics. Asiatic exclusion and Negro repatriation are
expressions of the eugenics ideal (Senator A.J. Ellender, June 1945 in Patterson, 1970).
By the end of the war the perspective of the Boasians and Ashley Montagu began
to prevail. Each questioned the relevancy of the concept of race for understanding
either human society or biology (Boas, 1938; Montagu, 1941) and tended to view
social, biological and health variation as an effect rather than cause of ’culture’.

These views were little more than a cry in the wilderness of racist public and
scientific sentiment until events surrounding the war produced a shift in political
climate.
In Germany, the entire field of physical anthropology was so under-cut by its
links to Nazism that today paternity testing has become its most prominent
practical application (Presuchoft, 1973). American anthropology under Boasian
and subsequent influences adopted a modified theoretical and political
orientation that preserved anthropology in more viable form. In the United States
physical anthropology responded to this socio-scientific phenomenon in ways
which tended to preserve its emphasis on human natural history and evolution in
general while the specific issues and explanatory models which had come under
attack (unilinear scheme, social behavior, intelligence and craniometry,
racialism, eugenics, and studies in the urban industrial West) became increasingly
questionable and marginal to the field.
26
THE MODERN SYNTHESIS

Evolutionary theory no longer had an application in any practical sense without
eugenics. Yet, physical anthropologists adhered devotedly to as much of the
evolutionary focus as could be preserved. The following suggests that several
areas of research are practically and politically limited by the constraints of
continuing naturalism which serves to legitimize or ignore the relationship

between social and economic organization and group differences in physical
health, nutrition, physiology and development.
Perhaps the most traditional area of evolutionary research remaining are
studies involving ’racial’ comparisons which continue in the tradition of
Hrdlickian preparationism. Journals in physical anthropology are replete with
descriptive comparative anatomy and serology even though the eugenical
applications once anticipated for the tedious details of human variation seem to
have been forgotten. To the extent that the race construct is explicitly or implicitly
used in those comparisons, that spurious division is reified. Lieberman and
Reynolds (1978) show that most physical anthropologists continue to believe in
the race concept, especially those having a privileged social background.
However, explicit racial analysis has been slowly dying out since the
epistemological utility of the concept was substantially questioned and rejected
by some after the War (Montagu, 1971; Livingstone, 1962; Washburn, 1963;
Armelagos and Salzman, 1976; and others).
Natural historical and evolutionary foci were retained within theories of
multilinear evolution and cultural ecology (Steward, 1949 and White, 1949) that
rose to prominence after World War II. This trend clearly represents a synthesis
of the Boasian environmental and evolutionary schema.2 From this perspective,
these ideas are a liberal compromise utilizing both the natural ecological
framework of evolutionists and a concept of multilinear adaptation and plasticity
akin to the Boasian perspective. This multilinear approach, as it has developed at

the present, constitutes a kind of evolutionary relativism which, like cultural
relativism, holds that biological, as well as cultural variants should only be judged
scientifically in relation to their own adaptive contexts. Thus, the study of human
variation need not rank regional or racial groups as superior/inferior to one
another on a single evolutionary scale. Livingstone’s analysis of the emergence
and geographical distribution of sickle cell polymorphism (1958; 1962) is an
excellent example of the research in population genetics that followed this
d:rection. Moreover, the causes of variation from an epistemological standpoint
were still sought and found in natural history.
From Paul Baker’s view (1962) on the eve of the fluorescence of ecological
anthropology, the ecological approach in physical anthropology (human
ecology) had obviously grown from a ’preoccupation with the evolution of man’
(Baker, 1962). Although ecological theory opened new vistas for the re-
integration of biology and culture after the dismantling effects of the Second
World War, cultural variables were considered only secondary to natural factors: 27
The primary correlation may be between climate and body size, or malaria and
hemoglobin C, but the discovery of why these correlations exist also requires a
knowledge of the similarities and differences in cultures of the people involved (Baker,
1962:19).
This was surely not an attempt to integrate human biology within a social science
of humanity. Rather, it simply acknowledges that cultural variables should be
accounted for in a natural science of man. Without dealing with innate social
behaviors, ecological physical anthropology reaffirmed the relevancy of biology
to cultural affairs and concomitantly came into ever closer association with the
natural sciences by using ’a body of theory developed from animal and plant
studies which can be tested on man’ (Baker, 1962:20).
Human adaptability studies follow in this trajectory. Although the concept of
adaptation in current usage has extended beyond its strict Darwinian meaning to
encompass plastic cultural, physiological, and developmental adjustments, the
physical and biotic environments continue to be stressed as the most
comprehensive conditions to which human biology and culture ’adapt’ (see
Thomas et al., 1979 for an extensive review). Notably, an alternative social
demographic explanation of low fertility at high altitude (Goldstein et al., 1983)
shows clearly how methods and results have been biased by an over-emphasis
upon natural ecological determinants.
In 1972 a number of prominent anthropologists expressed their ideas on the
nature and future of the discipline (Howells, 1973; Hunt, 1973; McKern, 1973;
Kelso, 1973; Lasker, 1973; Livingstone and Weiss, 1973; Steegman, 1973;
Kennedy, 1973). With sparse exception (most notably Kelso, 1973) their
prospectus for physical anthropology was confined to the study of human
ecology and organic evolution. Where sociocultural factos are concerned, the
dominating interest is, again, in the role of culture in organic evolution (social
selection) and as a buffer between independent natural ecological variables and
dependent human biological variables. Biological anthropology has come to be
defined as human natural history notwithstanding the contradictions between a

naturally determined world and the industrial world common to modern living
populations.
The emphasis on adaptation to nature persists at the expense of studies of
physiological behavior, nutrition, health and disease in urban industrial
populations. The natural science perspective in biological anthropology is geared
towards simple technologies and extremely stressful environments where a
naturalist’s perspective is more appropriate. In this sense there has been a shift
from issues involving urban industrial populations which were originally of
concern to physical anthropologists. An analogy can be drawn between these
interests and Hrdlicka’s focus upon ’pure races’. In each case, major human
populations are neglected for the maintenance of a theoretical approach.
Damon (1975) believed that the poor state of anthropological knowledge
concerning the physiology of industrial populations could be attributed to the
tendency to define a research problem as: ’something you like to study because it
28 fits into your theoretical disciplinary interest, not something you can of should
help with or do something about.’ A large proportion of physical anthropological
studies are limited to causal variables, populations, and issues of little relevance
to the physiology and health problems of most people. The obvious historical
current through which physical anthropology had come to be almost exclusively
equated with human evolution and natural history (a cultural assumption
constraining the breadth of intuitive interest within the sub-field) is the
continuing interest in the scientific legitimacy and prestige of natural science
macro-theory, much as it was during Hrdlicka’s time. Yet over-emphasis on
natural causation runs the risk of an apologetic political role.
Harrison (1982) commenting on the state of American biological
anthropology, proposed we turn towards the issues and problems of urban
industrial society where most people will live. Natural history hardly seems to
apply to the current stressors of pollution, poverty and unemployment in the
human population of a London, New York or rural South Africa (See Doyal,
1979; Eyer and Sterling, 1977). Kelso (1976) also advocates a 180° turn from the
biodeterminism in which the field is rooted towards research on the biological
effects of sociocultural systems. Whether Boasian environmentalism or political
economy, social theory is potentially critical of the systems involved. As
biological anthropologists return to study the industrial world, should they in fact
do so, the choice between types of macro-theory will decide the political overtones
of that research. And socio-political interest groups will choose among those
theories in an historical struggle for truth.
This paper seeks to reveal historical trends that make history useful in the
evaluation of present and future. As social scientists using sociological macro-
theory physical anthropologists would gain new insight into the socially alterable
causes of biological effects, just as evolutionary theory attempted to identify
eugenical solutions in a comprehensive way. The former suggests solutions

requiring the alteration of societal organizaton, public institutions and policy
while the latter no longer has an application according to post-war standards of
decency. The theories of the natural sciences may simply be epistemologically

inappropriate for the study of living populations in the urban and industrial
world. Although they may have varied political connotations, any social macro-
theory produces results which can be applied through social planning to improve
human biology on the population level because the specified independent/causal
variables are socially derived.
Naturalism, ecological or genetic, evades prospects for biosocial change. It has
never demonstrated the potential to expose political, economic, and other social
institutions to criticism. The more synthetic or liberal modern ecological
approaches (human adaptability studies, for example) tend to simultaneously
avoid the inadequacies of genetic determinism and the controversy of critical
social science. But, to the extent that they fail to cross the threshold of the
dominance of naturalism such theory also fails to achieve practical applicability
and social significance.
One attempt to emerge from this bottleneck, reasserting significance to the
issues of urban industrial society, is a return towards the pre-war Spencerian and 29
genetic determinist traditions. Wilsonian sobiobiology (Wilson, 1975, Lumsden
and Wilson, 1981) is the most glaring example of the continuation of that trend.
Genetic explanations for social organization and variation in social behavior
primarily disregard contemporary social forces. The deme effectively substitutes
analytical categories of race and class. They may accommodate environmental
effects within biodeterministic explanation, however, by using models of
epigenetic-culturgen interaction (Lumsden and Wilson, 1981) precisely as
Hrdlicka applied protoplasm-stimulus interaction. In each case the conclusions
support genetic determinism. Sociology has been applied recently by the British
and French ultra-right to justify the restriction of black and Asian immigration
and social hierarchy (Dickson, 1979).
The historical record suggests that physical anthropologists are intuitively
predisposed to this direction due to the singularity of adherence to evolutionism.
What one should be aware of is that sociobiology takes the baton in a relay run by
Morton, Spencer, Hrdlicka, Davenport, Coon and others in the direction of
apology. Sociobiology legimitimates the continuation of conditions as they
presently exist, in contrast to the no less objective research of those who have
sought to know the extent of human plasticity and potential change.
To summarize, one message of the history of biological anthropology is that
scientific procedures have not been self-correcting in the direction of ’objective
truth’. Contrary to the Khunian model (1962) of apolitical paradigmatic
resolutions, broad socio-political activities with which science articulated
crucially affect trajectories of epistemological stasis and change.
CONCLUSIONS
On the empirical record of history, biological anthropology is intrinsically biased
by socio-political perspectives and has been used as an effective tool of socio-
political action. Because truth appears to change, its interpretation is evidently

subjective. Because there is no evidence for an absolute truth, immutable to
change over the infinity of time and space, indeed, no method by which such an
absolute truth might be determined, the most material, observable, and,
therefore, scientific assumption is that scientific knowledge is subjective. This
does not mean that it is always subjective and never absolute. Always and never
are absolutes which also cannot be substantiated. Subjectivity is what we know
exists. This article substantiates this ’fact’ and has replicated the findings of
Gould (1981), Allen (1975), Gough (1968), Drake (1980) and others. The list of
scholars subjectively influenced is long; the evidence for a sociopolitical
articulation steadily accumulates. It appears less and less justifiable to relegate
those persons and studies to ’pseudoscience’. These cases involve the use of the
scientific method. Nor is it easy to assume that the social and behavioral sciences
alone incorporate bias. Perhaps the extent to which bias is clear-cut in the
histories of these fields primarily reflects the importance and sensitivity of the
30 human subjects with whom they deal, and which encourages debate on every side.
This may benefit, rather than undermine these sciences because the origins and
patterns of subjectivity can be identified and understood - subjectively.
Given the demonstrated intrinsic nature of scientific bias and function,
anthropologists, if they are to understand the meaning of their own work, must
seek to understand the socio-political influences and applications of their chosen
perspectives and analyses. Scientists should realize that in as much as they are
’tools of society’ they are also political actors. Since facts do not speak for
themselves, the physical anthropologist ultimately takes responsibility for his or
her views. With regard for these conditions, Frederick Douglass’s remarks are as
cogent today as they were over 130 years ago at the very origin of American
physical anthropology though he speaks to but one of the many social issues in
which this science is concerned.
The relation subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the vital
question of the age. In the solution of this question, the scholars of America will take an
important and controlling part. This is the moral battle field to which their country and
God now call them. In the eye of both, the neutral scholar is an ignoble man. Here, a
man must be hot, or be accounted cold, or, perchance, something worse than hot or
cold. The lukewarm and the cowardly, will be rejected by earnest men on either side of
the controversy. The cunning man who avoids it, to gain the favor of both parties, will
be rewarded with scorn; and the timid man who shrinks from it, for fear of offending
either party, will be despised. To the lawyer, the preacher, the politician, and to the man
of letters, there is no neutral ground. He that is not for us, is against us. Gentleman, I
assume at the start, that whatever else I may be required to speak with bated breath,
here, at least, I may speak with freedom the thought nearest my heart. Frederick
Douglass Address Delivered at Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854.

NOTES
1. Threatened by the eugenics movement’s attempt to control the National Research Council of
Anthropology Committee and to direct anthropology as a whole, m May 1918, Ales Hrdlicka attempted
to discredit Grant in a way which shows the close relationship between scientific criticism and self-
interest. He sought to use his renewed rapport with Boas to weaken Grant’s credibihty:
I understand that Grant’s book / Passmg of the Great Race/ has been published in second edition;
would you care to write a review of it for the Journal? I regard the work as badly biased to say the
least; and it has already led to such publications as Sadler’s ’Long Heads and Round Heads’
(McClurg, 1918) which is decidedly mischievous (Hrdlicka to Boas, May 2, 1918 :National
Anthropological Archives/National Museum of Natural History).
In reply, Boas wrote that he had ’reviewed the first edition of Madison Grant’s book m ’The New
Repubhc’. But that ’if you think it worth while to review it agam, I shall be glad to do so’ (Boas to
Hrdhfka, May 4, 1918: National Anthropological Archives/National Museum of Natural History). The
fact that Hrdlicka came to oppose Grant’s science when Grant and Davenport began to seriously threaten
Hrdh~ka’s plans for anthropology is the pomt I make here. Had he been concerned about Grant’s
’biased’ science above his mterests, he would not have given him a place on the Anthropology 31
Committee. In fact, Hrdlicka openly admitted that Committee busmess was involved in his request for a
new review from Boas:
My Dear Dr Boas:
I know that you have reviewed the first edition of Mr Grant’s book and what you said was so good
that I hoped you would write another similar review on the occasion of the second edition (which in
some respectsis even worse than the first) for our Journal. The most important place for such a
remew, would really be in Science, in which case I would follow with another review in the Journal. I
do not remember having ever seen a book either more pretentious or more biased. And the worst will
be, I am afraid, that the book, unless promptly shown exactly what it is, may be used to mfluence
men m important positions who are now trying to get all possible data on the European nationalities
in the way of preparation for the eventual negotiation. It may even be used as a leverage for the
establishment of a separate committee on ’Race’ m connection with the Council, with Mr. Grant as
manager (Hrdh~ka to Boas, May 6, 1918: National Anthropological Archives/National Museum of
Natural History).
It is also apparent that Hrdlicka had mcreasmg second thoughts (or pre-planned) to separate himself and
his journal from the review. In the above letter, he discussed the review m connection with Science and
not as an AJPA review as he had requested at first. Boas struggled with Hrdlicka to have his review
pnnted m the AJPA, to which Hrdhcka responded with a note of urgency and expressing his desire to
remain detached from Grant’s criticism-
Thanks for the review ... The review is no more severe than it deserves to be. I only wish you would
permit me to send it to Science, where it would be pubhshed much sooner and reach a great many
more people, many of whom may read the book within the next three months. You then could
amplify the review to some extent for the Journal. This would also prevent Mr. Grant from directing
his wrath exclusively against the Journal (Hrdlaka to Boas, May 29, 1918: National
Anthropological Archmes/Nanonal Museum of Natural History).
Hrdhcka finally sent Boas’s review to Science (although there is no letter which indicates Boas’s pnor
consent). Cattell, Science editor, rejected it having already chosen an uncritical review of the book. Later
Boas expressed his view of the whole affair.
I presume you have seen the review of Madison Grant’s book m ’Science’. I am sorry that the book
did not get the deserved criticisms. I have expressed myself twice, and of course I cannot do anymore.
The uses to which it had been put m the ’Medical Times’ and ’family /Vamty?/ Fair’, to which you
called my attention, are things that will result when scientists who have a reputation will lend
themselves to support views of this sort (Boas to Hrdluka, Nov. 4, 1918: National Anthropological
Archives/National Museum of Natural History).

Perhaps Boas intended Hrdli~kà to see himself among the causes of Grant’s success and mfluence, as
mdeed he was. The late efforts of Hrdli~ka to oppose Grant and Davenport (for purposes of control over
the NRC Committee on Anthropology) were unsuccessful with Grant and Davenport taking control of
important National Research Council committees.
T.H. Morgan, renowned geneticist, was also encouraged by Jacques Loeb to send a review or passing
of the Great Race to Science. Loeb, a biologist, was an early member of the NAACP who had lent his
backing to the career of E.E. Just, leadmg Afro-American biologist of this period (tanning, 1984).
Morgan disagreed with the review Cattell had accepted and published m Science, and commented to
Loeb that any review should have condemned the work. But Morgan worned about elite and eugenical
support on which much genetic research depended. Scientists, he believed, should avoid controversy and
since Osborn, his friend and colleague, had introduced the book Loeb would have to understand that his
’hands are tied’ (Allen, 1975).
REFERENCE CITED
Allen, G E
1975 ’Genetics, Eugenics, and Class Struggle’ Genetics 79 29-45
32 and Z Salzman
Armelagos, G J
1976 ’Problems of Racial Classification’ Anthropologia II, Congressus Anthropologorum
Bohemoslavacorum 22:11-13
Baer, H.A
1982 ’On the Political Economy of Health’ Medical Anthropology Newsletter 14:1-17.
Baker, T S and P.B Eveleth
1982 ’The Effects of Funding Patterns of the Development of Physical Anthropology’ In A
History of American Physical Anthropology, 1930-1980 Frank Spencer ed New York:
Academic Press.
Baker, P T
1962 ’The Application of Ecological Theory to Anthropology’ American Anthropologist
64:15-21
Beardsley, E H
1973 ’The American Scientist as Social Activist Franz Boas, Burt G Wilder, and The Cause of
Racial Justice, 1900-1915’ Isis 64:50-66
Boas, F.
1911 The Mind of Primitive Man New York MacMillan
1912 Changes m Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants New York Columbia University
Press
1931 ’The Problem of Race’ In The Making of Man V F. Calverton ed. Pp 113-141. New York:
MacMillan
Brace, C.L and F B. Livingstone
1971 ’On Creeping Jensenism’. In Race and Intelligence C L Brace et al. eds Pp 64-72
Washington, D C. American Anthropological Association.
Cobb, W Montague
1982 ’The Black American in Medicine’ Journal of the National Medical Association
73:1185-1244
Damon, A
1975 ’Biological Anthropology as an Applied Science’ In: Physiological Anthropology. A
Damon (ed ) Pp 360:-367 New York: Oxford University Press
Davenport, C B.
1921 ’The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War (Part 1) Army
Anthropology XV. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office
Dickson, D
1979 ’Sociobiology Critics Claim Fears Come True’ Nature 282:348.
Douglass, F.
1854 ’The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ In: (1950) The Life and Writings of
Frederick Douglass. P S Foner ed. New York International Publishers

Doyal,L
1979 The Political Economy of Health Boston South End
Drake, St Clair
1980 ’Anthropology and The Black Experience’ The Black Scholar 11 2-31
Eyer, J and P. Sterling
1977 ’Stress-Related Mortality and Social Organization’ Journal of Radical Political Economy
9(11) 1-42.
Fishman, W K and I Weiner
1982 ’A History of the Concept of Race’ Science for the People 14.6-33
Glick, L.B
1982 ’Types Distinct from Our Own Frans Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation’ American
Anthropologist 84 545-565
Goldstein, M C , P. Tsarong and C A Beall
1983 ’High Altitude Hypoxia, Culture, and Human Fecundity/Fertility: A Comparative Study’
American Anthropologist 85(1) 28-49
Gough, K
1968 ’Anthropology and Imperialism’ Monthly Review 19 12-27
Gould, S J
1978 ’Morton’s Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity’ Science 200 503-509 33
1981 The Mismeasure of Man New York W W Norton
Grant, M.
1916 The Passing of the Great Race New York Charles Scribner’s Sons
Harrison, G Ainsworth
1982 ’The Last Fifty Years of Human Population Biology in North America An Outsider’s View’
In A History of American Physical Anthropology, 1930-1980, Frank Spencer ed New
York Academic Press
Herkovitz, M J
1953 Franz Boas New York Charles Scribner’s Sons
Higginbotham, A L
1978 In the Matter of Color Race and The American Legal Process, The Colonial Period New
York Oxford University Press
Howells, W W
1973 ’Physical Anthropology’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 16 141
Hrdli&ccaron;a, A
1914 ’Physical Anthropology in America’ American Anthropologist 16:508-554
1915 Evolution of Man in Light of Recent Discoveries, and Its Relation to Medicine Paper read
at a joint meeting of Medical and Anthropological Societies, Oct 13, 1915 Washington
National Anthropological Archives (NAA), National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
1918 ’Physical Anthropology Its Scope and Aims, Its History and Present Status in America’
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1:3-34
1919 Lecture Delivered Before the George Washington University (Medical College) National
Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History
1921 Lecture Number 27 Delivered at the American University, May 27, 1921 Washington
National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History.
1924 Catalogue of Human Crania in the U S N M Collection Washington: U S National
Museum
1925a The Old Amencans Baltimore Williams and Wilkins
1925b ’Relation of the Size of the Head and Skull to Capacity in the Two Sexes’ American
Journal of Physical Anthropology 8:249-250
1927 ’Anthropology of the American Negro Historical Notes’ American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 10 205-235
1928a ’The Full-Blood American Negro’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 12 15-30
1928b ’The Origin and Antiquity of Man in America’. Bulletin of the New York Academy of
Medicine. Abstracts of Papers Delivered at Section Meetings, Section of Historical and
Cultural Medicine
, March 9, 1938:808-828

Hunt, E
1973 ’Physical Anthropology’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 16 141
Jordan, W D
1968 White Over Black New York: W W Norton
Kelso, A V
1973 ’The Current Status of Physical Anthropology’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology
16 145-146
1976 ’Symposium: What’s Going On in Cultural Anthropology, Preface’ Yearbook of Physical
Anthropology 19 70-71.
Kennedy, K R
1973 Physical Anthropology 16 156
Kuhn, T
1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Chicago University of Chicago Press
Lasker, G W
1973 ’The Future of Physical Anthropology’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 16:146-148
Lieberman, L and L T Reynolds
1978 ’The Debate Over Race Revisited’ Phylon 4 333-344
Livingstone, F B
34 1962 ’On the Non-Existence of Human Races’ Current Anthropology 3 279-283
1973 (With K M Weiss) ’The Future of Physical Anthropology’ Yearbook of Physical
Anthropology 16.148-154
Ludmerer, K
1972 Genetics and American Society Baltimore Johns Hopkins Press
Lumsden, C J and E O Wilson
1981 Genes, Mind, and Culture Cambridge Harvard University Press
McKern, T W
1973 ’Physical Anthropology’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 16 144-145
Meltzer, D
1982 ’The Antiquity of Man and The Development of American Archaeology’ In Advances in
Archaeological Method and Theory M B Schiffer ed Volume Co New York Academic
Press
Montagu, A
1941 ’The Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race’ In Frontiers of
Anthropology, A Montagu ed Pp 511-518 1974, New York G P Putnam’s Sons
1944 ’Ale&scaron; Hrdli&ccaron;a, 1869-1943’ 46
American
113-117
Anthropologist
1972 Statement on Race London Oxford University Press
Murphy, R F
1976 ’Introduction: A Quarter Century of American Anthropology’ In Selected Papers from the
American Anthropologist 1946-1950 R F Murphy ed Pp. 1-22 Washington American
Anthropological Association
Ortner, D J
1979 ’John Harvey Kellogg His Role in American Science’ Spectrum 19:14-19.
Patterson, W L ed
1970 We Charge Genocide:The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of
the United States Government Against the Negro People New York International
Publishers
Preushoft, H
1973 ’Physical Anthropology in German-Speaking Europe’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology
16:122-140.
Schultz, A.H.
1945 ’Biographical Memoir of Ale&scaron; Hrdli&ccaron;ka, 1869-1943’ National Academy of Sciences,
Biographical Memoirs 23:305-338
Spencer, F
1979 Ale&scaron; Hrdli&ccaron;ka, M D 1869-1943, A Chronicle of the Life and Work of An American
Anthropologist Ph D Dissertation, University of Michigan

Steegman, A.T. Jr
1973 ’How To Avoid Extinction and Find Happiness’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology
16 154-156
Steward, J H
1949 ’Cultural Causality and Law A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Crvilization’
American Anthropologist 51:1-27
Stocking, G W Jr
1968 Race, Culture, and Evolution Essays in the History of Anthropology New York Free
Press
1976 ’Ideas and Institutions in American Anthropology Toward a History of the Interwar period’
In: Selected Papers from the American Anthropologist, 1921-1945 Pp 1-54 Washington
American Anthropological Association 1-55
Stoddard,L
1920 The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy New York. Scribners.
Thomas, R B , B Winterhalter and S D McRae
1979 ’An Anthropological Approach to Human Ecology and Adaptive Dynamics’ Yearbook of
Physical Anthropology 22 1-46
Washburn, S L 35
1963 ’The Study of Race’ American Anthropologist 65 521-531
White, L A
1949 The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization New York Grove Press
Wilson, E O
1975 Sociobiology The New Synthesis Cambridge Belknap/Harvard University Press

Analyzing the Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History of American Physical Anthropology

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Analyzing the Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History of American Physical Anthropology

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SKULL DOCTORS

Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History

Michael L. Blakey, Howard University, Smithsonian

Anthropological theory has changed with society just as macro-evolutionary

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

(Hrdlicka, 1918:7). As the first curator of physical anthropology at the United

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

THE EVOLUTIONARY THESIS

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

through one form or another of reversion, reproduced an earlier form (Hrdlicka,

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

appropriate methods of analysis (selected so that results make sense in terms of

The Old Americans

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

THE BOASIAN ANTI THESIS

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

CONTRASTING SOCIO-POLITICAL VIEWS

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

INSTITUTIONAL BIASES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

subsequently accused of pro-German and un-American sympathies because of his

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

THE MODERN SYNTHESIS

continuing naturalism which serves to legitimize or ignore the relationship

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

eugenical solutions in a comprehensive way. The former suggests solutions

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on February 4, 2016

You might also like