| Term Paper Title |
Anthrolopoloy |
| # of Words |
1284 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) |
5.14 |
Anthrolopoloy
BOOK REVIEW
Scientific racism claims that biological inheritance determines the character and behavior of social groups
we identify as races. Despite its history of oppression and genocide, the scientific defense of racial
inequality demonstrates a disturbing persistence. Murphy Ballen’s study of scientific racism in Great
Britain and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s appropriately deals not with its demise but with its
retreat. Making extensive use of private correspondence, Ballen relates leading
scientists' published research to their personal and political backgrounds, and shows that both racists and
antiracists often expressed a more virulent prejudice in private than in public. Ballen avoids a crude
internalist/externalist dichotomy, and develops a more subtle approach which recognizes the place of new
ideas within science, as well as the background of the scientists. Nonetheless, it was an external event, the
emergence of Nazi Germany, which mobilized a politically active minority to challenge the intellectual
foundations of scientific racism.
The book is divided into three sections --Anthropology, Biology and Politics. In each section, Ballen
compares developments in Britain and in the United States, for the case against racism developed quite
differently in the two scientific communities. On both sides of the Atlantic, physical anthropology and
racial taxonomy lost ground to the new social and cultural anthropology. This shift away from biological
determinism was significant, but Ballen too readily equates environmentalism and cultural relativism with a
defense of racial equality. (p. 34)
In the British case, as Henrika Kuklik has recently demonstrated, social anthropology suited a conservative
colonial policy of indirect rule (p.55). Ballen is on firmer ground in the United States, where Franz Boas
challenged conventional ideas about fixed racial types in the 1890s. Boas and his students, principally
Melville Herskovitz, Otto Klineberg, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, became champions of the
primacy of culture over biology in explaining human behavior (p.55). Ballen discovered that Ruth
Benedict's critiques of racism in the 1930s were written in close partnership with Boas, but unfortunately,
the author does not explore how Benedict, probably from French sources, introduced the word “racism”
itself into our vocabulary (p.55). In building the case against racism, anthropologists were more important
in the U.S. than in the U.K., whereas biologists were more important in Britain than in America (p. 57).
Leading American biologists, drawn from old WASP families and particularly influential at Harvard,
supported eugenics and its antiimmigration platform. These biologists, for example, Charles Davenport in
his Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), still worked within the old racial taxonomies, and quite remarkably
made little contribution to research on heredity or to the development of population genetics (p.61). British
biologists pioneered much of this work in genetics which led to a greater understanding of the relationship
between heredity and environment. Together with statistical studies of populations, these innovations in
biology undermined crude biological determinism and racial taxonomy. Much of the British interest grew
out of a concern not with race but with class, and with the political implications of biological determinism
for social and education policy (p. 63). Liberals like Julian Huxley, and socialists like J.B.S. Haldane,
though members of the intellectual es!
tablishment, led the attack on biological determinism (p. 63). Others from less privileged origins, for
example, Lancelot Hogben from a Quaker background, directed their science against various forms of
elitism (p.63). Ballen argues that a political commitment to egalitarianism was instrumental in leading
these antiracist biologists to challenge established theories of biological determinism.
While Parts I and II focus on anthropo...Read entire document
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