Franz Boas's Physical Anthropology: The Critique of Racial Formalism Revisited

Abstract

In I968, the historian of anthropology George Stocking published an article on the physical anthropology of Franz Boas (I858-i 942) called Critique of Racial Formalism. Stocking's title was inspired by a letter Boas wrote to the American Anthropologist in I936 recalling his initial reactions to physical anthropology: When I turned to the consideration of racial I was shocked by the formalism of the work. Nobody had tried to answer the questions why certain measurements were taken, why they were considered significant, whether they were subject to outer influences; and my interest has since remained centered on these which must be solved before the data of physical anthropology can be used for the elucidation of historical problems (p. I40). Boas's physical anthropology has been characterized as experimentally-minded (Montagu I944:II5), with a concept of population structure denied to his race-ridden, cephalic-index-loving contemporaries (Tanner I959:io6). He has been credited with ushering in the dynamic science of human biology (Lesser I968:I07) and with being one of the first to challenge the virtually unquestioned assumption of stability of hereditary characteristics under any and all environmental conditions (Goldstein i98i:492). Boas's physical anthropology can be divided into three major parts: (i) growth and development (reviewed by Tanner i959), (2) the of racial psychology (reviewed by Cravens [I978] and exemplified by Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man [i9ii, revised in I938]), and (3) head form and heredity. This paper is primarily concerned with the last of these and its relation to his critique of racial formalism. Formalism is a term not often used in biology. According to Boas and Stocking, the formalism of turn-of-