A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
understand the broader ramifications of Boas’s theories on art it is necessary to review the social implications of the evolutionist’s theories. There was a tendency then, as there is today, to believe that science is objective, rational, and unconnected to social considerations. In fact, science has never been value-free. At the turn of the century, the writings of Brinton, McGee, and others provided “scientific” justification for the increasingly racist attitudes of the native-born American white population.41 For example, they supported, with “facts,” attitudes which held that Native Americans and other people of color were, simply, genetically inferior to whites. Although the Indian stood somewhat higher in the evolutionary ladder than blacks, many whites believed that his wild natural instincts would get the better of him and he would soon vanish from the earth, unable to evolve further and live in civilization. Although at this time there were some who thought well of the Indians, the general white assessment of their character was not favorable.
Dislike and distrust of Indians was mild compared with the increasingly virulent attitudes toward and outrageous treatment of American blacks. Here, too, evolutionist theories justified such treatment. Since these freed slaves and their descendants, like their Native American counterparts, were seen to occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder, it was not necessary to treat them in a civilized manner. Racist attitudes often greeted the new European immigrants as well (Gossett 1972:292–93). During the 1890s, Jews and southern Europeans entered the United States in great numbers, encountering here hostility on the part of native-born citizens who feared that alien “races” were weakening American blood (Higham 1963:94, 110). Late nineteenth-century white supremacy received a major boost during the Spanish-American War when this country finally established an empire over “colored” people. This was the climate in which Franz Boas worked out his ideas on art—as well as many of his thoughts on culture.
The prevailing American racialist thinking became increasingly blatant as science and racism allied themselves ever more tightly during the first decades of the twentieth century. The president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1932, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a distinguished paleontologist, was a firm believer in the connection between race and social standing, and became an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, the pseudoscience based on the assumption that the human race could be improved through selective breeding.
Osborn’s close friend was Madison Grant, who bemoaned the negative influence on white Anglo-Saxon society of immigrants, especially the Jews. Advancing his own reading of Mendelian genetics, Grant asserted that “the cross between the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (quoted in Higham 1963:156). Grant, president of the New York Zoological Society, in 1906 caged a Pigmy black in the primate house, presumably as an illustration of a Negro-ape on the evolutionary scale (Horowitz 1975:450). Then, in 1916, Grant published the immensely popular The Passing of the Great Race, which described this country’s dismal fate: becoming overrun by immigrants of inferior eastern and central European races. Grant praised the tremendous virtues of “Nordic blood,” and feared its assimilation by intermixture with blood of inferior races: “It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterized the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us race reverting to the more ancient, generalized, and lower type” (Grant 1916:17). To prevent such racial suicide, Grand proposed several remedies, including passage of expanded laws against miscegenation, sterilization of persons with “deficiencies,” encouragement of greater reproduction of the fit, and “a complete change in our political structure … superseding our present reliance on the influence of education by a readjustment based on racial values” (Grant 1916:60).
Osborn, Grant, and others reflected the growing racism which was to become truly destructive after World War I. During the late teens and twenties, the Ku Klux Klan became powerful in both the South and the North, anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism ran rampant, universities imposed quotas limiting the number of Jewish students, psychologists developed intelligence testing which “proved” the mental inferiority of nonwhites, and Congress passed several bills restricting immigration in order to curb the masses of darker-skinned southern and eastern European “races” flooding into the United States.
Throughout all this, Franz Boas kept challenging the scientific basis of racist theories and presenting new information to resist such ideas. Thus, the 1927 publication of Primitive Art was not merely an intellectual exercise meant to argue against esoteric evolutionistic art history. It also embodied an antiracist statement. By the 1920s, Boas’s ideas had been disseminated in a university context, and thus were generally accepted by the profession of anthropology (in part because so many university anthropologists had been trained by Boas).42 Yet the racist attitudes that anthropologists had managed largely to eliminate from their profession still prevailed among the American public. Primitive Art actually came out during some of the darkest years in the history of American race prejudice.43 All the manifestations in American society of racialist thinking and policy that had early been reinforced by science were still prevalent, even if anthropology itself no longer supported them.
By bringing attention to the similarities among the different peoples of the world, Primitive Art provided data on western and nonwestern perspective techniques to support assertions of racial equality. Boas noted that a symbolic reading of an abstract motif is not limited to primitive societies, for even in our own civilization, form and color can possess a significance unrelated to the actual shape and hue. As examples, he used national flags, the Nazi swastika, and the Star of David as images that can produce extremely deep emotions by virtue of their symbolic significance rather than their subject matter (pp. 100–102). Then, after describing how members of the same ethnic group can interpret the same motif differently, Boas pointed out that to a Canadian the maple leaf can communicate patriotic feeling quite different from the response of a person who reads that leaf as symbolic of the autumn season. The crescent can symbolize to some a beautiful summer night, to others the Turkish nation; or it can simply be perceived as an elegant form (pp. 105–6). Moreover, primitive cultures are not the only ones with conservative tastes; Boas identified those manifestations of conservatism in our own culture such as localized food preferences, and male versus female attire (pp. 148–50). With such allusions to cross-cultural traits, Boas saw art as a means of forming connections among peoples rather than increasing their distance.
Boas used the preface and conclusion of Primitive Art to attack the core doctrine of evolutionism and the theory of ethnic inequality deducible from it. In his preface he began with the two premises that underpin his book: the identical mental processes of all humans, and the historical causation of all cultural phenomena.44 He then asserted that “the mental processes of man are the same everywhere, regardless of race and culture, and regardless of the apparent absurdity of beliefs and customs. Some theorists assume a mental equipment of primitive man distinct from that of civilized man. I have never seen a person in primitive life to whom this theory would apply” (p. 1). On the next page, Boas alludes to his own experiences with non-western cultures:
Anyone who has lived with primitive tribes, who has shared their joys and sorrows, their privations and their luxuries, who sees them not solely as subjects of study to be examined like a cell under the microscope, but feeling and thinking human beings, will agree that there is no such thing as a “primitive mind,” a “magical” or “prelogical” way of thinking, but that each individual in “primitive” society is a man, a woman, a child of the same kind, of the same way of thinking, feeling and acting as man, woman, or child in our own society (p. 2).
At the end of his book, Boas extended that judgment to the highest manifestation of the human spirit. Drawing from his arguments for the complexity of the mind of primitive man as well as for the multidimensional psychological nature of the creative and aesthetic process, he asserted that primitive man has as much capability for aesthetic appreciation as civilized man. The only difference is the relative lack of a fixed style and greater artistic opportunities in western art: “I believe we may safely say that in the narrow field of art that is characteristic of each people the enjoyment of beauty is quite the same as among ourselves.… It is the