The Defeat of Scientific Racism

Charles King is a distinguished American commentator on the recent history of the Balkans and the Near East, but in this striking intervention in political debate the time and place of his concerns are very different. He has turned his attention to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the interwar years, concentrating on the development of the discipline of anthropology and centring on the figure of Franz Boas, a humane, courageous and farsighted German Jew, and on the group of women anthropologists he taught and fostered. By the time of Boas’ death in 1942, his arguments for racial equality were widely accepted, as the US entered a war against the horrors of Aryan supremacy. Charles King wrote his book in the last days of the Trump presidency when racism had become once more accepted, powerful and corrosive. It hadn’t of course ever gone away, but it was once more the norm for a terrifyingly large and influential number of Americans. King only mentions Trump once, but his message is clear. Boas had a number of distinguished male students, many of them Jewish immigrants like himself, and their own ground-breaking work helped to spread his insights and values throughout the States. But King concentrates on his female students who had a much harder battle. They needed Boas’ ongoing help to find enough financial support to practice anthropology at all. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been women anthropologists before—it had been a wonderful escape from drawing-room life for some well-to-do women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, somewhere they could be in charge for once and where no-one contradicted them. But gaining an academic position was a very different matter. King concentrates on four women. There is Margaret Mead, with her genius for attracting attention and book sales. Then Ruth Benedict, for years ignored and marginalized, but who eventually, after the war and Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture, Bodley Head, 2019, £25, 9781847924490