Ethnicity and Race in Anthropology

Franz Boas (1858–1942), widely considered to be the father of American anthropology, spent much of his career arguing vigorously against racism and theories of the fixed physiological nature of ethnicity. Though fondly remembered by most anthropologists as a rigorous ethnographer and mentor to such famous names as Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, he remains a contradictory and complicated figure for two disparate groups: Native Americans and physical anthropologists. First, for some Native American people, his participation—along with many of his museum curator and academic contemporaries—in the looting and desecration of Native graves for the collection of "specimens" for comparative anatomical research has forever tarnished his reputation. Likewise, some of the research methods of the time, considered controversial both when they were practiced and into the twenty-first century, included a simple anthropometry, or the measurement and comparison of certain continuous human characteristics. Native Americans and other nonwhite people are often and rightly suspicious of such techniques, since anthropologists used them to substantiate racist hierarchies.

Boas, however, employing the same anthropometric methodology, stringently critiqued the assumed fixity of human cranial dimensions, arguing that even slight changes in developmental and environmental conditions could make the simple measurements meaningless for human classification. For example, a ratio of the length to the width of the skull—the cranial index—was considered by early anthropologists to be a reliable measurement for distinguishing people of different ethnicities from each other, such as Hungarians, Poles, and European Jews. Boas disagreed.

Concerned about the rise of anti-immigrant prejudice in the United States, Boas, a German Jewish immigrant himself, secured funding from Congress in 1908 to undertake a massive cranial measurement study of immigrants in New York City, ostensibly to substantiate his views on human cranial plasticity and to prove the uselessness of the cranial index (see Boas). His conclusions, that the children of immigrants are different physically from their "ethnic" parents and therefore successfully integrating into American society, were embraced by sociocultural anthropologists (but not politicians, to Boas's dismay) as undeniable proof of the intergenerational flexibility of bodies. Cranial morphology was proven to neither be a direct function of ethnicity, culture, or language group. Anthropologists, then, could no longer pin ethnicity reliably and regularly to physical type, at least in the anthropological literature. Boas also argued, given his analysis, that anthropologists could not use cranial size and shape to link past skeletal populations with living human groups.

Boas's historical place among the physical anthropologists in the twenty-first century, though, especially given the methodological similarities between them, is growing even more complicated. Physical anthropologists, while no longer participating in the construction of racial taxonomies, often use detailed anthropometric techniques to track morphological changes and microevolution in human populations through time. Many physical anthropologists claim that new and detailed cranial metric techniques can distinguish different past groups from each other by culture or ethnicity, directly contradicting Boas's earlier findings. Some of these comparisons, ironically, are used to assign cultural labels to Native American skeletal remains for repatriation and reburial under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, P.L. 101–601).

In the early 2000s Boas's landmark study of cranial plasticity was the subject of a debate between two teams of physical anthropologists. Both teams reevaluated some of Boas's data using updated statistical methods. Sparks and Jantz conclude: "[O]ur analysis reveals high heritability … and variation among the ethnic groups, which persists in the American environment" (p. 14637). Gravlee and his colleagues, however, contradicted the first team, affirming Boas's conclusions that statistically significant differences exist between U.S.-born children and their foreign-born parents.

However this debate is resolved, most anthropologists still have Franz Boas to thank for his early critiques of the former assumption that race or ethnicity should correspond with language and culture. Furthermore, sociocultural anthropologists have little interest in quantifying morphological difference between people. Physical or biological anthropologists, however, are still struggling to define the meaning of some of the differences they find, especially when comparisons between different past skeletal populations have policy implications in the present.