Between Genetics and Biometry: Franz Boas’ Concept of a ‘Family Line’, 1890-1912

Staffan Mueller-Wille
ESRC Research Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/17/2005 9:00 AM in ROZH 105
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Abstract
Session: Genealogy, Pure Lines, and Radiation. Towards A Cultural History of Classical Genetics

George Stocking has repeatedly argued in his writings on the history of anthropology, that the anthropological concept of “race” combined physical and cultural aspects well into the twentieth century, and that the current split of cultural and physical anthropology occurred a relatively late, in the generation of students of Franz Boas (1858-1942) who dominated American anthropology in the mid twentieth century. According to a wide-spread view, it was this school of “Boasians” that subjected the concept of “race” to a critique that was motivated by and grounded in the growing autonomy of cultural anthropology as a separate discipline.
In my paper I want to question this received view. I will argue that the critique of the race concept emerged within anthropology in the nineteenth century already, when physical and cultural anthropology were not yet separated. The source for this critique was the increasing use made of the analytical tools of genealogy, both in cultural and in physical anthropology. Though kinship, genealogy and race seem to be mutually supportive, they are actually not: representations of race follow the logic of evolutionary trees, while genealogies follow that of networks of exchange.
To substantiate this claim I will look at the use of genealogical tools in Franz Boas’ papers on biometry and physical anthropology. Boas carried out a range of anthropometric studies on American Indian populations in the 1890s, making observations that predisposed him to embrace Mendelism after 1900, and to reject some of the fundamental assumptions of Galtonian biometry. It was specifically Wilhelm Johannsen’s work that had a lasting effect on Boas (The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911). However, physical anthropology lacked the possibility of creating pure lines and experimenting with them. When Boas embarked on his famous studies of American immigrant populations (Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, 1912), he therefore sought refuge in an analytical tool borrowed from genealogy: “family” or “genetic lines”, for which unity of descent could be empirically ascertained and which were represented, in each generation respectively, by the various fraternities a population is composed off. On account of this analysis, as Boas should later emphasize in his campaign against “race” as a viable, scientific category, races emerge as local, heterogeneous composites of family lines, not vice versa.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
From Plant Breeding to Heredity. Clones and Pure Lines
Genealogy and human heredity in Germany around 1900
Animal Breeding and its Influence on the Identity of Genetics
Towards a holistic understanding of the organism: The model organisms of German genetics in the twenties