Race and democratic society / Franz Boas.

  • Franz Boas
Date:
[1945]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Race and democratic society / Franz Boas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Swedes who look like Italians, for example, or Northern Ital¬ ians who look like Swedes; Jews who have blond hair and blue eyes and pass for North Germans. Individual appearance as a test of race has long since been abandoned by anthropolo¬ gists. It is too inaccurate, too untrustworthy. To be sure, Negroes and East Asiatics are fundamentally different from Europeans. Yet even among the black-skinned Negroes or slant-eyed Mongols the variations are wide. Is there any way, then, of distinguishing one people as a whole from another people as a whole by mere physical appearance or build of body? Not in Europe. Anatomica] traits are too varied. And they overlap in populations. In other words, if we decide that fair hair, long heads, blue eyes, and tallness are the unmistakable traits of a Scandinavian, what shall we say when we discover that many Northern Italians are also fair-haired, long-headed, blue-eyed, and tall? If olive skins and dark hair are to characterize Mediterranean peoples alone, we are bound to be discomfited when we dis¬ cover Englishmen and Americans who might easily pass for conventional Italians, Spaniards, or Greeks. To distinguish one European population from another, we must proceed statistically. In other words, we must set up standards or types and then find out how many members of a population conform with each in different regions. The best that we can do is to say that there are more blonds for each 1,000 of the population in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark than there are in Italy or Greece and that there are more swarthy, dark-eyed men and women among 1,000 Italians than among 1,000 Englishmen. But this is very different from assuming that all Scandinavians are fair and all Mediterraneans dark. Since it is futile to judge a man’s stock by his looks, we turn to his manner. How far is that determined by his bodily constitution? The first mistake that we are likely to make is to assume that, because bodies are stable, bodily functions must also be stable. It is true that, when maturity is reached, the body remains essentially the same for years. But the func¬ tions? With exertion, hearts beat faster, the breath comes and
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