Anthropology and psychoanalysis became popular in certain circles at about the same time, and for more or less the same reason. They both tended to discredit present day institutions and modes of thought by pointing to lowly origins in the infantile racial and individual past. It was fashionable a dozen years ago to be scornful of adult habits because their origins might be traced to a feeling of guilt, or an attachment to one's mother during the first four or five years of life. It was an equally popular pastime to suggest the ridiculousness of wearing a wedding ring, which was only an ancient symbol of marriage by capture; or of believing in the virgin birth, because it was a direct cultural descendant of primitive tribal myths. This use of some of the spectacular results of scientific inquiry tended to obscure the real value of both psychoanalysis and anthropology, and to make social scientists in related fields skeptical of co-operative enterprises. As late as 1928 a distinguished sociologist expressed the belief that the use of anthropology was purely historical and had no light to throw on contemporary problems.

Boas, in Anthropology and Modern Life, with no special theological axe to grind, makes clear the worth not only of some of the results, but of the methods of anthropological research. With an understanding of the use and limitations of his field of investigation he discusses the light it throws on certain important contemporary problems, and the possible future use of the methodology elaborated in the past quarter of a century. A glance at the chapter headings and the references in the back of the book show a preoccupation on the part of some investigators at least with modern situations, and indicate that Boas is not merely translating his material in order to make it available to the general public or to technicians in other fields; the studies mentioned and the discussion that follows are immediately illuminating, not illuminating by analogy.

The group, not the individual, is always the primary concern of the anthropologist… Theindividual interests us only as a member of the group. We inquire into determinate factors and the manner of their action in the group. The relation between the composition of the social group and the distribution of individual statures interests us. The physiologist may study the effect of strenuous exercise upon the functions of the heart. The anthropologist will investigate the interrelation between social conditions that make for strenuous exercise in a group and the physiological behavior of its members. The psychologist may study the intellectual or emotional behavior of the individual. The anthropologist will investigate the social or racial conditions that determine the behavior as distributed in the group.… We cannot treat the individual as an isolated unit. He must be studied in his social setting, and the question is relevant whether any valid laws exist that govern the life of society. (Italics ours).

That statement is surely temperate and sceptical enough to satisfy the most exacting.

The application of this attitude and technique to the problem of race, for instance, leads to the conclusion that sharply defined racial traits do not exist. There is not only a type to be considered, but a distribution of traits. Thus an examination of family lines of Swedes reveals not only many "typical" blondes, but some with dark hair and brown eyes. A similar examination of southern Italians shows a distribution including some blondes. Stature is also variable, short people being found in tall races, and vice versa. From studies of distribution Boas concludes that:

The vague impression of 'types' abstracted from our everyday experience does not prove that these are biologically distinct races.… It i s … not admissible to identify types apparently identical that occur in populations of different composition. Each individual can only be considered as a member of his group.

Thus, a blonde may be an Italian variant instead of a true Swede. This distribution tends to throw some doubt on the existence of a racial purity.

When we come to study culture it seems to have little relation to race, or heredity. Children readily pick up the language spoken about them, even though it be an alien one. Various races studied in a city environment responded more quickly to certain simple tests than did members of the same racial group when studied in remote country districts. Negroes from Chicago did very much better on the army tests than negroes from Louisiana. We even find a tendency on the part of the children of immigrants to conform anatomically to the native group among whom they live.

The importance of culture and environment in determining human behavior, together with the wide distribution found in family lines make Boas doubt the value of eugenics. A further reason against accepting the eugenic program lies in the instability of culture, and the consequent change in the ideal to be eugenically created. One tribe would work toward warlike, another toward acquisitive, a third toward conforming individuals. There is no reason to suppose that the American ideal of today is so absolutely good that it will not be supplanted tomorrow. Animal husbandry, from which eugenics derives its theory and aim is confounded by no such problem. The type of cow desired today is not only fairly well agreed upon but less likely to change than are human ideals.

Again in the field of crime we find anthropological studies illuminating. In the first place comparative studies of different civilizations and historical studies of our own indicate that there can be no definition of "crime" stable enough to warrant calling it instinctive or hereditary. Yesterday the man who drank moderately was no criminal; today he is. The man who denied God yesterday was punished by the forfeit of his life; today he may shout his heresy freely even in the sacred halls of science. It is not always criminal to kill or steal even in our own society.

The infinite complexity of conditions that bring an individual into the class of convicted criminals does not make such a conclusion (that the tendency to criminality is inherited in a simple Mendelian ratio) likely … The actual statistical data indicate only that in the population family lines differ in their degree of criminality.

Although anthropology may be of great assistance in predicting the average behavior of a group Boas limits its application by stating that "these results are not significant for the individual." "A prediction of the future development of a normal individual cannot be made with any degree of assurance." That should be obvious enough, but it is too often overlooked by many investigators, who make use of statistical methods.

We see then that anthropology is not a collection of ancient implements and amusing anecdotes about primitive tribes; neither is it a social psychoanalysis. It is a social science with a methodology and data that are applicable to the study of contemporary problems. Some one is certain to rise at this point and object that when anthropology attempts to study modern civilization it is encroaching on the domain of sociology. To which the present reviewer at least says God speed. Nothing is more futile than airtight divisions of fields of knowledge. Nothing is more hopeful than the sudden discovery that chemistry is physics, or that most social sciences are anthropology. Like M. Jourdain in The Bourgeois Gentilhomme we approach a recondite subject only to learn that we have been talking "prose" all our lives. It becomes possible immediately to apply all the known laws of prose to conversation. The discovery that sociology is anthropology surely brings us one step nearer to a scientific understanding of ourselves.