[A distinguished American anthropologist, Stocking is the editor of numerous volumes of writings on the subject. In the following excerpt, which was originally published in the 1979 collection The Uses of Anthropology, he discusses the political dimension ofBoas's thought.]

Although it would be presumptuous in the space available to attempt systematic evaluation, one can scarcely avoid a few general comments on Boas' career as a scientific activist. Let us take as reference point certain limitations to Boas' activist role. Even after his move toward socialism, he was not much concerned with the redistribution of economic resources and political power. Nor was he ever much involved in the problems of the American Indian—though he was quite active privately in opposing John Collier's appointment as Indian Commissioner, regarding him as an "agitator" who would "make more acute the difficulties of the Indians which are inherent in their economic relations to their White neighbors." Although various reasons might be advanced for these neglects, one common factor underlying them would seem to be a certain fatalistic attitude toward technologically based historical processes—on the one hand, the movement toward more collectively oriented economic systems within Western European civilization, and on the other, its overpowering of more technologically primitive cultures in areas where the two were in direct confrontation.

If this seems paradoxical, in view of Boas' well-known opposition to economic determinism, it is not inconsistent with his general historical outlook. Boas never abandoned entirely a nineteenth-century liberal belief in a singular human progress in "civilization" that was based ultimately on the cumulation of rational knowledge—of which technology was the single most clearcut manifestation. Certain values deeply embedded in his own enculturative experience—scientific knowledge, human fellowship, and individual freedom—had in fact been cumulatively realized in human history, not merely in a generalized sense, but in the specific form of "modern" civilization, which Boas' language often made clear was "our own." Boas was far from satisfied with that civilization, and his alienation was ultimately expressed in his contribution to the modern pluralistic concept of "culture," which was founded on the legitimacy of alternative value systems. But anthropology, for Boas, did not lead to a "general relativistic attitude." Quite the contrary. Not only were there general values that were cumulatively realized in the history of human civilization, there were also general values that were variously realized in different human cultures—"fundamental truths" that, notwithstanding their form in "particular societies," were "common to mankind." Boas did not himself undertake the systematic comparison that might have revealed these values empirically, however, and his occasional specific references to them suggest that they, too, were rooted in his own enculturative experience. Thus the common moral ideas he saw underlying the varied ethical behavior of mankind turn out to be respect for "life, well-being, and property" within the range of the recognized social group.

Despite this deeply rooted optimistic and universalistic rationalism, there was a repressed emotional-aesthetic undercurrent in Boas' personality, and his life experience had made him painfully aware of the role of irrational factors in human life. Positively, these tendencies were realized in the variety of human cultural forms; negatively, in the way emotionally rooted customs within particular groups were retrospectively rationalized and given pseudo-universalistic valuation. This opposition—and the broader one underlying it, which resonates of the traditional Germanic opposition between "civilization" and "culture"—runs throughout Boas' career, expressing itself during certain extended historical moments in a rather deep pessimism.

Within these attitudinal parameters, Boas confronted the problems of the modern world. Although science had a hand in these—generating both technological progress and value conflict—they were essentially the product of emotion rather than reason and had primarily to do with the ways that men delimited the groups within which general human values were applied or the fruits of technological progress were distributed. Appropriately, Boas' scientific life was devoted to studying two phenomena in terms of which such exclusivity was defined—race and culture—and the gist of his scientific message was that groupings defined in these terms were profoundly conditioned by history. If he was willing to grant a certain contingent value to such particularistic groupings, which in the present phase of history might long endure, they could have no permanent place in the noncontingent realm of scientific truth.

Although there are moments in Boas' writings when scientific rationality itself is viewed in relativistic terms, in general he retained all his life a rather idealized and absolutistic conception of science. At the very end, he rejected the idea that scientists must lay aside their studies to devote themselves full-time to the anti-Nazi struggle: "the icecold flame of the passion for seeking the truth for truth's sake must be kept burning." And despite the frequently utilitarian tone of his appeals for research funds, he had—or came to have as he grew older—a rather limited conception of the practical utility of anthropological research. The "usefulness of the knowledge gained" by "pure science" was an "entirely irrelevant" question. True, anthropology might "illuminate the social processes of our own times"—might show us "what to do and what to avoid." But given Boas' increasingly pessimistic view of the possibility of finding general social laws and his feeling that the variation of socially based ideals would make the application of social scientific knowledge always problematic, the practical utility of anthropology was somewhat limited. It told us much more what to avoid than what to do. Its posture vis-a-vis society was defensive rather than constructive. However, in fighting prejudice and intolerance, and in defending cultural variety, it sought also to defend the cultural conditions of scientific activity itself. And by these means, it sought also to provide the basis for systematic criticism of the particularistic cultural assumptions and the pseudo-universals that still pervaded "modern civilization." Its ultimate application was to "see to it that the hard task of subordinating the love of traditional lore to clear thinking be shared with us [scientists] by larger and larger masses of our people."

On the bottom line, the tension in Boas' thought between emotional particularism and universalistic rationality was thus resolved in favor of the latter. But particularism nonetheless played a critical role in its achievement. The fundamental Eurocentrism of Boas' attitude toward "the mind of primitive man" may best be understood in this context. On the one hand, in defending the mental capacity of non-European peoples, he was defending their capacity to participate fully in "modern civilization"; on the other, in defending their cultural values, he was establishing a kind of Archimedian leverage point for the criticism of that civilization. The need for such an external reference point was one of the leitmotifs of Boas' career, and it tended to carry with it a double standard of cultural evaluation: a universalistic one in terms of which he criticized the society in which he lived and a relativistic one in terms of which he defended the cultural alternative. Whatever the emotional roots of this need, the external cultural alternative was for Boas an essential precondition for the achievement both of scientific knowledge in the social sphere and of the freedom of the individual in society. Just as the "scientific study of generalized social forms" required that the student "free himself from all valuations based on our [own] culture," so also did true freedom require that we be "able to rise above the fetters that the past imposes upon us." Without an external cultural reference point by which to bring these valuations and fetters to the level of consciousness, both scientific knowledge and true freedom would be impossible. This then was the ultimate meaning of Boas' lifelong fight for culture.

From the perspective of today, one may well question just how far Boas was able to bring the shackles of his own tradition fully to consciousness. Many of the values that late-nineteenth-century liberals assumed were universal seem now to be anchored in a particular cultural historical context. To many present anthropologists, Boas' outlook must surely seem naively idealist, in both an ethical and an epistemological sense. Its tacit Eurocentrism cannot help but offend many in a postcolonial world. Its limited and defensive conception of the anthropologist's political role—which by World War II was already undergoing modification—must seem quite inadequate to many of those who have come of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Questioning the assumptions underlying Boas' activism, one may question its achievements as well. Forty years of education in tolerance seem neither to have eliminated prejudice nor greatly to have strengthened "the power of clear thought"—nor to have fundamentally modified the social order of the United States.

But if he never transcended them, Boas nonetheless represents nineteenth-century liberal values at their most generically human, and we may still today appreciate his contribution to our cultural life. There is a sense in which he transmuted personal history into scientific paradigm: the experience of Jews in Germany provided him the archetype of an ostensibly racial group that was in fact biologically heterogeneous, which had assimilated itself almost completely to German national culture and which in multitudinous ways had enriched the general cultural life of modern civilization. Transported to the United States, the scientific viewpoint founded on that archetype offered strong support for certain fundamental American values that in the early twentieth century were much in need of reinforcement. By the time of his death, Boas' critique of traditional racial assumption and his contribution to the modern concept of culture had contributed not a little to that end. And if today his critical perspective and his anthropological activism may seem somewhat limited in scope, the standpoint from which he approached the issues of anthropology and public life is surely as sound as ever: "the whole basis of the anthropological viewpoint is the willingness to take the position of the non-conformist, not to take anything in our social structure for granted, and to be particularly ready to examine critically all those attitudes that are accompanied by strong outbursts of emotion, the more so the stronger the accompanying emotion."