SOURCE: "Some Central Elements in the Legacy," in American Anthropologist, Vol. 61, No. 5, 1959, pp. 146-55.

Boas left no body of dogma as a legacy. What he established, as a foundation to modern anthropology, was a series of guiding principles for action. These were expressed in concrete contributions, with little phrasing of theoretical points in extended form. Hence our survey of central elements here must stay close to the specific as he presented it.

The life of Boas coincided with the establishment of anthropology as a discipline of definite scope and method. He, more than any other individual, can be credited with determining the nature of its field and giving it the scientific approaches of objective empiricism, carefully controlled analysis, firmness of aims, and scrupulous self-discipline in defining the axioms of one's thoughts. For all he maintained that he was merely analyzing the fundamental views of his predecessors, so far as anthropology is a science he made it one.

Boas was perhaps the last man who can be said to have embraced the whole field of anthropology. Since his earlier days the field has become so ramified, and demands so intimate a knowledge of some segment, that no one can encompass it again in so masterly a fashion. Yet a fundamental of our heritage from him is that the wholeness of culture and the unity of problems of physical types must be borne in mind while dealing with particulars.

To appreciate the extent of his contribution, we must bear in mind that at the time he came into anthropology in the 1880's and for some decades after, it was given over largely to speculation and generalization—and this is not to deny that early writers had given it direction, some formulation of problems, and had tried to create a methodology. Now that its premises have been established for us, we tend to assume that the points were obvious and needed no demonstration, forgetting that at the opening of Boas' career quite other views were held as equally obvious with unshakable conviction. What he did, in contrast to his predecessors, was to formulate our problems in specific form and provide basic valid methodology. That there are now many more problems and approaches does not absolve us from remembering the circumstances in which the axioms were laid down.

His first field experience (1883-84), among the Baffinland Eskimo, set the pattern of his thinking. He confessed that he went with a crass belief in environmental compulsions of Eskimo life and thought, but his stay among them revolutionized his viewpoint. He then became convinced, he said, that while there was an adjustment of life to external physical conditions, social tradition—the result of a multiplicity of historical factors—was by far the more potent determinant of a man's thought and behavior. This was the compelling idea of his life's work: the complete molding of every human expression—inner thought and external behavior—by social conditioning.

What then are the relations between the bodily constitution and endowment and the cultural matrix in which it exists? Boas' career turned fundamentally on the relations between the two. Much that is basic is summed up in his The Mind of Pimitive Man, a book which has had a profound influence on the thought of our generation—not narrowly on anthropologists, but on all social-minded thoughtful individuals. It has become part of the heritage of all educated persons. Perhaps its import is better understood by noting the title of the German edition, Kudtur mad Rosse. Where Boas would seem by the English title to have concerned himself with savage mentality alone, actually the book's aim so far transcended that as to make it a Magna Carta of race equality—or better, of the equivalence of hereditary endowment among races and the independence of cultural achievement from race. It is quite true that for decades a more enlightened attitude had been emerging in the Western world, but it was Boas who wrote quietus to any "scientific" pronunciamentos on "higher" and "lower" races.

Several main themes in the book are now axiomatic for us. (1) No racial group today can lay substantial claim to hereditary purity. (2) Races are not stable entities, immutably fixed in early times, but show evidences of change due to domestication, environmental influences, selection, and perhaps mutation. (3) The average differences in physical characteristics between races is small in contrast to the great overlapping of range and duplication of types among them. (4) There is no fixed relation between function and anatomy, between mind and brain for example, such as to warrant the view that any race is incapable of participating in any culture or even in creating it. On the side of cultural analysis Boas demonstrated (5) that there is no identity of race, language, and culture such that physical heredity can be credited with the formulation of languages and the achievements of civilizations. (6) On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence that these aspects of human behavior are the products of involved historical growth, though they rest on fundamental traits of mind and body, traits probably uniformly distributed among all races.

This emphasis on historical determinants is the keynote to Boas' thinking about culture, and it is our legacy. Applied specifically to primitive men, he concluded that such groups are not primitive by reason of hereditary inferiority but because the circumstances of their life were more static than those of civilized men, the differences being products of their variant history and traditional equipment. Such a formulation disposed of the belief of an older generation in cultural evolution (or parallelism): that each race is primarily responsible for its own development; that cultural evolution (perhaps racial and cultural evolution going hand in hand) passes through the same sequences everywhere, with savages left behind on an inferior level (erhaps because of incomplete biological development).

It should be clear that by "historical" Boas meant only that each cultural trait and configuration must have had a specific antecedent form. This did not involve the need to provide a sweeping picture-in-time (though that appeals to some anthropologists of different temperament) or knowledge of which individuals brought about innovations. It sufficed for his purpose to envisage a "before and after" picture at a particular place and time. Cultures, obviously, are continually in a state of flux, whether slow or rapid; hence cultural forms evolve endlessly out of antecedent cultural forms. In this sense—and in this sense only—would one say that Boas was a cultural evolutionist—as we all are.

But such historical unravelling was not an end in itself. Boas was primarily interested in the processes of culture growth revealed in this historical panorama. Whether universals could be phrased with respect to processes, forms, and interrelations (functions) was a matter he approached with caution—and to the extent that we are like-minded, that caution, too, is a heritage. He wrote:

… Certain laws exist which govern the growth of culture, and it is our endeavor to discover these laws. The object of our investigation is to find the processes [italics his] by which certain stages of culture have developed. The customs and beliefs themselves are not the ultimate objects of research. We desire to learn the reasons why such customs and beliefs exist—in other words, we wish to discover the history of their development. The method which is at present [1896] most frequently applied in investigations of this character compares the variations under which the customs or beliefs occur and endeavors to find the common psychological cause that underlies all of them. I have stated that this method is open to a very fundamental objection.

We have another method, which in many respects is safer. A detailed study of customs in their bearing to the total culture of the tribe practicing them, and in connection with an investigation of their geographical distribution among neighboring tribes, affords us almost always a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of the customs in question and to the psychological processes that were at work in their development.

An explanation is in order here—which is by no means a digression but significant for understanding this and comparable statements. Normally today the word "psychological" will evoke thought of the findings of modern experimental psychology (which hardly existed in 1896 and for many years after). Boas used the word in its older and more general sense alternatively with "mental." He had in mind always the inner states and mental content which are the realities of cultural habits and give meaning to their adherents—an aspect of the cultural whole which was either ignored or guessed at by his contemporaries.

Boas did not conceive his task as narrowly historical: he was concerned fundamentally with culture constructs as mental products. But where his predecessors sought general laws of psychic action by illusively simple analysis, he redefined the problem as that of the extent and character of mental operations at each specific point in their historically ascertained sequences. It has sometimes been said, without warrant, that Boas denied the possibility of deriving laws of culture and of mental action. He never phrased so drastic a statement: indeed, his firm belief in the essential similarity of minds in all races at all periods, and in the essentially equivalent nature of cultures the world over, presumed regularities of mental operation and of culture growth. Where he sought laws, if it were possible to formulate them, is indicated in a number of statements.

While on the whole the unique historical character of cultural growth in each area stands out as a salient element in the history of cultural development, we may recognize at the same time that certain typical parallelisms do occur. We are, however, not so much inclined to look for these similarities in detailed customs but rather in certain dynamic conditions which are due to social or psychological causes that are liable to lead to similar results.… In short, if we look for laws, the laws relate to the effects of psychological, and social conditions, not to sequences of cultural achievement.

He held firmly to the principle that such regularities must be explicitly demonstrated and could or should be phrased only within their limiting circumstances. This tenet is that of an ever-rigorous and cautious thinker: he feared a recrudescence of premature formulations. These features of the nature of laws as known to the natural scientist (of which Boas, as a physicist by training, was undoubtedly more fully aware than his sociologist critics) are far from those of the facile generalizations offered by early writers.

The need for a substantial factual basis for such demonstration led him to a carefully conceived series of studies of primitive life: ethnographies monumental in scope and in detail; texts and grammatical analyses of many American Indian languages; vast collections of folktales—not as trivia, but for their variant forms which could provide materials for historical and psychological analysis. Primary in these efforts is the conviction that for a true picture of native action and thought the records must be made through the native tongue, or, if command of the native language is not feasible, in the form of dictated texts.

Boas' methodology and aims are well exemplified in his study of tales, a life-long interest. To understand these aims and the different temper of his approach to the subject, we must recall that at the close of the last century there were ardent advocates of the view that the essential unity of men's minds and fancies inevitably produced like tales the world over, and equally ardent proponents that such tales could only have spread from some early centers. From the beginning he insisted that "in order to investigate the physical laws of the human mind … we must treat the culture of primitive people [here the tales] by strict historical methods. We must understand the process by which the individual culture grew before we can undertake to lay down laws by which the culture of all mankind grew." In Dissemination of Tales among the Natives of North America (1891), he laid down a test for historical unity: namely, that the tales compared must contain the same arbitrary elements and be part of a continuous area of distribution. In his Growth of Indian Mythologies (1896), he demonstrated that the myths and tales on the Northwest Coast were reintegrated forms of unit tales which crossed and recrossed in the course of their diffusion; in short, that the tales were intricate historic constructs, not simple immediate products of minds at play with fancy. On a very much larger scale, he provided in the comparative notes to Kutenai Tales (1918)—an encyclopedic index of North American tales to the date of its publication—materials for a much broader approach to the same problem. Again, in reaction to the old rationalistic view that mythological tales arose from the anthropomorphizing of nature, he showed that, by a transfer of characters, the same tale was told of human, animal, and nature actors in adjacent areas. So too, that the explanatory (etiological) elements were in many cases not primary but later accretions to existing tales. These concepts of historically secondary connection and the reassembling and reintegration of existing elements played a significant part, not only in his view of the growth of mythologies but in Boas' whole conception of the history of culture processes.

Something of these discriminations between the historically determined and the universally human appears further in his folktale analyses. In Stylistic Aspects of Primitive Literature he pointed out that certain features must have been historically determined: the moralizing fable, proverb, and riddle of Old World folk literature in contrast to their rare occurrence in the New, the tendency to cluster unit tales in long narratives or cycles in some areas against its absence in others, the specific motivations given locally to tales in conformity with cultural interests, and so on. On the other hand, general mental traits could account for such things as rhythmic repetition as a literary device to heighten interest, the tendency to make use of formal elements at the expense of free narrative, and, indeed, the impulses to associate and coordinate tales of diverse historical origin and to rephrase them in terms of local culture, its motivations, and stylistic norms. Such norms for large areas were presented in Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians. He attacked the same problems on an extensive scale in his Tsimshian Mythology and again in Kwakiutl Culture as Refected in Mythology, where by a very thorough inspection of a vast body of material, he gave answers to the questions how far—and in what ways—the culture of narrators determined content and form of the tales, what emotions and motives were expressed and how, and what formal elements or literary devices were utilized. His thought was that a series of such studies would enable us to discriminate the culturally determined and that residual part which could be ascribed to the free play of fancy. Parallel analyses have since been made, but it must be confessed that present-day anthropologists show little interest in the marked possibilities of this approach—or in anything else pertaining to tales.

Coupled with this was Boas' interest in the interplay of imagination and convention in the graphic arts and song: indeed, they are all treated as aspects of the same fundamental activity in his Primitive Art. He developed the thesis that some esthetic elements resulted from technical control, which with developing skill resulted in play with technique; that virtuosity itself became a source of esthetic gratification; that rhythmic repetition and balance of design resulted frequently from regularity of the craftsman's movements. In an analysis of The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast (1897), Boas had shown that the pseudo-realistic carvings of that area were strictly limited in their execution by fixed conventions of art derived from historical developments in their past. These treatments were by no means the purely formal, atomistic dissection they may seem, for he understood full well that in each art there is a set of values—values of emotional concern to artist and beholder. But he attempted to unravel that with which most students of art are less concerned—the nature of such cultural constructs, the inventive or assimilative character of men's minds, and hence, the processes of culture growth. Here again are a set of leads waiting for some scholar.

Nor should it be thought that this emphasis on history and process left unregarded the individual in culture. What else was his basic concern with the attempt to discover the manner in which an individual's thought and activities become molded? Too great an emphasis on the historical might end in neglect of the carriers of culture. He wrote: "… the dynamics of social life can be understood only on the basis of the reaction of the individual to the culture in which he lives and of his influence upon society.… An error of modern anthropology, as I see it, lies in the overemphasis on historical reconstruction, the importance of which should not be minimized, as against a penetrating study of the individual under the stress of the culture in which he lives." Unquestionably the overwhelming mass of an individual's overt activities are culture-channeled, but how far does this hold for states in which affect is uppermost—emotions, temperamental biases, sentiments. What, he asked, are the nascent physiological bases and what forms do these affective states take? Although at no point did Boas make the culture-moulding of the individual the sole objective of a study, there is material for it embedded in his ethnographies and in observations expressed in some more general papers; and, quite as significantly, he stimulated such studies among his students—for example, the study of adolescent behavior in differing cultural settings. Yet he was wary of "personality studies."

Some of our most familiar working concepts are a heritage from Boas, though commonly not recognized as such. The concept of the culture area first took form in his arrangement on a geographic basis of the exhibits at the World's Fair, Chicago, in 1893. When called to the American Museum of Natural History in 1895 he again embodied the idea in exhibits, where by display and label the concepts of areas of characterization, of typical and marginally variant cultures, were elaborated (and later developed and publicized by Wissler). Boas made no fetish of it: for him it served largely as a classificatory device for handling large bodies of data, but its utility for the analysis of the historical interrelations implied in such classifying has long been taken as a matter of course.

The legacy of Boas' long-time interest in language is not alone the great body of texts and grammatical analyses of previously unrecorded native tongues made by himself, his students, and their successors, but some general principles. What is axiomatic today—that each language must be viewed in terms of its own structure and operations—was a revolutionary proposition in the days when exotic languages were strained on the Procrustean frame of Old World "literary" languages. Boas was not concerned with linguistic analysis as an end in itself, that is, as a sort of mathematical play—as it is (quite properly) for some linguists. For him language is a cultural form, the components of which are to be investigated as is any other culture manifestation. One novelty of his presentations are the sections devoted to "Ideas Expressed by Grammatical Processes," an attempt to understand the weighting of grammatical forms for classifying experience. These observations are of inestimable value to the cultural anthropologist, and we can only wish that linguists of today would give us further insights of this nature.

His general viewpoint is expressed in the introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages and the inaugural article in the International Journal of American Linguistics. There he stressed the need of language study for an understanding of the more subtle aspects of a culture, its verbal forms and nuances of social behavior, and the analysis of grammatical categories for an appreciation of the formal verbal framework circumscribing expressions of thought. At the same time he discriminated carefully lest the logic of language structure be mistaken for the logic of thinking. Grammatical categories, he held, are not the categories of thought, but they constrain the logic of thinking in certain channels.

In his introductory article for the Journal he made perhaps his strongest and most unique methodological point: he insisted that the first historical problem with respect to languages was to discover how far lexical, morphological, and syntactic features had been incorporated in a language from diverse sources before assuming genetic connection. Pointing out that "In America we can discern various areas that have common phonetic characteristics … [which] do not coincide with any morphological groupings, and are apparently geographically well defined …, [while] certain morphological types have a wide continuous distribution," caution is necessary before positing the similarities as the consequence of genetic relationship. "It is quite inconceivable that similarities such as exist between Quilleyute, Kwakiutl, and Salish, should be due to mere accident, or that the morphological similarities of Californian languages, which Kroeber and Dixon have pointed out, should not be due to a definite cause. The experience of Aryan studies might induce us to agree that these must be members of single linguistic stocks; but this assumption leaves fundamental differences unaccounted for, and neglects the possibility of morphological assimilation, so that at the present time the conclusion does not seem convincing.… It is not safe to disregard the possibility of a complex origin of linguistic groups." Boas' insistence on rigor of demonstration—in contrast to the quick apperception by persons with a somewhat intuitive grasp of far-reaching similarities not easily conceptualized—may not have been wholly advantageous but did inevitably flow from his scientific habits of thought. If this was a somewhat negative attitude—but a healthy one—a more positive suggestion followed: "It seems probable that a safer basis will be reached by following out dialectic studies" which promise "rich returns in the field of the mechanical processes of linguistic development and of the psychological problems presented by languages of different types." Some dialectic studies have since been made, but rarely brought to any head with general statements of the processes involved in dialect differentiation.

Quite as fundamentally a part of our heritage were Boas' contributions to understanding the nature and composition of bodily types. His concern throughout was with questions of racial strains, their homogeneity and hereditary characteristics; how, in the course of growth, physical characteristics are established; and by inference, the bearing of similarity or difference of physical forms on hereditary mental endowment, and what its consequences for cultural behavior might be. Year after year he picked up these problems, systematically moving them toward definite conclusions.

Methodology here centered in the analysis of mass data by statistical measures. He was not only a master of statistical analysis but an originator of new forms (see inter alia his mathematical treatise The Measurement of Variable Quantities [1906]). It is patent that many of his contemporaries in physical anthropology, unused to mathematical thinking, were bewildered, and something of this unawareness of the utility of statistical devices persists.

A basic contribution was his demonstration of the plasticity of bodily types. Growth, commonly studied only as that of childhood and adolescence, was seen as a process continuing through adult life to death, a continuum of change. "The life span is the result of physiological processes that go on throughout life and that have been observed from the time of birth until death. When we study the distribution of moments of occurrence of definite physiological changes, it appears that the variability in time of occurrence increases with great rapidity during life." The genesis of this view lay in the prior observation that mentally precocious children had better physical development than their age-mates, dull children the reverse. As mathematician Boas saw in the seriations of physical measurements for a given age the distributions characteristic of scattering of a group caused by a multiplicity of factors (the product of chance as portrayed in the probability curve). His interpretation was that this systematic scattering resulted from varying degrees of retardation and acceleration; that there was a close correlation between the several physical measurements and between these and mental status; and that this correlation varied systematically during the years of growth.

He saw another corollary. If the course of the child's physical development was determined by the exigencies of growth, it should be clear that the final adult form is not fixed by heredity alone but by somatic factors as well; and should such circumstances affect a local population as a whole, there should be not only evidence of the instability of racial types as we find them, but the whole set of assumptions of anthropometrists—that in measuring adults they were describing hereditary forms alone—would be subject to fundamental revision. Confirmation of the hypothesis came with the study of Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants wherein were found characteristic differences between immigrant parents and their children born in the United States, differences which were substantial, correlated with the length of residence of the mother, and persistent throughout life. An inspection of earlier studies showed parallel changes in local racial types of Europe and elsewhere to have been established but their significance overlooked. Further studies, e.g. on Italians and Puerto Ricans (1913: summed up in New Evidence in Regard to the Instability of Human Types,) confirmed the conclusion, as did the less extended studies of others prompted by these findings. It is important to note that Boas held that these observations implied only a limited plasticity of human types. But however limited, he did demonstrate that we cannot assume that measurements of a local group immediately reveal fixed hereditary characteristics.

Equally important for understanding the nature of racial types were his analyses of component strains in local populations. His analysis turned On the Variety of Lines of Descent Represented in a Population. He established that homogeneity within a racial group is not identical with purity of descent; that in such a group variability of families may well be small because each family represents all ancestral strains, while within families a high degree of variation may be predicted. This is a methodological point of importance for the study of local races, the consequences of in-or out-breeding, and genetic stability.

On these bases he could logically have little interest in the classification of races. The local intrabreeding group was his unit of analysis, and the emphasis was on discriminating hereditary contribution and environmental influences. Only when the biological histories of such groups became known would it be reasonable to arrange them in taxonomic order. This is obviously parallel to the basic principles of his treatment of the problems of culture and language.

In many ways the most fundamental of Boas' contributions was the rigor of scientific method: careful analysis, caution, and convincing demonstration.

Fashions change in anthropology; it is always more pleasant to graze in new pastures; it is far simpler to narrow to a specialty than to harass oneself with concern for the whole. Often enough we become absorbed in some minor segment, yet scientific rigor should obligate us, like Boas, to give consideration to interrelations with other aspects of culture and bodily form.

Much of Boas' legacy is now central in the corpus of beliefs of present-day anthropology, but some elements lie neglected awaiting the day when they will be the subject of renewed appreciation.