FRANZ BOAS, CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS--The Jews and Anthropology--THE CULTURE OF ETHNOPOLITICS

15 September 2017--

The Culture of Critique--

The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/chap2.pdf

It is not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,.
[i.e., the minimum number of Jews required for a communal religious service] was to be found in sociology departments; or, one did not need a sociology of Jewish life, since the two had become synonymous" (Horowitz 1993, 77).

"ethnopolitical"-- https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ethnopolitical Of or relating to the politics of race or ethnicity; involving both ethnic and political factors.

Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that ethnic conflict played a major role in the development of American anthropology. Boas’s views conflicted with the then prevalent idea that cultures had evolved in a series of developmental stages labeled savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

"the moral and political monopoly of a [gentile] elite which had justified its rule with the claim that their superior virtue was the outcome of the evolutionary process."

Boas also opposed research on human genetics—what Derek Freeman (1991, 198) terms his "obscurantist antipathy to genetics."

By 1926 every major department of anthropology (Columbia U) was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish.
According to Leslie White (1966, 26), Boas’s most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier, and Gene Weltfish. All of this "small, compact group of scholars . . . gathered about their leader" (White 1966, 26) were Jews with the exception of Kroeber, Benedict, and Mead.

NOTE: The story of Gene Weltfish will be taken up later as she gets into hot water with HUAC.

"Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charis-matic teacher and master, ‘literally worshipped’ by disciples whose ‘perma-nent loyalty’ has been ‘effectively established’ " (White 1966, 25–26).
Moreover, Boas uncritically allowed Ruth Benedict to distort his own data on the Kwakiutl (see Torrey 1992, 83).
Indeed, one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.)