Science, Race and Anthropology

Ideas and experiments

· Louis Agassiz (glaciologist??) – cold climates improve productivity … hot climates produce laziness/indolence there fore … blacks should be put to hard work.

· George Morton proposed Craniometry – measuring the volume of the skull – most important argument : the size of your head has nothing to do with your intelligence.

· Stanley Cartwright investigated illnesses – (dyaesthesia) and drapetomania (insane desire to run away).

· Eugenics: Francis Galton (Darwins cousin), Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan linked racial inferiority to culture in his book: Ancient Society.

So do genes determine intelligence?

· Herrnstein & Murray’s book: the Bell Curve says yes.

· Ashley Montagu (1999) says no: ” intelligence is a complex function of highly complex variables…intelligence is clearly a function of many genes with the environment”.

· Intelligence Quotient (IQ) TESTS – ALFRED BINET (1913) and Arthur Jensen 1969

· The main arguments were: IQ is genetically inherited. Races should be kept separate.

Early Anthropologist on Race

· In 1899 Franz Boas found that : nutrition and exercise improves social and cultural performance and increases brain size over generations. Demonstrated this in the children of immigrants in America.

· Boas and his students developed CULTURAL RELATIVISM is their study of human beings.

The Volkekunde

· Apartheid studies of ethnic groups, craniometry tests, presentations of groups as static, bounded entities.

· Cf. The Bantu Studies Journal c.a. 1930s

· David Hammond-tookes’ book Imperfect Interpreters: South African Anthropologists from 1921 – 1990