Race and other misadventures. Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu in His Ninetieth Year 1882289358

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Race and Other Misadventures Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu in His Ninetieth, Year

Larry T. Reynolds and Leonard Lieberman

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Race and Other Misadventures: Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu in His Ninetieth Year

THE REYNOLDS SERIES IN SOCIOLOGY Larry T. Reynolds, Editor by GENERAL HALL, INC.

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Race and Other Misadventures: Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu in His Ninetieth Year

Larry T. Reynolds and Leonard Lieberman Central Michigan University

General Hall, Inc. Publishers

5 Talon Way Dix Hills, New York 11746

Race and Other Misadventures: Essays in Honor of Ashley Montagu in His Ninetieth Year

GENERAL HALL, INC. 5 Talon Way Dix Hills, New York 11746

Copyright © 1996 by General Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Publisher: Ravi Mehra Composition: Graphics Division, General Hall, Inc.

LIBRARY OL CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 95-82132 ISBN: 1-882289-35-8 [cloth]

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Editors’ Introduction 1.

“The Neotenic Career of M.F. Ashley Montagu” Andrew P. Lyons

Parti Introduction Race/Racism in Historical and Cross-Cultural Context 2. 3. 4.

“An Universal Freckle” Stephen Jay Gould “Politics, Colonialism, and the Mutable Color of Pacific Islanders” Christine Ward Gailey “British Racism and Its Impact on Anglo-Irish Relations” Seamus P. Metress

5. 6.

1

“The Skull Doctors Revisited” Michael Blakey “The Politics of the Science of Race: Ashley Montagu and UNESCO’s Anti-Racist Declarations” Elazar Barkan

3

23 27 36 50 64 96

Race Deconstructed/Alternatives Proposed 7. 8.

“A Four-letter Word Called ‘Race’” C. Loring Brace “Race: The Deconstruction of a Scientific Concept” Leonard Lieberman and Larry T. Reynolds

106 142

Race/Racism in Contemporary Science/Medicine 9.

“Race, Racism and the New Physical Anthropology” Alan Goodman and George J. Armelagos

10.

“Inventing Racial Psychologies: The (Mis)uses of Evolutionary Theory and Biology” Fredric Weizman, Neil I. Wiener, David L. Wiesenthal and Michael Ziegler

11.

174

187

“Racism and Bad Pregnancy Outcomes Among African-Americans: The Case Against the Biological Concept of Race in Perinatal Epidemiology”

12.

Richard J. David and James W. Colins, Jr.

206

“Is the Human Genome Diversity Project a Racist Enterprise?” John H. Moore

217

Part II Introduction The Nature of Human Nature 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

“Man and Aggression: A Reconciliation” Robin Fox “The Culture of Violence” Jane Ritchie and James Ritchie “The Authoritative Gombe Chimpanzee Studies: A Critical Analysis” Margaret Power “The Genetic Canalization of Individual Development: Misconstrued Innateness” Gilbert Gottlieb “Social Networks and Human Survival: An Evolutionary View” Roderic Gomey “What is It Like to be a Mind? or Why a Brain is Not a Body” Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

230 233 244 260 281 299 317

Sex and Sexism 19. 20. 21.

“Sex and the Evolution of Moral Sensitivity” David Loye “Sex, Race and Nature: Anthropology and Primitive Sexuality” Harriet D. Lyons “Rediscovering Our Past, Reclaiming Our Future: A Critique of the Gendered Construction of History”

338 347

Riane Eisler

365 Denouement

22.

23.

“Can Science Answer Moral Questions?” An Appraisal of Ashley Montagu’s Philosophy” Marc Lange

378

“The Fate of the ‘Socially Dangerous Idea’ in a [De]Constructed World” Kenneth Jacobs

397

About the Editors and Authors

421

»

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION There are those who can rightfully lay claim to being a major contributor to either the core ideas of a specific discipline or to the basic stock of knowledge within one of that discipline’s specialty areas. Fewer still are those powerfully imprinting on the intellectual styles of more than one discipline or specialty area. When one searches for those among us today who have shaped the thought, research, and ethical folkways of a host of such disciplines and areas, and indeed of occupations and professions, very few are the names encountered. Such men and women are, in fact, not only few, but rare. M.F. Ashley Montagu is widely recognized as a charter member of this small, distinguished coterie. He has long been a towering, if controversial, figure among physical anthropologists, but he has also exerted an enormous influence on cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and biologists. His contributions to the genetic critique of race stand out as do his offerings to the fields of philosophy and education. He continues to impact on the literature of mental health, gender studies, child development, ‘race relations’, and gerontology. His influence then not only extends beyond the sphere of science to the humanities, but his views continue to animate public discourse. Giving up his university position in the attempt to write for and reach a larger popular audience, in a sense, made of Montagu an “academic marginal man.” Such marginality only seems to have sharpened his insights. His person and his ideas are even the subjects of progressive cartoons, his writing has laid the basis for a major motion picture and play (The Elephant Man), and he contributes to belles lettres. Ashley Montagu is the embodiment of the Renaissance person. He is the scientist, not as particularizer and detailist, but as the forceful synthesizer of a truly vast amount of apparently unrelated objects, events, and structures. His is the intellect capable of demonstrating that the “facts” hang together in a manner others had not imagined possible. The mental productions of a thinker like this render the world intelligible, and in so doing they help to make it more manageable and indeed more liveable. It is fitting that we honor such a person, and this volume intends to do just that. We could, of course, go on and on in speaking of Dr. Montagu’s wide-ranging, long-lasting career. But it would be a formidable chore to summarize the intellectual life trajectory of one who has given so very much to so very many! Happily, Andrew P. Lyons has relieved us of that task by penning a broad overview of Montagu’s diverse and important contributions. Furthermore, he has presented us with a portrait of both the intellectual milieu and “academic actors” influencing our honoree’s illustrious career. We are most grateful to Professor Lyons for his effort, because it seemed to us a most fitting way to initially introduce readers to this festschrift. Following Andrew Lyon’s overview of “The Neotenic Career of M.F. Ashley Montagu,” this volume is divided into two main parts. PART I deals with the topics of Race and Racism. It is the book’s longest and most detailed section for a reason:

1

2

Race and Other Misadventures

the demolition, deconstruction, debunking, and dismemberment of the race concept is, in our opinion, Ashley Montagu’s single greatest contribution. The issue of race is still an issue of paramount importance. Contributing to the critique of race, adding to Montagu’s analysis, and detailing “racism’s” historical and contemporary forms are eminently worthwhile endeavors. PART II is divided into three basic units. The first two, The Nature of Human Nature and Sex and Sexism, deal with topics near and dear to Dr. Montagu’s heart. He has been a major contributor to the on-going debate on the “essential character” of human beings. He has been, and probably remains, the greatest critic of the notion of an aggressive human essence. Rather, we are, in his opinion, comprised of the networking, cooperative, mutual aid “kind of stuff.” With respect to the issue of sex and sexism, at a time when the doctrine of male superiority was very much in vogue (and it may well still be), Montagu voiced his dissent. He critiqued the notion of male superiority just as he did the concept of race and the view of an aggressive human nature. We believe that these three critiques (of race, male superiority, and human aggression) constitute a very large part of what will surely be his intellectual legacy. The final section of PART II, Denouement, presents essays which are at once sympathetic and critical of M.F. Ashley Montagu. They attempt to assess the contemporary relevance of his science and his philosophy. While we do not find ourselves in wholehearted agreement with their appraisals, we appreciate the fact that they do not treat our honoree as a theoretical abstraction, a mere wooden intellect free of warts. Bringing this festschrift to fruition has been both a privilege and a pleasure. We are deeply grateful to those anthropologists, sociologists, physicians, biologists, psychologists, philosophers, historians, psychiatrists, and educators who wrote the chapters that comprise this tribute to one of contemporary society’s finest thinkers. We hope that Dr. Montagu and the rest of the readers find their efforts to be as worthwhile as we do. Larry T. Reynolds and Leonard Lieberman Mt. Pleasant, Michigan

Chapter 1 THE NEOTENIC CAREER OF M. F. ASHLEY MONTAGU Andrew P. Lyons

Three quarters of a century ago a fifteen year old boy presented himself at the door of the building occupied by the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Ashley Montagu was carrying a skull in a brown bag. A friend’s father had given him it because he had already demonstrated an interest in human palaeontology. Montagu introduced himself to Sir Arthur Keith who was Conservator of the College and the pre-eminent physical anthropologist in Britain. Keith looked at the skull, which was distinguished by a keel-like projection on top which ran from front to back. It was, he explained to Montagu, an example of the “Thames River Bed Type,” which had been described by T. H. Huxley. He invited Montagu to visit him and the Hunterian Collection on a regular basis, an offer which was gladly accepted. The two men remained friends until Keith’s death in 1955 (Montagu 1987: 40,41; 1989:personal communication). If we can understand this incident, which evokes quite conflicting sentiments, we may comprehend something important about Montagu s intellectual development and personality (of course, he may say that I’ve got it totally wrong). Montagu was interested in skulls because they were a clue to human variability through both time and space, in both the individual and the species. He was not then sure whether he was to become an alienist (psychiatrist) or a physical anthropologist. Despite his decision to choose the latter career, he was not to abandon any of his interests. It is quite remarkable that Keith should have been his first patron. Best remembered today as one of the eminent scholars who was duped by the Piltdown fraud, Keith was to become the most intellectually respectable racial determinist in Great Britain. He believed that loyalty to one’s race was a biological given, and that interracial aggression and warfare were inevitable, natural and of benefit to the species (Barkan 1992:46-53). His young protege was to emerge within adecade as a fervent opponent of racism, was to be instrumental in the deconstruction and semi-demolition of the very concept of race itself, and was to devote half-a-century to the questioning of notions of innate aggression. Montagu was one of a number of scholars who realized that the Piltdown cranium and mandible could not possibly belong to the same individual (Montagu 1951b), although he did not know that outright fraud was involved. Perhaps the continuing friendship of the two was evidence that Montagu rather than Keith is right about human aggression! A Preliminary Overview It is so very difficult to summarize the work of someone who has contributed so much to so many fields. The stem craniologist is also a humorist, a historian of science, a cultural anthropologist, a popular writer and a contributor to belles lettres.

4

Race and Other Misadventures

Any modern scholar who dismisses Ashley Montagu as a mere popularizer, and some assuredly do, is quite simply ignorant. A survey of his output in the 20 years when he became established in physical anthropology should quickly disabuse such doubters. One of his earliest works was a comparison of the pterion in different members of the primate order, an article which occupied some 180 pages of HrdliCka’s American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The pterion is an area on each side of the brain-case in which are arranged the sutures separating the frontal, parietal, temporal and sphenoid bones. Commonly, but not always, among hominids there is an articulation between the sphenoid and parietal bones at the pterion. A frontal-temporal articulation is usually found among chimpanzees and gorillas. On the basis of his comparison Montagu was able to make some informed observations about the relationship between humans, the various apes and other members of the primate order (Montagu 1933). The precise status of Neanderthals in human evolution is a matter of continuing speculation. Montagu dismissed as invalid the opinions of those who saw S wanscombe and Fontechevade as Neanderthaloid, affirming their position as generalized forms which, apart from the thickness of the cranial bone, resemble modem Homo sapiens more than they do their more immediate, presumed descendants, the Classic Nean¬ derthals (Montagu, 1955b). Montagu’s contributions to the history of science include a paper on Vesalius (Montagu 1955c), and a series of writings concerning the history of encounters, fictional, putative or real between explorers and the great apes (Montagu 1940), as well as the understandings and misunderstandings of our relationship to them. His biography of Edward Tyson, the anatomist who dissected an ‘orang-outang’ (which was in fact a chimpanzee) was one outcome of the latter project (Montagu 1943). Tyson’s errors were at least inspired and original, given the context of his times. Much of Montagu’s career has been devoted to the repudiation of serious and less excusable contemporary errors and foibles. His work on “race” and “innate aggres¬ sion” is part of this mission. Some minor essays have been devoted to lesser foibles such as the alleged discovery of apes in South America (Montagu 1929b) and the biological tall stories which convinced the readers of R. M. Zingg that two Indian girls had really been raised by wolves (Montagu 1943b; 1957b:240-245). Even when he is not writing science, most of Montagu’s lighter and more humorous writings have an all too serious purpose. Up the Ivy (1966), written under the pseudonym, Academicus Mentor, is allegedly an updated version of Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica. It is a satirical guide to academic life, a warning by an old hand to unschooled assistant professors, who must learn much about syco¬ phancy, hypocrisy and incompetence. While the tone of the satire is gentle, one can well understand why Montagu found scholarly production and thinking irreconcil¬ able with continuance in an academic institution. Most of Montagu’s writings are expressions of a particular vision of anthropology and the human sciences. Because he sees culture as a complex mechanism which answers to the biological needs of the individual and the group, and because he wishes to avoid any simplistic form of biological, or for that matter culturological reductionism, Montagu believes that physical and cultural anthropology must remain part of the same discipline. In a paper which he wrote with the late Theodosius Dobzhansky,

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

5

Montagu observed that all humans possessed a unique, species-specific characteris¬ tic, a “genetically controlled plasticity of mental traits” (Montagu and Dobzhansky 1957:119). This plasticity,a product of natural selection, has enabled humanity to develop remarkable intelligence and social skills: “As far as his physical responses to the world are concerned, he is almost wholly emancipated from dependence upon inherited biological dispositions, uniquely improving upon the latter by the process of learning that which his social heredity (culture) makes available to him” (1957: 116). If individualistic competition and aggression were the biological norm, cultural advances might not have occurred. Co-operation and dependence are more effective as survival devices in a biological as well as a social sense. Given Montagu’s friendship with many members of the so-called Culture and Personality school and his acquaintance with many psychoanalysts and psycholo¬ gists who were interested in early childhood, his increasing focus on the mother-child bond over the last forty years is hardly surprising. It is a fact that prolonged infantile dependency is linked to the human learning capacity, inasmuch as babies are bom when their bodies are immature and the brain, although proportionately very large, is only a quarter of its full size. Montagu has stressed the dangers of maternal malnutrition, stress and social deprivation to the unborn infant, and has used other researchers’ data to develop such concepts as sociogenic brain damage (Montagu 1972,1977a). Good mothering, breastfeeding, happy families and gentle correction rather than corporal punishment are factors which encourage the infant’s develop¬ ment. Individuals so raised will not be aggressive; contrary to Freud, Montagu believes that aggression is not innate but arises rather from frustrated object relations. All aspects of education should be aimed at encouraging the child’s playfulness and inventiveness, which are part of our neotenous, evolutionary heritage. Montagu’s opinions concerning women have been more than a little controver¬ sial. Because of their greater longevity, the lower mortality of female fetuses, their more valuable role in the perpetuation of the species and their somewhat superior intellect women are naturally superior to men (Montagu 1953; Town Meeting 1953).He would vigorously deny having in any way written or proclaimed that the kitchen and the nursery are the inevitable outcome of female destiny, but some of his critics may perhaps be excused their misreading of him, inasmuch as superficially similar arguments might be employed by others with a less benign purpose. Now that this cursory but necessary review is complete, it behoves us to examine some of the intellectual milieu and circumstances which influenced Montagu’s intellectual career. Influential Encounters In the couple of years following his initial encounter with Sir Arthur Keith, Ashley Montagu had acquired a considerable knowlege of human anatomy, performed dissections with two friends who were medical students, and had read intensively and widely. His readings included as many books by and about Friedrich Nietzsche as he could find, John Stuart Mill’s writings and a particularly influential work, Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. At this point he lost his religious faith.

6

Race and Other Misadventures

In the autumn of 1922, when he was just seventeen years old, Montagu went up to University College, London, as a student of psychology and anthropology. His teachers in psychology included Charles Spearman and Karl Pearson. He quickly established a good relationship with Pearson, whom he describes as “the very essence of a professor (Montagu: personal communication).” As the intellectual heir of Francis Galton, Pearson made considerable advances in biometrics, the statistical study of phenotypical traits and performance in human populations. In his younger days he had been a socialist and a friend of Olive Schreiner’s. Later in life he became a friend of Margaret Sanger, the American socialist and birth control pioneer. In those days, opinions which we would still regard as progressive often went along with others which we might consider retrograde. Pearson was the leading eugenicist of his day; other followers of this dismal agenda for “race betterment” included Shaw, the Webbs and Havelock Ellis. This group was more than a little tarred with the brush of antisemitism, and Pearson was particularly worried about the racial and cultural effects of increased Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe (See Lyons and Lyons 1983). Despite his personal beliefs, his intellectual entourage included a number of Jewish scholars. In those days all students who took courses in the biology department at University College were required to undergo an anthropometric examination. It was noted that Montagu had a rather large external occipital protuberance. Accordingly, Pearson, a strong hereditarian, asked Montagu to conduct a study of his own family so that he could observe the distribution of this trait. On one occasion Pearson requested an unusual service of Montagu. Raymond Pearl from Johns Hopkins was due to lecture on alcoholism, and it was feared that his lecture would be disrupted by teetotalers. Montagu who was captain of the boxing club was asked to act as a bouncer! (Montagu:personal communication) Just as an understanding of biometric techniques aided Boas in his critique of racial formalism, so too were Montagu’s advances in physical anthropology, includ¬ ing his assault on racism and hereditarianism, abetted by the strong grasp of statistics and biometrics which he had acquired with Pearson’s help. He could use them to trace the flaws in arguments about race and intelligence as well as the heritability of supposed criminal traits (see Montagu 1940b). The anthropologists at University College were Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and William John Perry. Today they constitute a somewhat bizarre footnote in the history of anthropology; together they constituted the hyperdiffusionist or pan-Egyptian school. They claimed that all the accomplishments of the early civilizations could be traced to Egypt. Megalithic monuments, the worship of the sun, divine kingship, tattooing and circumcision had all alike spread from there (see Lyons 1984).They attributed only the smallest of roles to independent invention in the development of culture. Elliot Smith, it should be noted, was also one of the major players in the Piltdown affair. Montagu still has contempt for Elliot Smith. He took a course in physical anthropology which was ostensibly taught by Elliot Smith. The actual work was done by a young and somewhat untrained demonstrator. Elliot Smith was conspicuous by his absence. The medical students referred to him as “pink and pompous” (Montagu: personal communication).

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

7

Montagu quickly discovered that he knew more about the human skull than Elliot Smith and some of his colleagues. His knowledge of their amateurism led him to doubt their analysis of Piltdown; he was to discover terrible mistakes in their account of the cranium. There was a more cordial relationship with the younger pan-Egyptianist, Perry. Montagu was not prepared to accept hyperdiffusionism, but he did accept Perry’s recommendation that he take a seminar in social anthropology at the London School of Economics with Bronislaw Malinowski. That seminar proved to be a critical experience. Montagu may have been Malinowski’s first seminar student. Evans-Pritchard and Firth arrived shortly afterwards. The seminar had the occasional distinguished visitor. From time to time Edward Westermarck, the Finnish sociologist who was Malinowski’s teacher, would drop into the room and talk (see Montagu 1982). It is most unfortunate that the only knowledge most contemporary anthropolo¬ gists possess about Westermarck comes from the garbled summaries of his theories about the incest taboo which are found in several poor textbooks. Westermarck more than any other scholar worked to destroy some of the myths of primitive sexuality current in his day, albeit he added a few errors of his own. In The History of Human Marriage (1901), Westermarck used the comparative method to cast doubt on assertions that primitive promiscuity was universal. Although he believed that there had been some evolution in ethical standards, he nonetheless was inclined to favour a position which was radically relativist by the standards of his day. He asserted that the nuclear family in some form was universal, and that the forms in which it was manifested were culturally constructed on biological foundations which were part of the human inheritance from the primate order. He was a Darwinist but not a social Darwinist. His influence on his student, Malinowski, was considerable. Thus, both directly and indirectly, he was an exemplar for Montagu who still admires him (Montagu 1982). An unwavering loyalty has characterized Ashley Montagu’s relationship with Malinowski. Both men were blessed with a strong sense of humour and a practical understanding of irony. One suspects,indeed knows, given the furor which erupted after the publication of Malinowski’s diary, that Malinowski’s ironical sense has perpetually damaged his reputation. In the twentieth century irony is becoming a lost art. He was given to making jocular references to his students’ religion. Montagu believes that Evans-Pritchard’s later antagonism towards him may have stemmed in part from a few such remarks (personal communication). Montagu insists that Malinowski was a confirmed anti-racist and not in the least anti-Semitic. Malinowski’s own notes in the Stirling Library reveal that he was strongly opposed to doctrines of Nordic race supremacy but was sceptical about some of the positions taken by Boas and his group on racial equality (Lyons and Lyons 1986). He did teach his students to question and, where necessary, to refute the racist or merely ethnocentric notions about the primitive which were current at the time. Accordingly he asked his new student, Ashley Montagu, to write a seminar paper on Levy-Bruhl’s theory of primitive mentality. The position which Levy-Bruhl took in his writings, that the primitive is a virtual captive of mystical collective representations, was foreign to Malinowski’s experi¬ ence. Fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands had convinced Malinowski that commonsense

8

Race and Other Misadventures

knowledge, magic and religion all had a role to play in the life of primitives. Magic and religion played a role when commonsense knowledge was inadequate to the task. Accordingly, to portray primitives as solely mystical was to distort reality. The paper which Montagu (1929a) wrote earned his teacher s approval. What is more important here is that Montagu claims that this particular assignment stimulated his interest in racism as an anthropological issue. When Malinowski was attacked, Montagu was ready to defend him. Our analysis of Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines (1937) will show why he felt it necessary to defend Malinowski’s assertion that the Trobrianders were ignorant of physiological paternity. When Malinowski was overly unfair to an opponent, Montagu was keen to mediate. Robert Briffault, who supposedly revived matriarchal theory in The Mothers, aroused his admiration because of his humane and moderate feminism and socialism, and also because of his considerable learning. Although he was not prepared to lend support to any of Briffault’s more untenable assertions, Montagu felt that the amateur scholar from the Channel Islands was a much misunderstood and maligned figure whose error was to state in an exaggerated fashion the indisputable fact that women were given greater respect and accorded more rights in many primitive societies than in our own. He accordingly arranged a friendly meeting between Briffault and Malinowski (Montagu 1956a). Montagu’s vision of a unified science of anthropology may, in part, be a consequence of Malinowski’s teaching, which reinforced his own inclinations. In A Scientific Theory of Culture, published posthumously (1944), Malinowski explained that social institutions responded to the biological needs of individual humans. “Metabolism,” for instance, is listed as one basic need: Thus the entry metabolism means that the processes of food intake, digestion, the collateral secretions, the absorption of nutritive sub¬ stances, and rejection of waste matter are related in several ways to environmental factors and the interaction between the organism and the outside world,an interaction culturally framed (Malinowski 1944:91). Malinowski (1944:94) felt that his notion of an organized routine of satisfactions and of culturally framed interactions was a way of reconciling culture with biology without resort to biological determinism. Montagu acknowledges that Malinowski’s theory of needs, as well as the somewhat similar ideas of Maslow, are of much importance to him. One is not clear as to precisely when Malinowski developed his theory of needs, but one does know that intellectual contact between him and his favourite students was continual. Mainstream social anthropology in Great Britain was to follow Radcliffe-Brown more than Malinowski. Accordingly, it was to make no gesture toward biology. Perhaps that gesture was no more than a nod on Malinowski’s part, but Ashley Montagu was equipped to take the program one stage further, and he did so. It might be assumed that Montagu was particularly close to Boas, given that his work on race might well appear to be a logical progression from and outcome of the researches of such members of the Boasian school as Herskovits, Klineberg, Benedict, Efron and Boas himself. There is no doubt about the intellectual debt, but the difference in age between the two scholars was nearly fifty years, and the relationship between them was not particularly easy (Montagu: personal communication).

The Neotenic Career of M. F. Ashley Montagu

9

The first encounter took place early in 1928, and caftie about as a result of Montagu’s decision to emigrate to the USA. He had become frustrated both personally and politically in England: he was distressed by the crushing of the 1926 General Strike and was concerned about his career opportunities. He had obtained a position as Honorary Research Associate at the British Museum of Natural History, where it took six forms and a six months’ wait to obtain a pair of callipers. Boas informed him that he could teach him little that was new in the way of statistical methods, but that he was welcome to attend lectures at Columbia. Because his initial visa was only a temporary one, Montagu returned to Europe. After a brief sojourn in Florence, where he taught in a private school for American girls, Montagu took up a position as Curator at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, a job which had been secured for him by Sir Arthur Keith. In 1931 he became Director of the Division of Child Growth and Development at New York University and stayed there for seven years before moving to Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. During his first few years at NYU, he attended some of Margaret Mead’s lectures on sex and temperament. He was being drawn into the movement which is now known as Culture and Personality. This was hardly a surprising step for a Malinowski student. Unlike RadcliffeBrown, who was the object of considerable dislike, Malinowski was much admired by many of Boas’ students who were aware of the convergence between their own opinions and those of the author of Sex and Repression and The Sexual Life of Savages. The sentiment was reciprocated despite Malinowski’s private tendency to refer to some opinions which he considered extreme as “Boasinine.” In 1934 Montagu, who was already publishing work in dental journals as well as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, decided formally to enroll as a doctoral student at Columbia, but in cultural not physical anthropology. His thesis was to become his first major book, Coming into Being Among the Australian Aborigines (1937). Boas felt that the thesis was too long, and that it neglected the emotions. He accordingly requested some changes. Benedict and Maclver were supposed to re-read the thesis. They did not do so, and a substantially unchanged manuscript was judged worthy of the degree. At this time concern was growing among Boas and his students as to the best way of combatting Nazi race doctrines and the totalitarian threat to academic freedom. Montagu, as we shall see, was to emerge as a key player in these events. Before this part of our discussion is concluded, it should be noted that Montagu never met the individual whom he once considered to be “the greatest man alive,” Havelock Ellis. Although he lived very close to Ellis for a while, he was too shy to introduce himself to the reclusive scholar. He read everything Ellis wrote, and admired hi m for his work in liberating the discussion of human sexuality. Very unlike Montagu, Ellis was a believer in eugenics, a strong hereditarian whose work in criminal anthropology closely followed Lombroso, and a mild racist (See Grosskurth 1980, Lyons and Lyons 1986). However, there are some aspects of his moderate feminism as well as his outline of a concept resembling neoteny which anticipate Montagu. In Man and Woman (1894) and The Task of Social Hygiene (1912), Ellis expressed his support for female emancipation. He believed that the mean intelli-

10

Race and Other Misadventures

gence of women was similar to that of men, but that there was more clustering around the middle, fewer geniuses and fewer morons. He felt that patriarchal institutions had prevented women from being sexual subjects. Economic and political rights should be accorded to women not merely as a matter of justice but also in order that women might best fulfdl their potential as wives and mothers. Good motherhood was an essential part of an eugenics program. Ellis was disturbed by the more outspoken English suffragettes whose agenda was primarily political; he endorsed the early cultural feminism of Helene Stocker and Ellen Key who wished to reform marriage but maintain a separate sphere of social action for women. Ellis noted that in some ways women were more evolved than men. The prolongation of infancy in both physical form and behaviour is a human evolutionary characteristic. Baby apes resemble human infants; the adults of both species are in a sense “throwbacks.” Significantly, women, hairless and more gracile in form, are more paedomorphic than men (Ellis 1894). Accordingly, Ellis is one of the scholars whom Montagu (1989: 211,212) credits with the discovery of neoteny. In correspondence Ellis also observed that aggression was not innate in humans, and that the institution of war was a cultural product which had developed at some time in prehistory (Grosskurth 1980: 381). Ellis was the very model of a scientific writer who could write both for a professional and a popular audience. He also wrote literary criticism and belles lettres. He never occupied a position in the academy. Montagu who, as we have noted, gave up his permanent position in order to concentrate on writing and popular communication, took on Ellis’ mantle and stepped into his shoes.

Race Montagu’s 1940 paper (Montagu 1942b) and 1941 lecture effectively critiqued, and at very least, began the demolition of that concept of race which had been prevalent in physical anthropology since its birth. That is a fact of which many physical anthropologists and a majority of supposedly intelligent laymen are unaware to this day (Lieberman 1991). The demolition was completed by a scientific analysis which put the biological notion of animal subspecies in question. Nonetheless, at the time Montagu presented his findings, they were greeted with scepticism by many influen¬ tial colleagues. The reason for that scepticism was the reason why Boas had had so little success mobilizing physical anthropologists and the scientific community in general against Nazi racism. Not only were most physical anthropologists committed to a biologi¬ cally unsound view of human taxonomy, many prominent scholars were covertly or overtly racist. The overt racists included C. B. Davenport, E. M. East and William Holmes. Some scholars who publicly opposed racial prejudice privately entertained other opinions: the biometrician Raymond Pearl lamented that the American Academy had become a home for “incurable Hebrews” (Barkan 1992:218); Earnest Hooton of Harvard wrote to Madison Grant in 1933 expressing, “basic sympathy for you in your opposition to the flooding of the country by alien scum” (Barkan:313). In a trio of

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

11

books produced at the end of the 1930s, Hooton warned America that its social fibre was threatened by an internal enemy, a degenerate criminal class with biologically atavistic features. Montagu’s analysis of Hooton’s absurd arguments and statistical ‘proofs’ is both caustic and funny (Montagu 1940b). Yet, it was the very same Hooton who, on Sapir’s request, presented a resolution against the Nazi classification of race at the 1938 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. It was defeated. Its opponents argued that Germany was a friendly power. However, a similar motion was passed unanimously a year later. A time-honoured tactic was used to frustrate the motion introduced by Ashley Montagu at the 1939 meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropology: it was referred to a subcommittee which never reported (Barkan: 339). Many scholars still believed that there existed entities or groups called “races” which shared a common ancestry and in which certain physical and mental charac¬ teristics persisted from generation to generation. It was assumed that many races were no longer pure, but it was also assumed that in a more isolated and insular past they had been much purer. Many of the physical characteristics employed in racial classification were relatively unchanged from those used by the raciologists of the mid-nineteenth century: hair colour and hair shape, the cephalic index, cranial size, stature and skin colour. The tools of psychometrics and biometric methodology could now be utilized by raciologists. A connection between physical type and intelligence was still assumed by many. While there was some degree of consensus about the identity of larger, geographical races such as the Negroid and the Caucasian and the Mongoloid, there was outright confusion when attempts were made to classify smaller, national populations or supposed racial groups which, if they ever existed, were disguised social classes. One might agree that Nordics were tall, blond and dolichocephalic, and then lament the lack of pure specimens in a supposedly Nordic population; it was quite possible for siblings to be assigned to different races on the grounds of head shape. A tradition of confusion ran from Nott and Gliddon in the 1850s to Dixon in the 1920s. At this time Davenport added a new confusion, a misapplied Mendelian mythology, insisting that certain populations were character¬ ized by dominant genes for nomadism and musicality. In 1938 a revised edition of Boas’ The Mind of Primitive Man appeared. With respect to race it advanced the following arguments: (1) Variability between family lines as well as within populations is usually greater than variability between populations; (2) The criteria used to separate races were often geographical or political rather than biological; (3) In any case the choice of some physical criteria was quite arbitrary - it could not always be shown that they were of any evolutionary significance; (4) When comparing supposed racial groups one should look not only at the means for certain traits which in themselves were sometimes uninformative but also at the variability of the trait within the group - biometrics would make classification much more difficult; (5) In view of the above-mentioned factors, it was possible to classify humans into major, geographical races, but not into subraces;

12

Race and Other Misadventures

(6) There were small differences only in cranial size between the major races, a weak correlation only between cranial size and intelligence and no clear evidence of racial differences in intelligence. Boas’ students, including Montagu, accepted the above positions which were the consequence of a fifty-year movement by him from hereditarianism to anti-racism. Furthermore,they did their own work: although he is best known for his research on African survivals in Afro-American culture, Herskovits (1930) began his career with anthropometric research on American black populations, and was unable to find any stigmata of racial inferiority; Klineberg (1935:185) showed that the performance of black schoolchildren in Harlem on intelligence tests was positively correlated with length of residency in New York City; David Efron (1941,1972) showed that gestures were culturally determined and could not be attributed to race; Ruth Benedict wrote Race, Science and Politics (1940,1943) for intelligent lay persons, and with Gene Weltfish wrote an anti-racist pamphlet for the military in World War II (its distribu¬ tion to the armed services was suppressed by the House Military Affairs Committee). Montagu did something different. He added concepts and data from the new science of genetics to the critique of race. This was a step Boas could not take because he was unprepared seriously to entertain Mendelian ideas. The so-called “new synthesis” of Darwin and Mendel had been developed by a number of British scholars including Fisher, Haldane, Hogben and Julian Huxley during the 1930s. Its implications for physical anthropology were partially realized in a book which attempted to demonstrate the intellectual folly of Nazi racism to the intelligent lay public. We Europeans (1936) was written by Julian Huxley, Alfred Cort Haddon and A. M. Carr-Saunders. Its authors advanced the same arguments as Boas concerning variability within rather than between groups, and noted that few studies had addressed that issue. They noted that, if physical difference were addressed with respect to Mendelian genotype rather than selected aspects of phenotype, the issue of classification became more complex than ever. Some phenotypical traits were polygenic, the result of interaction between several genes. Accordingly, so-called racial crossing involved something more complex than the blending of simple, phenotypical traits. Furthermore, the human species was charac¬ terized by constant genetic change and gene flow, dynamic processes which should not be misrepresented by static classifications. Their suggestion that “race” be replaced by “ethnic group” was one which had immediate appeal for Ashley Montagu (see Montagu 1962 and 1965). Like Huxley, for Montagu “ethnic group” remains primarily biological rather than sociological in its reference, but it does not refer to a biological division of the species. The scientific clarity and effectiveness of We Europeans was a little marred by certain inconsistencies not unconnected with the personal history of its authors. Huxley had once believed in the biological inferiority of Negroes (Barkan 1992:244). The octogenarian Haddon felt that he had been dragooned by Huxley into co¬ authoring a radical document, and expressed his regrets in a letter to the Canadian, Ruggles Gates who was a fascist sympathizer (Barkan:303). Accordingly, although the authors proclaimed that there were no longer pure races, because of genetic mutations and gene flow, they occasionally implied that such races had existed in the past. They still felt they could use the term “subspecies” to refer to major, geographi-

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

13

cal races, and that it was possible to use the expression, ^minor subspecies” for divisions of the above. Furthermore, the authors were still wary of the effects of intermixture between members of primary subspecies, and indicated approval of the white Australia policy (Barkan: 299,301). Montagu’s 1941 address to AAPA, “The Concept of Race in the Human Species in the Light of Genetics,” is a systematic application of the new synthesis to human biological variation, which casts aside the baggage and detritus which still accompa¬ nied Huxley and his co-authors. Like much good science, it is characterized by much humility. Its key point was that, “any conception of race which operates as if inheritance were a matter of the transmission of gross aggregates of characters is meaningless” (Montagu 1942:246). Unfortunately, such was invariably the case with racial taxonomies both before and after Darwin. They were based on a few, observable, phenotypical traits which involved “a minute fraction of the great number of genes which it would actually be necessary to consider in attempting to make any real, that is to say, genetically analytic, classification of mankind” (Montagu 1942:246). Furthermore, even the observable traits, such as skin colour, were polygenic and complex. The implication of these remarks was that until many more genes were identified and until more was known about such processes as genetic mutation, gene flow and what is now called genetic drift, classification of populations would be premature and an obstacle to good research. Implicitly, Montagu’s lecture (and the 1940 paper which preceded it) was a critique of the notion of subspecies as applied not only to human but to all mobile, animal populations. In zoology, similar arguments were being advanced by some other scholars at this time or shortly afterwards (See Ehrlich and Holm 1969:167). We note that in this case the deconstruction of the notion of race was accomplished on scientific, not merely political, grounds. Neutrality on political issues was, of course, hardly possible. In the same year that Montagu addressed the AAPA, the American forces were to enter a war against Nazi racism with an army whose wounded were treated with blood transfusions from a segregated supply. Over the years the battles have been continual. In 1944 Montagu published a paper in which he provided full documentation for his side of a festering controversy over the interpretation of the Alpha and Beta Tests administered to U.S. Army recruits in the First World War. In the 1920s Carl Brigham and Lewis Terman had interpreted the results as proof of the superiority of the Nordic race and the intellectual inferiority of the Negro race; their critics, including Otto Klineberg (1935), had noted that Northern blacks performed worse on the tests than Northern whites, but Southern whites finished behind both Northern groups (See Gossett 1965: 373-377; 493). Montagu’s paper was the first to analyze the median scores for recruits of both races from all the reporting states that were analyzed. He concluded that performance of both groups on both sets of tests was closely linked to socioeconomic status (Montagu 1944). Unfortunately, the question of the alleged inferiority of black intelligence has resurfaced frequently. This has happened despite the conviction of a majority of contemporary educational psychologists that “intelligence” is a reification of several distinct abilities, that it is impossible to discriminate between the roles played by nature or nurture in “intelligence,” and lastly that I.Q. tests measure performance,

14

Race and Other Misadventures

which is affected by several social factors, and cannot therefore assess ability in any direct fashion. Montagu has fought the battle in legal, medical and psychological journals, in the medical press and in the courts. In 1948 his opponent was Henry Garrett, the Chairman of Columbia’s Psychology Department and a supporter of segregation (Montagu 1948). In 1956, he produced a short article for the Harvard Law Record refuting the claims of a Professor F.C.J. McGurk who had resurrected the old army tests. In the 1960s his opponents included the National Review columnist and New York University sociology professor, Ernest van den Haag, and a University of Chicago physiologist, Dwight Ingle (Montagu 1969). More recently his opponents have included Arthur Jensen and the late William B. Shockley of Stanford University. When Shockley sued The Atlanta Constitution, because it compared his proposals for the voluntary sterilization of the intellectually and biologically “unfit,” including 85 percent of American blacks, to the genetic experiments of the Nazis, Montagu was called as an expert witness for the defence. His witty and scathing comments caused uproar in the courtroom: “Had Mozart been bom to a blacksmith, there would never have been a Mozart, just a blacksmith named Mozart” (Washington Post, September 12th, 1984). Montagu was the rapporteur, the chief organizer of the UNESCO Statement on Race, on which he has published a commentary (Montagu 1951 and 1972). Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race went through five editions between 1942 and 1974. His edited volume, The Concept of Race (1964 and 1969) is still the best treatment of the subject. Race, Science and Humanity (Montagu 1963) is an important compilation of papers which originally appeared between 1941 and 1961. In academic discussions of the causes of racial prejudice and discrimination, Montagu has offered both psychological and sociological explanations, conforming on occasions to the predilections of his audience. He has, some might argue, attributed the child’s development of out-group prejudice to dysfunction, that is to say frustration in object relations within the child’s family (Montagu 1946). In other words, racial prejudice is a particular form of aggression consequent to the rejection or denial of love. He has also described racism as the product of an ossified class system which has many of the attributes of caste. He has correctly criticised scholars, including Oliver Cromwell Cox, who have insisted that the concept of caste should pertain only to the particular social circumstances which exist in India (Montagu 1947). ' It is most unfortunate that several historians who have discussed the rise and fall of the race concept have slighted Ashley Montagu. As Stevan Hamad (1980:535) has justly remarked, “his principal legacy will indisputably consist of his critical analysis of the concept of race.”

On Human Nature, Nurture and Gender In Montagu s opinion, Charles Darwin, “bequeathed to the world a fragmentary, a partial, an incomplete truth” (1952:99). Darwin’s theory of natural selection stressed competition at the expense of cooperation. It was based on a somewhat dismal view

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

15

of human as well as animal nature. Pessimism has indeed characterized western views of human nature over the last two thousand years with but a few obvious exceptions, such as Rousseau. Montagu views the doctrines of Malthus and Darwin as an influential variant on ideas also advanced by St. Paul, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud. Original Sin, the war of all against all, human nature red in tooth and claw, the conflicts in the primal horde are alike expressions of the adage, homo homini lupus. Montagu (1955a) notes that the sole evidence in favour of this proposition is, so-to-speak, ex post facto and circumstantial - the catalogue of recent human history, events for which other explanations might be advanced. Competition and conflict, however, are not the whole story. The Russian anarchist Pyotr (Peter) Kropotkin modified the Darwinian theory of natural selection in Mutual Aid (1902), emphasizing the value of co-operation in both human and animal communities as an aid to survival. Montagu is particularly fond of citing this work (see Montagu 1952: 34, 39-42). In his view, social behaviour is a consequence of reproduction and the tie between animals and their offspring. There is a close tie between sociability and reproductive fitness, particularly but not exclusively in the higher mammals. The bond which determines the wellbeing of the human individual links the mother with the child. If all goes well, the individual will be physically healthy and well-adjusted; aggression, conflict and ill-health are the result of poor bonding. Montagu acknowledges a debt to psychologists such as Bowlby and psychoanalysts such as Maslow. Cultures differ in the ways in which children are cradled and physically stimulated,fed, weaned, loved and corrected. Consequently, they differ in the degree they express and tolerate aggression. In Montagu’s opinion, love and sociability, rather than aggression are innate; this was his response to Ardrey and Lorenz. Educability and plasticity are human survival traits; that is why aggression can be eliminated (Montagu 1955a,1968,1976,1978). Let it be noted that these cultural theories depend upon an irreducible biological residue, the mother-child bond and co-operation as a survival device. Accordingly, Montagu described himself as a sociobiologist or social biologist before “sociobiol¬ ogy” was invented in the 1970s. Montagu is aware that such notions as reciprocal altruism and kin selection echo, in part, some of his own views, but he is impatient of some of the work in this new subdiscipline, which neglects cultural variation, endorses a crude hereditarianism, and reduces both family relations and genetics to the equivalent of a Monopoly game. He accordingly edited a collection of papers which intelligently criticised the supposed new synthesis of biological and social science (Montagu 1980). Montagu’ s well-known work on mothering, given its most popular expression in such books as The Natural Superiority of Women and Touching, has its basis therefore in his modification of Darwinian premises in such scholarly works as Darwin: Competition and Cooperation. Mothering, it should be stressed, begins before the child is bom. Poor diet, smoking, the ingestion of drugs, nervous stress, hypertension are but a few of the factors which adversely affect the health of the fetus and neonate (Montagu 1950,1972,1974). Interventionist delivery techniques, bottle feeding and a lack of tactile stimulation have an adverse effect on the neonate and infant (Montagu 1977b).

16

Race and Other Misadventures

A considerable amount of pathology, in Montagu’s view, is evident in childrearing in some western countries. The culture as a whole discourages tactile stimulation, unlike other cultures such as the San of Southern Africa. In Touching: The Human Significance of Skin (1986), Montagu condemns the experts of an earlier generation, men such as Dr. Luther Emmett Holt and the behaviorist, J.B. Watson, who warned parents not to hug and kiss their children. In his view, incalculable mental and emotional damage has resulted from the inhumane treatment advocated by such men. There were too many conditioned to accept their advice. Men, less nurturant, more competitive and individualistic, are the lesser gender, rightly jealous of women’s reproductive power. Such an argument has appeared to be double-edged: if something is wrong with America’s children, must women, and perhaps feminists, in particular, bear a disproportionate amount of blame? Montagu certainly disapproves of those feminists who believe that women should embrace a competitive, individualistic ethos. However, he has made it clear that he regards anti¬ feminism as equivalent to racism (Montagu 1946b). It was no wonder, he informed the readers of Psychiatry, that there have been few great women scientists, when so few females (perhaps 1 % at that time) were employed as instructors in American colleges: “The pattern of the anti-feminist argument is identical with that of the racist argument. Deny a particular group equality of opportunity, and then assert that because that group has not achieved as much as the groups enjoying complete freedom of opportunity it is obviously inferior and can never do as well” (Montagu 1946b: 70). He has also expressed the opinion that children of two-career couples do better than children of families where the father alone works (Town Meeting, April 24th, 1953).

Primitive Nescience and Adolescent Sterility Montagu’s first book was Coming into Being Among the Australian Aborigines (1937), although he wrote his first draft of The Natural Superiority of Women when he was twenty years old. The book came at the end of a decade-long controversy over Malinowski’s claim that the Trobrianders were ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity, which in turn continued a controversy which Baldwin Spencer, Andrew Lang, Sir James Frazer, Sidney Hartland and others had initiated concerning Australian aborigines’ knowledge or ignorance of the facts of life. These debates in turn owed their origin to the evolutionary speculations of J.F. McLennan. In 1966, the controversy was renewed in Sir Edmund Leach’s Henry Myers Lecture on “Virgin Birth.” Leach castigated the ancestral figures of anthropology for their racist, class-bound and paternalistic assumptions. A primitive world, in which ignorance of physiological paternity coincided with primitive promiscuity, matrilineal descent and totemism, was a projection of the psyche of the evolutionary anthropolo¬ gist, not an ethnographic fact. Malinowski, remarks Leach, initially accepted Hartland’s views concerning primitive ignorance. Although he denied the existence of a primitive state of promiscuity, he appeared to apply a modified version of Hartland’s views to his Trobriand data. Malinowski, remarks Leach, needed to believe in the primitivity of

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

17

the Trobrianders in order to justify his own paternalistic and dolonialist assumptions: “The ignorance of the Trobrianders was a necessary element in their continuing primitiveness” (Leach 1969:101). Leach further argues that supporters of the idea of primitive ignorance, and here he includes Montagu, accept the flimsiest evidence to support their constructions, while excluding ethnographic evidence pointing to Australian aboriginal knowledge of physiological paternity as the contaminated product of culture contact (Leach: 118). One does not wish to enter this debate, but, given that Leach essentially accused Montagu of doing the very opposite of what he has done the rest of his life, it is perhaps fair to set the record straight. For his part, Montagu has responded to the attack only indirectly; he alludes to it briefly in the second edition of Coming into Being, and may perhaps be construed as giving a reply in the form of some republished and re-edited essays which appeared in the volume Sex, Man and Society (1969). Significantly, Montagu employs the word, “nescience,” in the place of “igno¬ rance.” What does “nescience” denote or perhaps connote: not having knowledge, being unaware, not seeing it as relevant to know something, not being in a condition to be informed, dismissing one’s “knowledge” as irrelevant? There is a charming ambiguity about the word, and one must confess that one is nescient as to its meaning. What factual knowledge did the Australian aborigines possess? “We found upon investigation that on the positive side there was much in the experience of the aboriginal which would tend to make possible and to support such a nescient interpretation of the facts of procreation, and on the negative side there was absolutely nothing in his experience which would in any way be incompatible with such an interpretation. The aborigines were aware that intercourse was, “a necessary factor in the production of childbirth” (Montagu 1969:217), but they saw it merely as a preparation for the visit of a spirit child. They were most certainly unaware of the precise biological significance of the sexual act. It is significant that Montagu includes an essay on the history of embryology in Sex, Man, and Society, placing it before the discussion of the Trobriand controversy. The essay’s point is made in many different ways. When Leuwenhook presented his discovery of spermatozoa to the Royal Society of London in 1677, there was incredulity as to the number of animalcules in a single ejaculate. Despite Leuwenhook’s assertion that a spermatozoon fertilized the ovum, many scientists regarded sperma¬ tozoa as parasites until 1850 (Montagu 1969:197). One could add a few more examples from Montagu’s texts or from other recent, scholarly writings, but the point is surely made. Ignorance, or nescience, is a relative matter. Andrew Lang believed that the Arunta, the locus classicus for primordial ignorance in the Australian continent, were originally aware of the facts of life, but their factual knowledge was at some point suppressed by religious dogma. Montagu responded that the separation of “facts” from “psychology” or “dogma” was artifi¬ cial; they were in fact interrelated: “Knowledge is never more than what it is socially determined to be, and if certain sense data are intellectually interpreted in a particular way, that interpretation constitutes the knowledge of such sense data” (1969:217; see also'l937: 218-226; 306-330). Ironically, such a statement owes much to Montagu’s bete noire, Levy-Bruhl and his notion of mystical participation. However, Montagu still retained a partially Malinowskian position. The Australian aborigine possesses

18

Race and Other Misadventures

some commonsense knowledge or science into which mystical notions do not intrude; where the facts are lacking or the technique inadequate and the questions are metaphysical, the mystical may assume command (see Montagu 1937:306-330) A byproduct of Montagu’s research on the nescience issue was perhaps more important to him than the original topic itself. Malinowski had noted that, despite the very considerable freedom they enjoyed, unmarried Trobriand girls very seldom became pregnant. He presumed, for obvious reasons, that they knew nothing of contraception, and confessed ignorance about any resort to abortion, albeit he suspected it happened at best infrequently (Malinowski 1929:166-168;Montagu 1957:8,9). Other ethnographers had reported similar data: Hogbin from Wogeo; Rivers from Eddy stone; Elwin on the Baiga of Central India; Barton on the Ifugao (see Montagu 1957: 9-22). Montagu was aware of some data obtained by students of primate behaviour and reproductive physiology which might explain the phenomenon. One of the most important studies had appeared in 1931. Noting that an interval of about a year separated first estrus from first conception in a colony of Rhesus monkeys, C.G. Hartman had postulated that first ovulation occurred relatively late in the develop¬ ment of the adolescent macaque (Montagu 1957:50-57). Yerkes and other scholars had made similar observations concerning the chimpanzee (1957:57-70). Pregnan¬ cies which occurred soon after first estrus were often unsuccessful, ending in miscarriage, stillbirths or maternal death. Utilizing demographic data including medical statistics from developed countries, ethnographic reports and various find¬ ings from endocrinology and obstetrics, Montagu advanced a strong case for the occurrence of a period of adolescent sterility among human populations. A book incorporating this hypothesis appeared in 1946 under the title, Adolescent Sterility, and in 1958, in revised form, as The Reproductive Development of the Female. Adolescence was a gradual rather than a sudden process, marked by endocrine instability. There was often a protracted period of adolescent sterility. Intercalating, intersecting and interweaving epistemologies, data and methodolo¬ gies from the “two cultures” (the arts and hard sciences), Ashley Montagu, a physical anthropologist with a doctorate in cultural anthropology who taught in a medical school, had assisted the birth of a new subdiscipline, medical anthropology (see also Montagu 1950a, 1950b, 1956d).

Neoteny Ashley Montagu has discussed the idea of neoteny and its applications at various times over the past forty years. The concept dates back to the fin de siecle and the first three decades of this century. Montagu’s predecessors included Louis Bolk, J.E.V. Boas, Havelock Ellis and Gavin de Beer. At first sight neoteny appears like a lookingglass image of recapitulation, an idea which some had thought to be truly buried. The recapitulationists of the nineteenth century believed that the juvenile stages of a more highly evolved individual recapitulated the adult stages of species which were ancestral to it (for example, human embryos pass through a stage where they have gills like fishes), neoteny however implies that the adult of a living species retains

The Neotenic Career of M. F. Ashley Montagu

19

phenotypical traits typical of the fetal, infantile or juvenile stages in its ancestors (Gould 1977: 3,4; Gould 1980: 63-69). The controlling concept behind both phenomena is heterochrony, “changes in the relative time of appearance and rate of development for characters already present in ancestors” (Gould 1977:2). Evolutionary change need not involve the appearance of entirely new phenotypes through genetic mutation. Rather there may be changes in the genetic “clock” which regulates the appearance of particular traits during ontogeny. The individual’s development in certain respects may be retarded, so that some traits characteristic of the adult ancestor never appear in the descendant whereas purely juvenile ancestral traits are retained into (or almost into adulthood). Con¬ versely, development may be speeded up. If one compares the face of an infant chimpanzee with that of a human infant, one notices that both are flat. They resemble each other much more than do the adult forms. The adult chimpanzee is, of course, quite prognathic with a flattened skull. The human face undergoes less change as the individual matures. A retardation in the rate of change causes paedomorphosis. Flatness of face and the absence of brow ridges are but a couple of the paedomorphic features which characterize humans. This is neotenic evolution. In humans neoteny is presumably connected to slow physical and mental maturation which renders the individual very dependent on parents and the group during infancy. The size of the brain at birth is only about a quarter of adult size (as opposed to nearly 70% in some macaques), but it is big enough to make childbirth difficult. Human neonates are in a sense bom prematurely as well as being slow to reach maturity. Prolonged dependence implies a prolonged learning process, which in turn implies that the individual is more educable and mentally malleable till a later age. The survival advantages of this adaptation are obvious (See Montagu 1956c). Montagu applied the notion of heterochrony in a novel way in his paper on “Time, Morphology and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man” (Montagu 1955b). He believes that the notion may explain the development of neanthropic forms in the last half million years. He observed that the rate of neotenic evolutionary change could well have been subject to variation, inasmuch as more or less isolated populations responded to different adaptive pressures. Solo Man, still generally believed to be later Homo erectus rather than Homo sapiens, lived in Java between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago, which is 150,000 years later than Swanscombe, tentatively assigned to the taxon, Homo sapiens, and between 10,000 to 50,000 years later than early Homo sapiens at Fontechevade. In any event, the general direction of human evolution is neotenic. The disappearance of the supraorbital torus makes us all look a bit like baby australopithecines. As for the Classic Neanderthals, Montagu regards them as a specialized development, adapted for a particular econiche. Having stressed (1956c) that the educability and malleability which are our neotenic heritage have enabled us to achieve the civilization we now enjoy, Montagu has sounded a note of warning in some recent writings (for example, Montagu 1989). He believes that our ways of raising our children and educating them in school do not encourage them to develop their neotenic potential, albeit our present ways are improved over our Victorian predecessors. We discourage imagination and creativity in order to force the young to become prematurely old and rigid, when we should be

20

Race and Other Misadventures

encouraging the elderly to “grow young.” Thus the concept of neoteny has crossed a boundary or two, from the description of anatomical to behavioral evolution, and from trait, perhaps, to trope. As an almost pastoral metaphor, neoteny has extreme power. As a discipline contemporary anthropology is too rarely neotenic. Within physical anthropology, the anatomist may find it difficult to converse with the geneticist. Within cultural anthropology, the cultural materialist regards the poststructuralist as an unfriendly extraterrestrial. Ethnography seems immersed in an endless crise de conscience, and many of the big, comparative questions it once raised have, rightly or wrongly, been set to rest. Perhaps the state of the discipline reflects an increase in understanding and moral vigour, but it could equally reflect trepidation, fear of crossing subdisciplinary boundaries and a terror of saying anything that is too new or too clear lest one be perceived as wrong. How many of one’s colleagues read more than a hundred books in all aspects of their discipline and beyond it, and write reviews of them in a single year (1938)? How many are left who read Greek and can do population genetics? The questions are not rhetorical, because progress in the sciences as well as the humanities is so often the product of the creative metaphor, the useful analytical notion which is often the consequence of interdisciplinary learning. The best honour we can do Ashley Montagu is to ensure that his example becomes a tradition.

References Cited Barkan, Elazar. 1992. The Retreat of Scientific Racism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benedict, Ruth. 1943. Race, Science and Politics. Revised Edition. New York: Viking. Chase, Allan. 1980. The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Efron, David. 1972. Gesture, Race and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. Ellis, Havelock. 1894. Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters. London: Walter Scott. -. 1912. The Task of Social Hygiene. London: Constable. Gossett, Thomas F. 1965. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Schocken. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. -. 1980. Ever Since Darwin. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Hamad, Steven. 1980. “Ashley Montagu”. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 18 (Biographical Supplement), Pp. 535-537. New York: Free Press. Herskovits, Melville. 1930. The Anthropometry of the American Negro. New York: Columbia University Press. Huxley, Julian S. and A.C. Haddon. 1935. We Europeans, A Survey of ‘Racial’ Problems. London: Jonathan Cape. Klineberg, Otto. 1935. Race Differences. New York: Harper and Brothers Leach, Sir Edmund. 1969. “Virgin Birth”. In Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. London: Jonathan Cape. Lieberman, Leonard. 1991. Address to Plenary Session on Race and Racism, American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Illinois. Lyons, Andrew. 1984. “Hamites, Cattle and Kingship”. Canadian Journal of Anthropology 4(1): 57-64. Lyons, Andrew and Harriet. 1983. “A Race or not a Race? The Question of Race in the Year of the First Universal Races Congress.” In Ethnicity, Identity and History, edited by Joseph Maier and Chaim Waxman, Pp. 147-162. New Jersey: Transaction Books.

The Neotenic Career ofM. F. Ashley Montagu

21

-. 1986. “Savage Sexuality and Secular Morality: Malinowski, Ellis’Russell.” Canadian Journal of Anthropology 5(1): 51-64. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1929. The Sexual Life ofSavages in Northwestern Melanesia. London: Routledge. -. 1960. A Scientific Theory of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Westermarck, Edward. 1901. The History of Human Marriage. Third Edition. London: Macmillan.

Books and Monographs by Ashley Montagu Cited in this Chapter 1937. Coming into Being Among the Australian Aborigines. London: Routledge. Second Edition 1974. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. 1942a. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Columbia University Press. Fifth Edition 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1943. Edward Tyson, M.D., F.R.S. (1650-1708), And the Rise of Human and Comparative Anatomy in England. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 1943, pp. 29-488. 1946a. Adolescent Sterility. Springfield, Illinois: C. C. Thomas. 1951a. Statement on Race. New York: Abelard-Schuman. Third Edition 1972. New York: Oxford University Press. 1952. Darwin, Competition and Cooperation. New York: Abelard-Schuman. 1953. The Natural Superiority of Women. New York: Macmillan. 1956a. Marriage: Past and Present. A Debate between Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ashley Montagu. Boston, Mass.: Porter Sargent. 1957a. The Reproductive Development of the Female. New York: Julian Press. 1957b. Anthropology and Human Nature. New York: Porter Sargent. 1963. Race, Science and Humanity. Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand. 1964. The Concept of Race (edited volume). New York: Free Press. 1966. Up the Ivy, by ‘Academicus Mentor.’ New York: Hawthorn. 1968. Man and Aggression (edited volume). New York: Oxford University Press. 1969. Sex, Man and Society. New York: Putnam’s. 1972. Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Harper and Row. 1976. The Nature of Human Aggression. New York: Oxford University Press. 1978. Learning Non-Aggression. New York: Oxford University Press. 1980. Sociobiology Examined. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989. Growing Young. Second Edition. Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey.

Articles, Book Chapters and Comments by Ashley Montagu Cited in this Chapter 1926. “Intelligence Tests and the Negro in America.” WASU (Journal of the West African Student Union of Great Britain) 1: 5-7. 1929a. “The Procreative Theories of Primitive Man.” The Realist 2: 87-96. 1929b. “The Discovery of a New Anthropoid Ape in South America.” The Scientific Monthly 29:275-280. 1933. “The Anthropological Significance of the Pterion in the Primates.” The American Journal of Physical Anthropology 18: 159-336. 1940a. “Knowledge of the Ape in Antiquity.” Isis 32: 87-102. 1940b. “Crime and the Anthropologist.” American Anthropologist 42: 384-408. 1941. “The Concept of Race in the Light of Genetics.” The Journal of Heredity 32: 243-247. 1942b. “The Genetical Theory of Race and Anthropological Method,” American Anthropologist 44: 369375. 1943b. “Wolf Children and Feral Man.” American Anthropologist 45: 468-472. 1944. “Are the Jews a Race?” The Chicago Jewish Forum 2: 113-117.

22

Race and Other Misadventures

1945. “Intelligence of Northern Negroes and Southern Whites in the First World War. American Journal of Psychology 58: 161-188. 1946b. “Anti-Feminism and Race Prejudice.” Psychiatry 9: 69-71.

1946c. “Racism and Social Action.” Psychiatry 9: 143-150. 1947. “The Nature of Race Relations.” Social Forces 25: 336-342. 1948. “Racial Intelligence.” The Scientific Monthly 66: 81,82. 1949. “The Origin and Nature of Social Life and The Biological Basis of Cooperation.” Horizon 19: 381— 399. 1950a. “Constitutional and Prenatal Factors in Infant and Child Health.” In Problems of Infancy and Childhood, Supplement II, pp. 1-30. New York: Joseph Macy, Jr. Foundation. 1950b. “Anthropology and Medicine.” In Research in Medical Science, D. E. Green and W. E. Knox, eds., Pp. 94-119. New York: Macmillan. 1951b. “The Piltdown Mandible and Cranium.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology n.s. 9: 1-7. 1955a. “Man and Human Nature.” American Journal of Psychiatry 112: 401-410. 1955b. “Time, Morphology and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man.” American Anthropologist 57: 13-27. 1955c. “Vesalius and the Galenists. Scientific Monthly 80: 230-239. 1956b. “Negro Educational Capacity - A Scientist’s View.” The Harvard Law Record 23, 18th October: 3-4,6. 1956c. “Neoteny and the Evolution of the Human Mind.” Explorations 6:85-90. 1962. “The Concept of Race.” American Anthropologist 64: 919-928. 1965. “On the Concept, ‘Ethnic Groups’.” Current Anthropology 6: 326. 1969. “The New Ideology of Race.” Midway, Autumn 1969: 87-101. 1972. “Sociogenic Brain Damage.” American Anthropologist 74: 1045-1061. 1977a. “Sociogenic Brain Damage.” [Revised version of Montagu 1972] in New Dimensions in Psychia¬ try, Vol. 2, Dr. Silvano Arieti and Dr. Gerard Chrzanowski, eds., Pp. 4—25. New York: John Wiley. 1977b. “Social Impacts of Unnecessary Intervention and Unnatural Surroundings in Childbirth.” In 21st Obstetrics Now,” David and Lee Stewart, eds., Pp. 589-607. Chapel Hill, N. Carolina: Napsac Publications. 1982. “Edward Westermarck: Recollections of an Old Student in Young Age.” In Edward Westermarck: Essays on his Life and Work, Timothy Stroup, ed. Acta Philosophica Fennica, Vol. 34:65-70. Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica, distributed by Akateeminen Kiijakauppa. 1987. “As if Living and Loving were One.” Free Inquiry, Summer 1987: 40-42.

Co-authored Article 1957. With Theodosius Dobzhansky. “Natural Selection and the Mental Capacities of Mankind.” Science 105: 587-590.

Radio Discussion Town Meeting. 1953. “Modem Woman: Companion or Competitor?” Town Meeting: Bulletin of America’s Town Meeting of the Air. Moderator: Gunnar Back. Discussants: Alice Thompson and Ashley Montagu. Volume 18 (49), April 24, 1953.

PARTI INTRODUCTION

“The assumption that contemporary human variation can be understood in terms of ‘racial’ variation, despite some pointed critiques,...sails on without any substantial change...” (C. Loring Brace 1982) “Biologistic theories of race no longer retain even minimal credibility.” (Howard Winant 1994) The two statements above are at serious odds with each other. One is essentially correct, Brace’s. One is clearly wrong, Winant’s! But there is one statement of Winant’s that is indeed correct. He notes that, with respect to the critique of the race concept, the “effort has not by any means been entirely completed” (1994:14). The main task of Part I of this volume is, in fact, to see to it that the critique of the concept of race is completed so that it can no longer sail on without any substantial change, not in science and hopefully not in the world at large. Ashley Montagu puts into question the biological idea of race, of subspecies of Homo sapiens, and others have elaborated on and added to his animadversions. It is indeed time to complete the critique. Several papers here focus on the race concept and add to the critique’s completion. Others directly touch on the topic of racism. Still other papers deal with both race and racism because, as Penrose and Jackson (1994:205) have noted, often when the category of “race” is in use, the ideology of racism is seldom far removed.

Race/Racism in Historical and Cross-Cultural Context The first five papers deal with the concept of race or with racism in an historical andJ or cross-cultural context. Stephen Jay Gould points out that “When we view the past only in the light of modem concerns, we inevitably commit major errors of substance and emphasis...(especially) when we place a person or an idea into a category that simply didn’t exist in its own time.” With such a warning in mind, Gould’s piece, “An Universal Freckle” examines Samuel Stanhope Smith’s theories of heredity and of racial differentiation in the social context in which they arose, a context that did not “recognize the truth of evolution.” Smith was an early monogenist, but his beliefs in the common origins of all peoples and in a universal brotherhood rooted in that common biological background had to be defended two hundred years ago in terms of his anti-Darwinism essentialism. In “Politics, Colonialism, and the Mutable Color of Pacific Islanders,” Christine Ward Gailey demonstrates that color truly is in the eye of the beholder. Relying on colonizers and traveler’s accounts, she illustrates, through the use of a series of sketches and engravings, how “people of particular islands were 23

24

Race and Other Misadventures

seen as brown in the eighteenth century, but as black later. Gailey also demonstrates that one colonial power depicted an island people as brown, while another colonizing country saw these same people as white, while still another country viewed them as being black. From the 1770’s to the 1870’s, the change in the perception of Pacific Islanders’ color is mind-boggling! The color imputed to these peoples, Gailey argues, is a function of the use colonial powers would make of them. Her argument is both detailed and convincing. In analyzing Anglo-Irish relations, Seamus P. Metress concludes that anti-Irish “racial” prejudice on the part of the British has played a major role since the 12th century. In fact, from Ireland to India to North America, “The British empire was built on an ideology of racism.” Ireland was, so to speak, England’s first colony, and as Metress argues, British colonial policy to be applied throughout the empire was first formed and tested in Ireland. The British definition of the Irish as a race, and the racism that accompanies it, Metress illustrates, are still in vogue today, even in academic circles. Functioning within the socio-political context of the pre-World War II years, physical anthropology in the United States helped to produce and reinforce an inegalitarian racial ideology. According to Michael L. Blakey, the noted anthropolo¬ gist, Ales HrdliCka played a leading role in the production and dissemination of such an ideology both among American physical anthropologists and among those they, in turn, influenced. Anthropology, including physical, or biological, anthropology, has been liberalized over the past several decades, but Blakey argues that “many of the research interests and beliefs regarding the concept of race of the pre-war period (remain) for reasons having little to do with analytical efficacy.” Blakey spells out the social constraints which have helped limit much of the focus of physical anthropology to natural history instead of to the broader applications implicit in social science approaches to human biology. The paper by Elazar Barkan details and analyzes Ashley Montagu’s role in the formulation of the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) anti-racist statements of the early 1950s. Barkan demonstrates that Montagu articulated a “biological brotherhood of man,” anti-racist thesis far too strong for the taste of many scientists. Nevertheless, in modified, watered-down, and even somewhat confused form, the later UNESCO statements helped pave the way for a more egalitarian view of “races.”

Race Deconstructed/Alternatives Proposed The next two papers in Part I literally take the race concept apart. C. Loring Brace presents a painstakingly detailed account of the inadequacy of the race concept as the prime “theory” for explaining human variation. Of equal interest, he makes the case for alternative explanations which seem capable of accounting for a larger number of the known facts. One such alternative to race is the concept of “cluster.” In highlighting both the intellectual weakness of the race concept and the potential strengths of alternative formations, Brace is led to conclude that race is not a viable scientific concept, but rather a “Four Letter Word That Hurts.” Lieberman and Reynolds conclude this section by 1) placing “race” in its historical context, 2) tracing the debate over “race” through its “origins,” “equality-

Introduction

25

inequality,” and “deconstruction” phases, 3) examining thfe varying social back¬ grounds of anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and psychologists taking differ¬ ent sides on the “race” debate, and 4) discussing alternatives to the race concept, such as the concept of ethnic group. The race concept is indeed suspect and Lieberman and Reynolds pose the same question that Audrey Smedley (1993:309) does: “If the concept of race loses its validity, credibility, or substantive usefulness to science, does it follow that its force and meaning will be diminished in the larger society?” Like Smedley, Lieberman and Reynolds are optimistic; they argue that “The role of science can be that of a catalytic agent which speeds and channels change by developing one or another of the possible alternative formulations for conceptualiz¬ ing biological and cultural difference.”

Race/Racism in Contemporary Science/Medicine The final four papers in Part I deal with race and racism in the context of social and physical science, as well as in the practice of modem medicine. With respect to the scientific literature, Alan H. Goodman and George J. Armelagos maintain that evidence abounds that those who insist on defining humanity in racial terms turn up everywhere—Pat Shipman’s (1994) latest work serves as a timely example. Further¬ more, they contend that “The re-emergence of race as a shorthand for human variation appears to be covariant with an escalation in biological reductionism and a search for simple explanations to complex problems.” Such racialism poses the potential for great harm, intended or not. Goodman and Armelagos evaluate the recent use of the race concept in skeletal biology and forensic osteology researches, in studies of medicine and nutrition by physical anthropologists, and in work in the new human genomics. Conclusions reached following this evaluation merit careful attention. Fredric Weizmann, Neil I Wiener, David L. Wiesenthal, and Michael Ziegler offer up a spirited critique of J.P. Rushton’s Differential-k theory. Among other things, Rushton opines that racial differences lie deep in evolutionary history and that by reason of inherent biology “Negroids” are the least altruistic, least sexually restrained, least intelligent, and most criminal of “races.” Weizman and his co¬ authors demonstrate both that Rushton’s theory represents a serious misunderstand¬ ing of evolutionary theory and that his work does not even meet “elementary scientific standards.” As Rushton’s views have been taken seriously by some, the exposure of their scientifically unfounded nature is clearly warranted. The last several decades have witnessed a growing gap between “blacks” and “whites” in terms of infant death rates. Many point to genetic differences between blacks and whites as the source of such an outcome. An alternative explanation of the differential infant mortality offered by Richard J. David and James W. Collins, Jr. proposes “A shift in approach from one which conceives of black-white differences in perinatal outcome as caused by ‘race’ per se to a model explaining these differences by exposure to racism.” David and Collin’ s, in rejecting a biologic conception of race, present arguments and evidence that both strongly suggest that “racial differences in health outcomes, in fact, come about through social and political mechanisms, not genetic ones.”

26

Race and Other Misadventures

In terms of both intrinsic scientific interest and potential social impact, few endeavors in recent times can match the Human Genome Diversity Project. Results of this undertaking could tell us much about our origins as a species and also much about which forces shaped our commonalities and which our differences, but as John H. Moore notes, “It has been alleged by respectable scientists that the Diversity Project represents a continuation of the racist agenda of the 19th century.” Moore wishes to know whether or not the Diversity Project is a racist enterprise. The way in which he goes about the business of answering his question serves as a useful example of genuine intellectual craftsmanship, and the answer he arrives at will surprise some.

References Brace, C. Loring. 1982. “The Roots of the Race Concept in American Physical Anthropology,”in Frank Spencer (Ed.), A History of American Physical Anthropology, 1930-1980. New York: Academic Press. Jackson, Peter and Jan Penrose (Eds.). 1994. Construction of Race, Place and Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pat Shipman. 1994. The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. New York: Simon and Schuster. S medley, Audrey. 1993. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder: Westview Press. Winant, Howard. 1994. Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, and Comparisons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 2 AN UNIVERSAL FRECKLE Stephen Jay Gould

Genes may be selfish in a limited metaphorical sense, but there can be no gene for selfishness when I have so many friends and colleagues willing to offer their aid. I thank Ashley Montagu, not only for his specific suggestions, but also for leading the fight against scientific racism for so many years without becoming cynical about human possibilities. The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Rumor has it that something big happened in Philadelphia exactly 200 years ago.1 Posters, parades, and propaganda all proclaim the bicentennial of our Constitution, hammered out in lengthy compromise during the long, hot Philadelphia summer of 1787.1 will not begrudge this event its proper place in the annals of human liberty, but Philadelphia in 1787 means something else in my parish of evolutionary biology—for there, on February 28, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, the Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith delivered his “Essay on the causes of the variety of complexion and figure in the human species.” Flistorian William Stanton has characterized this essay as “the first ambitious American treatise on ethnology and long a standard work in the United States. It even attracted the attention of European savants—no mean accomplishment for an American book in the eighteenth century” (The Leopard’s Spots, University of Chicago Press, 1960; Stanton and I chose the same striking line from Smith’s essay as the title to our chapters on his work). The myopia of special interest often leads to such idiosyncratic ranking for the relative importance of events and people. I insist that Thomas Jefferson was a paleontologist, Vladimir Nabokov an amateur taxonomist of butterflies, and Billy Sunday a mediocre outfielder for the long-suffering Chicago Cubbies (hey, he hit .291 in 1887 and even smacked three homers when they were as rare as three-toed horses). Philadelphia in 1787 belongs to the birth of American ethnology—in other words, we the people. Parochialism can limit and distort our perspective across time, as well as among professions. When we view the past only in the light of modem concerns, we inevitably commit major errors of substance and emphasis. Such errors often arise when we impose a modem taxonomy of people or concepts upon the past—when we place a person or an idea into a category that simply didn’t exist in its own time. Since we view evolution as the great watershed of biological thinking, and since we retain our lamentable habit of scanning the past for heroes (defined as precursors of modernity), we eagerly abstract passages from pre-Darwinian texts that seem to 27

28

Race and Other Misadventures

recognize the truth of evolution. The authors of these disembodied snippets then become heroes of modernism, but I wonder if they don’t lose more in misrepresen¬ tation than they gain in approbation. Samuel Stanhope Smith is America’s primary case for this intellectual form of killing by kindness. Science was a minimal enterprise in colonial and early republican America, and we need all the heroes we can get. Smith has therefore become the primary example of an American pre-Darwinian evolutionist because several misin¬ terpreted passages in his 1787 essay can be read favorably in a later light. Yet Smith spoke from another world with a different taxonomy of concepts. His own categories didn’t even include the possibility of evolution. Smith’s world was also an interesting place; it merits our understanding, not our depredation for our own parochial purposes. The title page of Smith’s essay lists him as “professor of moral philosophy in the college of New Jersey.” He later became president, while his institution took up the new and more distinctive name of Princeton. Smith’s essay on human variation makes two central points: first, all humans belong to a single species and descend from an initial pair; second, our racial and national variations are responses to different climates and conditions of life. These variations can therefore be modified or reversed, albeit slowly, over several generations when populations move to different climates or adopt new habits of life. The benign myth of Smith as a proto-Darwinian arises from three arguments that he used to support this thesis. First, he claimed that racial variations, as adaptations to prevailing climates, had arisen by a process of change from the original human form. He noted the direct effect that climate imposes upon us: “The heat of summer darkens the skin, the cold of winter chafes it, and excites a sanguine color.” He then argued that these minor and reversible changes can be accumulated over generations to a substantial and inherited effect; tropical climates will encourage the develop of permanently black skin. “Every sensible difference in the degree of the cause, will excite a visible change in the human body.” Second, Smith supported a theory of heredity that explained how changes impressed directly by climate could be rendered permanent in succeeding genera¬ tions. This incorrect theory, the “inheritance of acquired characters,” holds that useful traits, developed by sustained effort or impress during an organism’s lifetime, may be passed directly to offspring by altered heredity. This theory usually goes by the name of Lamarckism because Lamarck invoked it in the first important evolutionary treatise of modem science, his Philosophic Zoologique of 1809. This designation is both unfair and ironic. Lamarck did not invent Lamarckism. Inheritance of acquired characters was the standard view of heredity in his day, a virtual folk wisdom. The essence of Lamarck’s theory lay elsewhere, and he had many sensible and interesting things to say. But, since the inheritance of acquired characters is incorrect, and since this style of inheritance later received the name Lamarckism, we blame the founder of evolutionary studies for the common view of all his contemporaries. In any event, Smith presented a fine epitome of Lamarckism, emphasizing the vital point that continuously impressed adaptive characters might become hereditary, but not such sudden accidents and mutilations as the loss of a leg or the amputation of a tail. (Thus, when Weismann later cut off mouse tails for many generations, and

An Universal Freckle

29

never achieved any reduction of tail length in offspring, he didn’t disprove Lamarck¬ ian inheritance—any more than Jewish male infants do by continuing to develop foreskins after several thousand years of circumcision.) Smith also cited his “Lama¬ rckian” belief to establish the primary correlation of color and climate: Color and figure...are created, not by great and sudden impressions, but by continual and almost imperceptible touches....They are transmitted to offspring, and augmented by inheritance....National features, like na¬ tional manners, become fixed after a succession of ages. They become, however, fixed at last. And if we can ascertain any effect produced by a given state of weather or of climate, it requires only repetition during a sufficient length of time, to augment and impress it with a permanent character. The sanguine countenance will, for this reason, be perpetual in the highest latitude of the temperate zone; and we shall forever find the swarthy, the olive, the tawny and the black as we descend to the south. Third, Smith advocated a general philosophy of imperceptibly gradual and continuous change entirely in keeping with Darwin’s later proclivities. Armed with Darwin’s own philosophy, and Lamarck’s own theory of heredity. Smith bathed himself in the anachronistic glow of the two men most closely associated with evolution. How can we view him as anything but a precursor of later truth? “In the beginning,” Smith writes, permit me to make one general remark which must have occurred to every judicious inquirer into the powers both of moral and of physical causes—that every permanent and characteristical variety in human nature is effected by slow and almost imperceptible gradations. Great and sudden changes are too violent for the delicate constitution of man, and always tend to destroy the system. But changes that become incor¬ porated, and that form the character of a climate or a nation, are progressively carried on through several generations, till the causes that produce them have attained their utmost operation. In this way, the minutest causes, acting constantly, and long continued, will necessarily create great and conspicuous differences among mankind. I was led to Smith’s essay by last month’s reading of Petrus Gamper...Camper, Smith’s contemporary across the Atlantic, has also been misread (unfavorably for presumed racism in this case) as an evolutionary precursor. Yet I recognized the almost cruel irony that Camper’s own world view placed truly evolutionary interpre¬ tations well beyond the pale of conceivable thought. Since Smith shared Camper’s philosophy, his false fame as precursor must suffer a similar rebuttal—thus freeing him for proper appreciation of his genuine talents and importance. Camper and Smith took the problem of human variation as their subject. In the mind-set of our own times, variation is irreducible and primary. When I pick up a handful of snails, I see their differences. Variation, moreover, is the raw material of evolutionary change. Thus, differences both define the present state of a population

30

Race and Other Misadventures

and provide the source of any future alteration. An acknowledgment of variation, accompanied by a theory of adaptive change in response to climate, should therefore brand anyone—Smith in particular—as an evolutionist. But Smith inhabited a different world with contrary presuppositions. Darwin’s revolution had not arrived, and the old Platonic view of essence or type still dominated biological thought. Species were not defined by their variation but as idealized forms, each permanently separate, by fundamental nature or essence, from all others. Variation might be a reality of life, but it ranked as confounding nuisance in any effort to define the world’s created species. Variations are often called, in a technical usage of the times, accidents. When an eighteenth-century biologist picked up a handful of snails belonging to a single species, he tried to abstract a single essence from the accidental variation. This transition from “typology,” or “essentialism,” to the evolutionary world view of intrinsically varying populations marks one of the greatest revolutions in human thinking (see Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological

Thought, Harvard University Press, 1982). But Smith lived before this particular revolution (even while Philadelphia struggled to codify the results of another.) World views may differ in time, but some issues are eternal and seem to achieve an incarnation in every age. The meaning of human differences has probably been with us at least since Cro-Magnons encountered Neanderthals in their migration across Europe some 25,000 years ago. The alternatives of a dichotomy—fundamen¬ tal unity versus fundamental difference—have probably also been available through¬ out our debates about the meaning of human variation. We continue to fight this battle as we argue about the validity of IQ, the scholastic skills of Asian-Americans, and the lack of black managers in major league baseball. This eternal issue was Smith’s battleground—but he did not fight on the field of evolution. He did face the same two alternatives: biological determinism of fixed differences versus biological lability. He wrote his essay in order to defend a clear and unalloyed conviction about essential human unity. But, in Smith’s preevolutionary world, this dichotomy demanded an expression starkly different from current formulations. Nearly all biologists accepted the basic premise that species had fixed essences—created and immutable differences. The issue of permanence or flexibility of human variation therefore reduced to a simple question utterly foreign as to our way of thinking: do humans belong to several created species or to one? If blacks, whites, and Orientals represented separate species—a theory called polygeny—then our differences might be fixed for all time in the immutable essences of our disparate creation. But if all races belonged to one species—a theory called monogeny—then our differences could only be modifiable and “accidental” departures from a shared essence. Smith wrote his essay as America’s most prominent supporter of monogeny, or unity of origins for all humans. Monogenists like Smith were not evolutionists. They did believe that racial variation had developed gradually and could change further. But these changes could only rank as superficial departures from our shared essence. Such variation could never accumulate further to a true evolutionary difference among species. Smith did support a political theory of universal brotherhood based on common biological heritage, but his justification lay firmly in the concepts of anti-Darwinian essential¬ ism that identified our variation as necessarily devoid of true evolutionary import.

An Universal Freckle

31

Since all humans share a common essence, Smith argued that our variations can only represent more or less of common properties, not the presence or absence of unique features. Skin color, for example, has a universal basis, and the same cause that raises freckles on a white person darkens a black person from head to toe: Freckles are seen in all shades of color. They are known to be created by the sun; and become indelible by time. The sun has power equally to change every part of the skin, when equally exposed to its action. And it is, not improperly, observed by some writers that color may be justly considered an universal freckle. These shared features reach different states of intensity among disparate peoples because they are so strongly subject to direct modification (with later inheritance of these acquired characters) by two immediate factors of environment—climate and conditions of life. Smith’s notion of environmental power extended beyond the tired old argument that tropical climes produce dark skin, for he sought to explain the totality of both obvious and subtle differences among people as expressions of environmental impress. Consider two examples of his theory and the extent of his confidence in its shaping power. Smith argued that the entire range of Oriental features could be understood as responses to the cold, inhospitable, and wind-swept world of the Asiatic tundra. Cold contracts the aperture of the eye, producing the Oriental slant—“the intensity of the frost concurring with the glare of eternal snows.” Meanwhile, the pressure of lower jaw against upper (a clench against cold extended continually over generations) causes the face to spread at its sides and forces the cheekbones up. As for flattening the nose: The inheritance of frozen climates naturally drawing their breath more through the nose, than through the mouth, thereby direct the greatest impulse of air on that feature, and the parts adjacent. Such a continual stream of air augments the cold, and by increasing the contraction of the parts, restrains the freedom of their growth. The impressive size of the cranial vault is not so much a favorable sign of unusual intelligence as a relative expression of the only source of potential warmth amidst so much contraction caused by cold: “The superior force of life and warmth in the brain that fills the upper part of the head, will naturally increase its size, and make it overhang the contracted parts below.” As a further example, adding the second force of life style to the primary influence of climate, consider the multiple sources of African blackness. The tropical sun ranks first, but its effects are manifold. Solar intensity colors the skin but also produces greater thickness. This denser covering blocks the escape of bile, and bile turns black on exposure, thus increasing the darkness of skin. To this double whammy of sunburn and bile, we must add the rude effects of savage life style, tending to darken the skin further. Exposure and misery haunt the ignoble savage:

32

Race and Other Misadventures

A naked savage, seldom enjoying the protection of a miserable hut, and compelled to lodge on the bare ground and under the open sky, imbibes the influence of the sun and atmosphere at every pore. He inhabits an uncultivated region filled with stagnant waters, and covered with putrid vegetables that fall down and corrupt on the spot where they have grown....The vapor of rivers, the exhalations of marshes, the noxious effluvia of decaying vegetables, fill the whole atmosphere in an unim¬ proved country, and tend to give a dark and bilious hue to the complexion. And the sun acting immediately on the skin in this state will necessarily impress a deep color. Add to this the indelible impress of colors used to daub or tattoo and the effect of smoke from poorly ventilated dwellings—“these causes will render it impossible that a savage should ever be fair.” So much for romantic illusions of the Rub&iyat where (so long as we have bread, wine, and companionship) even wilderness would be close enough to paradise. These arguments may strike us as silly today, but they do capture the primary contrast between Smith’s monogeny and the polygeny of his opponents. Those who viewed races as separate species invoked the same traits as examples of permanent, essential differences marking bridgeless gaps of quality between white and black or Oriental. By arguing that all these traits lie on continua of direct molding by climate and life style, Smith affirmed human unity by branding our variations as accidental play upon a common essence. The gradual production of variation by continuous environmental modification also underscored a political point central to the argument of most monogenists (remember that the word science did not yet exist and that the modem taxonomy of separation between scientific and moral or political issues did not trouble Smith’s search for a unified personal philosophy): if inhospitable climates and savage life styles could drive a wedge of difference between people, then an amelioration of environment could bring us together again. We must not carry the argument too far to an optimistic absurdity of immediate perfectibility. Racial differences, for Smith, are not superficial, capricious, or immediately expungeable. Black skin is not a sunburn, ready to be blanched by a winter indoors. Our differences may have been impressed by climate, but the process occurred gradually over many generations and entered our inborn constitutions by inheritance of acquired characters. Still, if undesirable traits were fashioned by continuous impress, they may be reversed and even abolished, slowly over many generations, by an improved environment. Smith cited the case of a young Indian exposed to the salubrious effects of polite society as a student at Princeton. The distinctive characters of ancestry had not yet been completely erased, if only because he had lost precious time by spending his first fifteen years in native haunts. But his sojourn among the more fortunate had already expunged “that vacancy of eye, and that lugubrious wildness of countenance peculiar to the savage state.” Smith opined that an equalization of life styles might eventually efface all differences between Caucasians and Indians in their common American climate:

An Universal Freckle

33

I have received the most perfect conviction that the samfe state of society, united with the same climate, would make the Anglo-American and the Indian countenance very nearly approximate. Smith did not believe that a melding of African and European features could go quite so far in America; for a greater difference in climate and a ruder life style, both deeply impressed by so many generations of Lamarckian inheritance, had forced blacks so far from the ideals of white perfection. At least some measure of “the negroe color” had probably been “rendered almost perpetual.” Still, Smith hoped for a substantial amelioration if the bonds of slavery could be loosed and blacks accorded a measure of social and economic equality. He felt that the process had already begun because slaves living as domestic servants seemed lighter of skin and straighter of hair than their compatriots laboring in the fields. (Smith did not recognize, or chose not to mention, a more obvious explanation based on a brutal reality of slavery—offspring of mixed blood bom as a result of coercion and rape.) The great difference between the domestic and field slaves, gives reason to believe that, if they were perfectly free, enjoyed property, and were admitted to a liberal participation of the society, rank and privileges of their masters, they would change their African peculiarities much faster. Just as we must not use false hindsight to cast Smith as an evolutionist before his time, we should also recognize that he was no modernist on the subject of racial equality either (anachronism is equally misleading in scientific and moral spheres). Smith did take a radical posture for his time (he actually advocated intermarriage of white and black as a way to beef up the population density of frontier settlements). Yet, consistent as he was in stressing both malleability of all racial differences and the need for equality of opportunity (he castigated Thomas Jefferson for speculating that black disadvantages might be irrevocably innate), Smith did not doubt the evident superiority, both aesthetic and intellectual, of cultured whites. Civilization grafts its benefits directly to produce a more beautiful body: The conveniences of clothing and of lodging—the plenty, and healthful quality of food—a country drained, cultivated, and freed from noxious effluvia—improved ideas of beauty—the constant study of elegance.. .give cultivated an immense advantage over savage society in its attempts...to beautify the human form. The rudeness of savage life also condemns the uncivilized to stupidity: The mental capacities of savages...are usually weaker than the capacities of men in civilized society. The powers of their minds, through defect of objects to employ them, lie dormant, and even become extinct.

34

Race and Other Misadventures

Smith continues with his strongest deprecation (a passage that illustrates the limits of egalitarianism in the eighteenth century—remember that Smith maintained a radical view for his time on the subject of equality in human potential): Savages are praised by some writers for the same reason that a Monkey is—a certain imitation of the action of men in society, which was not expected from the rudeness of their condition....There is something so peculiar and so stupid in the general countenance of savages, that they are liable to be considered as an inferior grade in the descent from the human to the brute creation. Smith’s views on the inferiority of savages also illustrate why his theory is no precursor to Darwin. In Smith’s system, humans are created in a state of perfection. All later change, under the influence of climate and life style, can only be seen as a limited and reversible degeneration from this original essence. We are created in perfection and then fall away as poor climates and rude life styles impose their baleful effects. But the salubrious influence of civilization can help us to recover our original perfection. “The effect of climate,” Smith writes, “is augmented by a savage state of society and corrected by a state of civilization.” Civilized people are “most nearly in that perfection which was the original design and idea of the creator.” We note, in these passages, the deeper, comprehensive aim of Smith’s treatise. He did not view his essay as a work of science in the modem sense—as an empirical ethnology without moral messages (overtly expressed, at least). Smith’s intellectual world had different taxonomic boundaries, and fields now viewed as logically immiscible (the “isness” of fact and the “oughtness” of ethics in particular) flowed together in his vision. Smith viewed his monogenic theory more as a source of political values than as a statement about anthropology. The doctrine of one race...renders human nature susceptible of system, illustrates the power of physical causes and opens a rich and extensive field for moral science. For if our physical differences are degrees of degeneration imposed by climate and life style, and if civilization can restore a people to the original perfection of Eden, then we must struggle to form a society that will extend corrective blessings to all people. The fact of human biological unity might become the ideal of social harmony if we can improve and remake all people in the light of liberty and civilization. The pliancy of nature is favorable to the unions of the most distant nations, and facilitates the acquisition and the extension of science. And so, when we finally reach the bottom line of Philadelphia in 1798, the last day of February at the Philosophical Society did not really differ in import from the efforts at Independence Hall a few months later. Smith wrote to extol the practical benefits of securing “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”—the eventual

An Universal Freckle

35

erasure of divisive differences among human races. Samuel Stanhope Smith struggled to understand the human constitution, and for one primary purpose: in order to form a more perfect union.

NOTES

’This essay is adapted from Natural History, 8 (1987): 14-20. Copyright The American Museum of Natural History, 1987. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 3 POLITICS, COLONIALISM, AND THE MUTABLE COLOR OF PACIFIC ISLANDERS Christine Ward Gailey

Skin color, in a society as scarred by racism as the United States, is considered by most people to be a natural indicator of difference. Few students entering an introductory anthropology course, for instance, are aware of the absence of any scientific basis for the notion of race (see Montagu, 1941, 1942; Brace, 1964; Livingstone, 1962; Lieberman; Stevenson and Reynolds, 1987). Yet upon reflection, most of these same people can see a wide overlap of pigmentation from one population to another. Still, people generally assume that color is an “obvious” difference, perceptible to the eye and thus, a convenient marker for categorizing people. The speciousness of this “common sense” notion of race becomes clear when we examine early European travelers’ accounts, beginning in the 1400s, of encounters with the rest of the world’s peoples (see, e.g., Baudet, 1965). Careful historical studies have documented that early European travelers, when not explicitly agents of some colonial venture, rarely associated cultural differences with color (Bougainville 1771/1980). Peoples’ appearances were duly recorded, and skin tone was included— along with manner, presence or absence of commerce, customs pertinent to mercan¬ tile endeavors or agricultural production, and social relations in general. The more discursive and reflexive of the ships’ logs or travelers’ accounts, for instance in James Cook’s or Otto von Kotzebue’s journals, render judgments about the particular populations or societies, relative both to the recorder’s own and other societies (Beaglehole 1967; Kotzebue 1821). But particularly where the balance of power rested with the indigenous people, and particularly if the societies in question were seen to be state structured, there was a reluctance to conflate color with innate inferiority. The reduction of these judgments to color seems associated particularly with capitalist slavery in the West African cases, and settlement colonization elsewhere. Correlatively, “scientific” debates regarding color and culture that emerge in the late 1700s around the nonevolutionary categorization scheme of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and the racial discourses of Buffon in France, are merged with evolutionism and cultural ranking ladders only by the mid-nineteenth century (see Burke, 1972:269-270). Earlier indecision about color hardens into race at the same time (see, e.g., Merians, 1993). At that time, of course, racial categorization was occurring as well within European countries vis-a-vis regional peasantries. A number of researchers have been careful to document the role of ascribing cultural differences to color in rationalizing colonization, enslavement, and other forms of exploitation. Historical studies of European depictions of West African peoples are of special importance here (Brantlinger, 1985; Jablow, 1963; Kieman, 36

Politics, Colonialism, and the Mutable Color of Pacific Islanders

37

1969). But in regions where the national agendas of various European countries differed from one another, as in much of the southern Pacific prior to the 1840s, little research has been done on depictions of indigenous peoples’ color. From the time of initial contact—generally ranging from the early 1600s to the 1770s—South Pacific Islanders have served as malleable material for European constructions of what came to be known as “race” only in the 1770s, following the debates in French intellectual circles surrounding the schema presented by Blumenbach and Buffon (cf. Pagliaro, 1973). When we examine early explorers’ and merchants’ accounts, some island populations are represented as black or brown very early—as in Schouten and LaMaire’s accounts of the early 17th century (see the excellent collection of illustrations in Smith, 1985). But these early images did not necessarily create a kind of stereotypic vocabulary of color among all other European and (later) American and Russian visitors, at least not until the mid-nineteenth century (Pickering, 1850), unless the early visitors were followed by another country’s efforts at settlement colonization (see, e.g.. Cook or Bligh regarding Australian aborigines [Bligh, 1792:51]). By the late 1800s, men and women from a wide range of southwestern Pacific islands were often deceptively impressed into labor contracts or forcibly transported by agents for white settlers and plantation owners—a practice known at the time as blackbirding. With this practice, only later considered to be slavery, the color ‘black’—originally associated only with settler areas—was extended to many peoples throughout the region. I suggest that in this enslavement might be found the origins of the distinction between Melanesia and Polynesia (see Foerstel and Gilliam, 1992). Those who were most likely to be enslaved were those who had to become black in the process. In some cases, people of particular islands were seen as brown in the eighteenth century, but as black later; in other cases, one country represented a people as brown, while another as white or Grecian/Mediterranean, and yet another as black. Some people, like those in New Caledonia, shift in English and French accounts from brown and industrious to black and lethargic in the course of a mere fifty years. Indeed, in the southern Pacific societies during the century from the 1770s to the 1870s, we can see one of the most astonishing transformations of skin color in the world. My aim here is to consider why some populations were perceived so variably: why during some time periods there was no shared perception across national boundaries among what later would become colonizing countries in most cases, but a quick stereotyping in others; and why one country’s depiction of a single population might change dramatically through time. The belief in skin color as an indication of anything about culture was slow to develop, at least with regard to groups that did not enter initially into the colonial or capitalist world as slaves or conquered peoples. The position of these more marginalized peoples in the congealing hierarchy of race and color is of interest for several reasons. First, the confusion about what to do with uncolonized peoples underscores how color had to be made into a “real” difference, that is, articulated with a scientific/political agenda of a particular country. Second, the various depictions and descriptions of uncolonized peoples from specific countries varied through time, showing the development of a more coherent physiological imagery and script for the local

38

Race and Other Misadventures

peoples as various colonial agendas became more coherent. Third, the differential interest shown by Europeans in the men and women of South Pacific societies, coupled with the tendency of ships’ officers—who recorded most of the extant journals—to associate mostly with local chiefly groups, and therefore to draw distinctions accordingly between chiefs and other local people, show a linkage of perceptions of color with gender and social stratification. The conflation of color, class, and gender as vectors of innate hierarchy can also inform efforts today to untangle the different and sometimes contradictory images of women and men of color in a rapidly transforming capitalist society. Today, Tongans—like other South Pacific peoples—are widely perceived by Europeans and Americans as brown-skinned people. That this was not always the case may seem unbelievable given the experiences of the last hundred years, especially the racial tensions in the Second World War. What is more interesting and useful in our own efforts to combat racism is under what conditions a common perception of brownness came about, and what brownness was supposed to convey about the peoples and cultures so depicted. This question has recently been addressed for World War II Hawaii regarding the relations between indigenous Hawaiians and the military (Bailey and Farber 1993). What is clear is that, after considerable shifts among white, brown, and black, the category “Polynesian” came into being in the later 19th century. The peoples so designated came to serve as a “buffer race” in the region, between the colonizing whites (and later, Japanese) and those who early on had been defined as blacks, especially Australian aboriginal peoples and the peoples from neighboring island societies and New Guinea. Examining copper engravings, lithographs, and later, newspaper and ethno¬ graphic atlas depictions; European and American travelers’ descriptions; and the racial discourse in various countries through time, we can attempt to tie the shifting images of local peoples with the home country debates that informed many of the ships’ officers (Symcox, 1972:231), or the naturalists and artists who accompanied so many of the voyages (Bougainville 1771/1980:xxiii). In this brief space, I will present a tentative schema, necessarily an invitation to other researchers and certainly not a set of universal claims, that associates color with different colonial agendas and racial discourses, based on the case of Tonga with passing reference to New Caledonia and other island groups.

Periodization of Imagery Our story begins in 1610, with the voyage of a Dutch trader and his French assistant, Schouten and LeMaire, followed in 1643 by the voyage of Abel Jansoon Tasman. Here, in keeping with the Calvinist agenda, the peoples are portrayed as in a state of unredeemed nature, where nature is irretrievably soiled after the fall from Eden. The women are described as licentious and ugly, the men as ape-like. The women, for instance are described by Schouten in 1616 as: ...very deformed, as well in face as body...they have long breasts...which in some hang down to their belly like leather sacks; they are very immodest (cited in Dalrymple, 1770/1967:58).

Politics, Colonialism, and the Mutable Color of Pacific Islanders

39

LeMaire adds: The women were ugly—transgressing the bounds of decency every moment (:57n). They are without religion, as brute beasts, and have no knowledge of merchandise, living like people of the first world, without labouring (:57n). The description, it should be noted, is thus, quite condemnatory in a Calvinist world view. These early voyages were connected to the Dutch search for effective routes to the East Indies trade, and captains were supposed to report whatever items might be had in the islands for that commerce. By the time Tasman reached Tongan waters, for instance, he was bitterly disappointed in the little that he found worth the effort to collect. There had been hopes as well of finding a suitable place for settlement, this colonial agenda being already a priority of Dutch state interest in these voyages. This Dutch imagery and the journals of later captains who had read Tasman’s and Schouten and LeMaire’s accounts created an image of the southern Pacific peoples that included a notion of the “wild man” that Linnaeus would include in 1740 and 1758 in his classification scheme for the six varieties of Homo sapiens (see Burke, 1972:266). It is likely that the earlier Linnean scheme would have then influenced Maupertuis in France who, in his Lettre sur le progres des sciences, calls for exploration of the continent he believed existed in the southern Pacific: ...in the islands of that sea...voyagers assure us they have seen wild men covered with hair and having tails, a species half-way between ourselves and monkeys. In true Enlightenment fashion, he adds, “I would rather spend an hour in conversation with one of them than with the greatest bel esprit in Europe” (1768:2:382). During these pre-revolutionary years in France there was a keen desire on the part of Rousseau and other men of science for more exact information about people “in the state of nature” (Symcox, 1972:231). In the Tongan case, the stage then shifts to the two voyages by Captain James Cook in the 1770s. Cook, it should be noted, was influenced by the French geographer de Brosses, himself influenced by Maupertuis (Symcox, 1972:323). Cook dubbed the Tongan group the Friendly Islands, mistaking for hospitality local chiefs’ plans to scuttle his ships. In Cook’s accounts, color is noted, and a distinction is made between the lighter color of the “chiefly sort” and the rest of the population. Cook’s interests were in scouting the islands for products of interest to the British for the Asian trade. He found little apart from colored feathers (which turned out to be imported from Fij i) and various foodstuffs—but little biche de mer and no sandalwood; the easily accessible deep harbor of Neiafu in Vava’u also escaped his eye because a (rival) chief he consulted told him there was nothing of interest in the northern island group. The depiction of the people in the copper engravings from the Cook voyages shows a fascinating point of convergence between a class discourse in Great Britain and the ranking scheme in the Tongan Islands. A case for comparability between the

40

Race and Other Misadventures

chiefly stratum and the English is made in the pairing of the sacred chief s portrait with that of a military officer (see Figure 1). Their features are similar: The eyes are shown as intelligent, the nose is almost identical, and the manly pose conveys strength and gentility. Skin tone, too, is similar. That the artist was capable of rendering darker skin is clear in other pictures in the account. The point of parallel, then, is that of “class”_even though it is highly debatable whether classes existed in Tonga at the time, and even though most English visitors misconstrued the ranking system and ascribed kingship where none existed.

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