The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

by Robert Wald Sussman

Stocking (1968, 232–233) summarizes the importance of Boas’s use of culture: Focusing only on those aspects of the change having specifically to do with the culture idea, one might say that it involved the rejection of simplistic models of biological and racial determinism, the rejection of ethnocentric standards of cultural evaluation, and a new appreciation of the role of unconscious social processes in the determination of human behavior. It implied a conception of man not as a rational so much as a rationalizing being.… Boas did not … offer a definition of anthropological “culture.” But what he did do was to create an important portion of the content in which the word acquired its characteristic meaning.… By changing the relation of “culture” to man’s evolutionary development, to the burden of tradition, and to the processes of human reason, transformed it into a tool quite different from what it had been before. In the process he helped to transform both anthropology and the anthropologist’s world.