The Mind of Primitive Man by Franz Boas

First published: 1911

Type of work: Anthropological study

Critical Evaluation:

The best of Franz Boas’ work in anthropology exists in his collected papers, and his most important influence is undoubtedly upon his pupils, whom he trained to revolutionize the study of anthropology in America and eventually Europe as well. THE MIND OF PRIMITIVE MAN has its significance in being one of the few books for the general public that Boas ever wrote. It presents the work of Boas’ generation in comparative anthropology, with special emphasis upon the problem of race, which so beset the 1930’s and 1940’s. As a comparativist, Boas is much concerned to study primitive culture objectively, and not to judge other cultures from European prejudice, as so many social scientists of preceding generations had done.

Boas proposes to examine the question of race first to find what, if anything, one may say about this disputed question. Then he will analyze primitive culture and see if in any way it determines racial characteristics. Reviewing many writers of an earlier generation, Boas shows that while different racial characteristics exist, no one has ever been able to say specifically what cultural significance such racial characteristics have. The work of Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim, and Levy-Bruhl, at the turn of the century, shows that differences in culture are more important in man’s history than differences in race. The primitives of Australia, Africa, and America are more like one another than they are like any ethnic group in Europe. Race is formed by heredity, not by environment, but there are too many variables for anyone to show consequences for culture from racial causes. The body forms of the races of man are not stable either; malnutrition will stunt a race and raising the standard of living will increase height and weight.

No matter how primitive man is in the historical era, he is more like civilized man than any deceased prototype. All races, Boas finds, are equal to the so-called white race in faculties; there is no race on the globe today that, given proper opportunities and technical equipment, cannot reach that level of civilization enjoyed by the most favored groups. No significant relations whatever exist between race and culture; custom and language can change within a race. Boas cites the African, brought to North and South America and developing different characteristics in each locale. People may remain constant in anatomical type and language but change in culture, remain constant in type but change in language, or remain constant in language but change in anatomical type and culture. The interdependence of anatomical type, language, and culture seems to be so variable as to be unpredictable. The so-called “Aryan problem” is therefore nonexistent, for obviously people who speak an Aryan (Indo-European) language may be and often are of a large variety of anatomical types and cultures. What we call “race” embraces many language groups, as in both Europe and Africa. Contrary to what popular prejudice holds, in the past we do not find a few “mother tongues,” but rather more languages than there are today, suggesting that our ancestors were many small isolated groups, each with its own body type, language, and culture. We can never know whether so-called primitive mentality causes a simple and deficient culture, or whether such culture could adapt higher forms of life at any time the opportunities for development are presented.

Culture, in Boas’ analysis, is the sum of the acts and reactions characteristic of the behavior of individuals within a group. In Boas’ sense, animals could be said to have culture, though we generally call their acts habits, for certain animals have group behavior, a recognition of power and craft, a selection of some of their own to hunt and others to guard. Apes, it seems, can make and use tools in a limited way. Certain habits, such as the annual migration of birds, are the result of a long historical process, as in human culture.

Cultures everywhere are remarkably, even monotonously, alike. All men communicate through speech, build fires, and make tools. They all have some religious sense, believing in a supernatural or spirit life. Sometimes their beliefs and cultural acts are strikingly similar: for example, the simultaneous invention of zero in Yucatan and India, identical basket design and decoration in America and Africa, or the identical blowgun used in South America and Malaysia. Folklore and legends show even more parallels, with identical complex tales, with the same motifs, images, and plot patterns to be found all over the world. We cannot credit this similarity to cultural diffusion; we probably have here the common product of similar minds confronting similar situations in the world that is common to all of us. Cultural diffusion, however, is phenomenal; Indian corn was spread all over the world in a mere decade after it was brought to Europe from America in the sixteenth century. Before Europeans came to the New World, it seems the Indians of Mexico, Central America, and Peru played the role in this continent that the cultures of Central Asia did in the Old World.

We often assume that modern culture is complex and sophisticated, while primitive culture is plain and simple. This is too distorting a reduction. The languages of primitive cultures are always much more complex in structure than modern language systems. Primitive music is always more complex in rhythm, though similar in harmonics and thematic elements. Many of the founders of modern anthropology—Edward Tylor, James G. Frazer, Herbert Spencer—were entirely too simplistic in their propensity for seeing all cultural history as a logical progression of higher forms out of lower. We should not then look upon primitives as savage children who finally grew up to be good Victorian Englishmen or German burghers. The children of Europe are comparable only to the adults of Europe, not to adults of Africa. Parenthetically, Freud too is wrong, in Boas’ opinion, in analyzing primitive culture in terms of unconscious conflicts which he found in his cases in nineteenth century Europe. There are vestiges of primitive ritual and behavior in modern culture. This fact would lead too many of us to deduce that all cultures began at the same low level of primitivism and proceeded through parallel evolutionary stages to the current high level of civilization we find today. This is not true, however. There is no reason anthropology can find to hold that agricultural civilizations always grow out of herding cultures. Clearly the traits needed for both are quite different, and the former does not have to come from the latter. Habits and people can be quite different. There is some historical development in a single limited phase, but we can find no harmonious evolutionary scheme to explain the development of a whole culture.

Nor does the family evolve in the way some early authors maintained. There is no evidence that the patriarchy we find in higher civilizations evolved out of an earlier matriarchy. In primitive societies remaining about the edges of the earth, we have both patriarchy and matriarchy, quite independent of each other. Neither does symbolic primitive art precede realistic modern art; the reverse can often be true. Oddly, Boas observes wryly, when comparing cultures we look for similarities, quite often distorting evidence to make parallels. But when we look at race, we invariably look for differences, then exaggerate distinctions of no importance.

Geography is an important influence upon culture, but does not create it. A tribe may live upon rich gold veins but never mine. Economic determinism is no more a key to culture than geography. Social structures influence economic structures, and vice versa, and biological factors are also involved in this dynamic relationship.

We call those people “primitive” whose life forms are simple and uniform. We call those cultures civilized which, for better or worse, like ourselves have mastered their environment through technology. Leisure and surpluses are needed for complex thought and technical development: such people as the Eskimo clearly exhaust all their potential in merely staying alive in a formidable environment. We differ from the primitive in our educational devices. The traditional material we hand on from generation to generation is much more highly organized, compressed, logical, and abstract than the material a primitive father gives his children.

Boas closes his study with a plea for racial understanding, in contrast with the prejudices of pseudo-experts in the United States and Europe who couple racial prejudice with nationalism for a new and poisonous ideology. Immigration to America will no more “mongrelize” the United States than it did Europe, where for centuries invaders poured out of Asia. The low quality of culture found in too many Negro areas of our nation is obviously caused by unequal opportunity and social injustice; there is no reason to doubt that, given facility, opportunity, and help, the Negro will rise in cultural status. We should judge individuals by ability and character and not by any prejudice toward a group, and we should treasure cultural variety, not strive to impose any one standard of culture or race on any nation, or on the world.