PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY[1]
By Franz Boas
The science of anthropology deals with the biological and mental manifestations of human life as they appear in different races and in different societies. The phenomena with which we are dealing are therefore, from one point of view, historical. We are endeavoring to elucidate the events which have led to the formation of human types, past and present, and which have determined the course of cultural development of any given group of men. From another point of view the same phenomena are the objects of biological and psychological investigations. We are endeavoring to ascertain what are the laws of hereditary stability and of environmental variability of the human body. These may be recognized in the historical changes that the bodily appearance of man has undergone in the course of time, and in his displacement from one geographical or social environment to another. We are also trying to determine the psychological laws which control the mind of man everywhere, and that may differ in various racial and social groups. In so far as our inquiries relate to the last-named subject, their problems are problems of psychology, though based upon anthropological material. I intend to speak of this aspect of anthropology to-day.
The fundamental problem on which all anthropological inquiry must be founded relates to the mental equipment of the various races of man. Are all the races of mankind mentally equally endowed, or do material differences exist? The final answer to this question has not been given, but anatomical observations on the various races suggest that differences in the form of the nervous system are presumably accompanied by differences in function, or, psychologically speaking, that the mental traits which characterize different individuals are distributed in varying manner among different races; so that the composite picture of the mental characteristics of one race would presumably not coincide with the composite picture of the mental characteristics of another race. The evidence that has been brought forward does not justify us,
- ↑ Lecture delivered at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the opening of Clark University, September, 1909.
