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Franz Boas and the Discovery of Culture 12 Geography, published in Science in 1887, were the physicist for Naturwissenschaften and the cosmographer for Geisteswissenschaften. The former sought the laws of the universe, while the latter described it, seeking historical patterns rather than laws. The methods were, respectively, the deductive, or “physical,” and the interpretive, or “historical.” Cosmographers produced cosmographies, classifications of observed phenomena that could then be studied in relationship to each other. Patterns revealed by such study were considered phenomena in themselves, “deeper” than those directly observed phenomena, but not less “real.” While Boas ended up as more of a geographer, which by his training meant a cosmographer of planet Earth, he trained to become a physicist. 23 By the time Dilthey was writing about it, this tension, between the pursuits of the physicist and the cosmographer, already had a long tradition in Germany, beginning with the cosmographical pursuits of two Prussian brothers of a previous generation, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), the senior, was educated in the Berlin Enlightenment, and later much influenced by the critique of it. The critique came from many quarters, such as the moderate Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the more radical Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), for whom reason was entirely contingent on history, and Hamann’s student, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who went even further by identifying reason with history. For Herder, a Geist, a collective spirit, was inseparable from its Volk, a group of people with a shared history. Together, they were one: Volksgeist. Herder was not dismissing the existence of an objective History, but rather reducing it to its atoms, Volksgeister, which could be individually observed and studied. Herder intended the study of Volksgeist to be a rigorous, practical, and coherent alternative to that of the Enlightenment. It was to continue Herder’s project, by defining its method in Kantian terms, that Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote his Plan for a Comparative Anthropology. The method was decidedly inductive and historical, and Humboldt was well aware of the political implications of such a decision: by making history relevant to the present, he was shifting emphasis of responsibility and accountability from the living individual to the collective past. In his own words: For this is what distinguishes the historian from the natural scientist and the philosopher: he limits his dealings to that which had happened, and regards his field as neither nature nor will, but fate and accident, for whose individual quirks, at least in their detail, no one is responsible. 24 Later, Humboldt’s pioneering work in linguistics, following his comparative anthropology program, recognized all languages as complete and worthy manifestations of Volksgeist, very unlike the philological hierarchy described by his contemporaries. Such a manifestation, which Humboldt called Nationalcharakter, the “features of a people,” varied for each Volksgeist. The degree of achievement for a people was measured in relation to its ideal Nationalcharakter potential. Boas would later demand the same respect for something called “culture.” Because Boas probably did not read Wilhelm von Humboldt, 25 the striking similarity of his approach to anthropology and Humboldt’s suggests a significant debt 23 Boas 1996 24 Bunzl 1996, pp. 23-4 25 Bunzl, p. 24
Franz Boas and the Discovery of Culture 13 both owe to their shared intellectual background. There are, however, direct, though critical, inheritances. First was through Dilthey, who rejected the positivism of Comte and Mill, and saw Verstehen (understanding, interpretation) as an alternative foundation for all the human sciences. For Dilthey, it was only through experience (or, rather, reexperience, because experiences were gone as soon as they occurred, and could not be studied directly) that one could obtain any kind of knowledge of the human condition. Dilthey’s Verstehen was taken directly from Gustav Droysen (1808-1884), a leading historian and advocate of German unification under Prussia, who referred to Humboldt reverently as “the Bacon of historical sciences,” 26 and distinguished Verstehen (Humboldtian) knowledge from Erklären (explanation), that of the natural sciences. Importantly, unlike Herder (and Humboldt), Dilthey was concerned with individual minds, not collective Geist. Thus, Boas’ idea of culture could not have come from Humboldt through Dilthey. The other route from Wilhelm von Humboldt was Boas’ training in the Völkerpsychologie discipline of Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899), which assumed a collective mind that manifested as language, mythology, religion, and customs. Though Lazarus and Steinthal used Humboldt’s Nationalcharakter approach, and even adapted Herder’s Volksgeist, their project, in stark contrast to Humboldt’s, was explicitly looking for scientific laws of human development. Considering Verstehen and Völkerpsychologie as two conflicting inheritances from Humboldt, it could be said that Humboldt transmitted to Boas, through Dilthey on the one hand, and Lazarus and Steinthal on the other, a sharper version of the academic tension of his own generation, that between the particular and the universal, between the humble attempt at description and the ambitious search for explanation. Wilhelm’s younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), was, perhaps, the first modern cosmographer. Though both brothers used the historical method, Wilhelm was working in the humanities, primarily in history, where cosmographies of some sort where already acceptable, while Alexander was applying the historical method, quite radically at the time, to the natural sciences. He found the complexity of the Cosmos overwhelming, and preferred modest “empirical laws,” local and descriptive, to “natural laws.” As mentioned earlier, Boas read Humboldt as a child. As an adult academician, however, Humboldt’s influence was filtered through the more ambitious lens of the geographer Karl Ritter (1779-1859), Humboldt’s protégé. Humboldt wrote, in his five-volume masterpiece, Kosmos, of “the admirable work… in which Karl Ritter so ably delineates the physiognomy of our globe, and shows the influence of its external configuration on the physical phenomena on its surface, on the migrations, laws, and manners of nations, and on all the principal historical events enacted upon the face of the earth.” 27 Despite this blessing, Ritter, moving away from the Humboldt brothers, was not nervous about universal laws. He tried, by formulating the “empirical laws” that Alexander von Humboldt was careful to avoid, to situate humanity in nature. In this tradition, the zoologist Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), influenced by Ritter’s student, Moritz Wagner (1813-1887), developed an ambitious theory of a reciprocal relationship between nature and humans in his Anthropogeographie, the book which Boas read just before leaving for Baffin Island. Ratzel was concerned with the history of population movements, and the diffusion of traits, which he believed to be the only plausible cause 26 Bunzl, pp. 26-7 27 Bunzl, p. 40
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