Innatism in the Anthropology of A. L. Kroeber: A Critique of ‘the Boasian Paradigm’

Abstract

Basing his analysis on Kroeber's ‘The superorganic’ (1917) and ‘Eighteen professions’ (1915), Derek Freeman has put forward the notion of a ‘Boasian paradigm’, whereby Kroeber is alleged to have perpetuated the biology/culture split suggested by Boas. I argue, instead, that there is a strong innatist element in Kroeber's writings throughout his long career; and that the articles noted above need to be placed in the social and intellectual contexts of their time, particularly the encroachment of the eugenics movement on social theory and its application to immigration restriction.

Keywords:

• Innatism
• History of Anthropology
• Kroeber
• Eugenics

Notes

1. The Lamarckian aspects of Victorian evolutionism have been massively downplayed in more recent apologetics, particularly by the Intellectual Left (e.g., Carneiro 2003; Leacock 1972; Lee 1988), where its occasional primitivist ‘psychic unity’ arguments have been emphasised at the expense of a much more pervasive progressivism, with its implied contempt for Fourth World people (Stocking 1968, 110–32).

2. Kroeber was in fact an American gentile of German background. In the north‐eastern United States of his younger days, German‐Americans, whether Jewish or not, tended to associate with one another on the basis of this hyphenated ethnic identity—and, relatively exclusively, distanced themselves both from Americans of Anglo‐Saxon origin and, in the case of Jewish German‐Americans, from other American Jews. On these matters, see Howe 1976, 229–35; T. Kroeber 1970, 24–27; Stocking 1968, 289 et seq.). The last source is especially important in situating the emergence of professional anthropology in the United States in the context of the scholarly nativism of the times.

3. There has been since Boas's day a tendency to ignore the hopeless polysemy of the word ‘culture’ and to speak glibly of ‘the culture concept’, as if there were a genuine conceptual consensus here. This tendency has, I think, been if anything strengthened recently, especially in ‘deconstructionist’ and ‘postmodernist’ discourse. Kroeber's investigation, with Clyde Kluckhohn, of the use of the word by anthropologists up to the mid twentieth century (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952) revealed no fewer than 162 notions, and the number has surely increased since then, partly because the word is now used widely by non‐anthropologists. I employ it here only for discursive purposes.

4. It is not clear what part Kroeber's interest in psychoanalysis may have played here. His widow notes that he tended markedly to segregate this interest from his anthropological concerns (T. Kroeber 1970, 112). Yet the fact remains that he published two articles on Freud's Totem and taboo, the second (A. Kroeber 1939) more favourable than the first (A. Kroeber 1920).

5. The first of these analyses initially appeared in 1939, the second in 1942. All reference here is to the reprinted versions. It should be added that Kroeber's analysis of the Aboriginal Australian materials derives from Radcliffe‐Brown's synthesis (1931), which is mistaken on several counts. For correctives, see Shapiro 1979.

6. Kroeber's language suggests a materialist perspective grossly contrary to the gravamen of his thought, in which the allegedly ‘secondary patterns’ figure much more conspicuously than the supposedly ‘basic’ ones. A more forthright example of this perspective can be found in the work of Julian Steward, who seems to have taken the notion of a ‘culture core’ from Kroeber, under whom he studied (see especially Steward 1955, 5–6).

7. One could, of course, argue that the emphasis on dualistic classification is more telling, as Lévi‐Strauss (1963, 120–63) and others would in ensuing decades. I do not wish to pursue this argument here, however.

8. Also noteworthy here is Kroeber's (1952b) analysis of human communication in the light of what was known at the time of the communicative repertoire of bees.