Race and Nationality

Part 1

INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION

SPECIAL BULLETIN

RACE AND NATIONALITY

By FRANZ BOAS

Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

JANUARY, 1915

American Association for International Conciliation Sub-Station 84 (407 West 117th Street) New York City

The editor of Everybody’s Magazine, in which this article appeared in briefer form in November, 1914, has kindly granted permission for its republication in this series.

RACE AND NATIONALITY

The struggle that is now devastating Europe has been described as an unavoidable war of races, as an outcome of the innate hostility between Teutonic, Slav, and Latin peoples, that can never be overcome by argument and reason, because it is due to deep-seated “racial instinct.” If this were so, we might despair of the future of mankind; for beyond this conflict would arise others without end, as wider and closer international intercourse develops and brings more emphatically into consciousness racial differences like those between Latin-American and Anglo-American, East Indian and European, Mongol or Malay and European. If this view were correct, the so-called “racial instinct” would perpetuate wars of extermination until one race alone survived.

It is true that in our own political and social life the feeling of racial solidarity finds strong expression in our behavior towards Mongol and Negro. It is equally true that in Europe the Slavic world is moved to its depths by the Pan-Slavistic idea; that Germany has been carried far on a wave of admiration for the excellence of the great Teutonic race, and that England rests serene on the unshaken conviction of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon; and yet the emotional value of these ideas does not make clear their rational values.

The term “racial instinct” expresses the ideas that there are definite, insurmountable antipathies based on differences of appearance, and that certain hereditary mental characteristics belong to each type of man.

In Europe, the occurrence of local types has led to the concept of distinct races, identified with certain national groups: the blond representing the Teuton; the heavy, darker type, the Slav; and the Mediterranean, the typical Spaniard or Italian.

On account of the peculiar position of the blond type, it has been pre-eminently identified with the so-called Aryan race. As is well known, most of the languages of Europe are derived from one ancient form of speech,--the parental Aryan language. Slavic, Teutonic, and Romance languages are the most important modern divisions of this group in Europe, to which Greek, Celtic, Lithuanian, and Albanian also belong. Among European languages, only Finnish and its relatives on the Baltic, Magyar, Turkish, and Basque, do not belong to this extended group. Aryan languages are spoken by people of the most diverse racial types; nevertheless there are scientists who try to identify the blond north-European with the ancient pure Aryan, and who claim for the race pre-eminent hereditary gifts, because the people who at present and in our concept are the leaders of the world speak Aryan languages.

Scientific proof of these contentions cannot be given. They are rather fancies of north-European dreamers, based on the complaisant love of the achievements of the blondes. No one has ever proved either that all the Aryans of the earliest times were blondes, or that people speaking other languages may not have been blond, too; and nobody would be able to show that the great achievements of mankind were due to blond thinkers. On the contrary, the men to whom we are indebted for the basic advance of civilization belong to the dark-complexioned human types of the Orient, Greece, and Italy, and not to our blond ancestors.

How deep and emotional a hold this idea has in the minds of some scientists appears when some investigators try to show us that Christ cannot have been a Jew by descent, but must have been an Aryan.

THE GREAT BLOND ARYAN--A FICTION

The idea of the great blond Aryan, the leader of mankind, is the result of self-admiration, that emotional thinkers have tried to sustain by imaginative reasoning. It has no foundation in observed fact. This, however, does not decrease the emotional value of the fiction that has taken hold of minds wherever the Teutonic, German, or Anglo-Saxon type--however it may be called--prevails.

It is not the pre-eminence of the blonde alone that appeals to the fancy in northwest-European countries: all over Europe we find the idea of racial purity, and of the existence of certain features inherent in each race that make it superior to all others; while it is assumed that the mixed, “mongrel” races are doomed to permanent inferiority. This notion prevails among ourselves with equal force, for we shake our heads gravely over the ominous influx of “inferior” races from eastern Europe. Inferior by heredity? No. Socially different? Yes, on account of the environment in which they have lived, and therefore different from ourselves, and not easily subject to change provided they are allowed to cluster together indefinitely. Equally strong is our fear of the mongrelization of the American people by intermixtures between the northwest-European and other European types.

Scientific investigation does not countenance the assumption that in any one part of Europe a people of pure descent or of a pure racial type is found, and careful inquiry has failed completely to reveal any inferiority of mixed European types.

TYPE AND RACE DO NOT COINCIDE

In our imagination the local racial types of Europe have been identified with the modern nations, and thus the supposed hereditary characteristics of the races have been confused with national characteristics. An identification of racial type, of language, and of nationality has been made, that has gained an exceedingly strong hold on our imagination. In vain sober scientific thought has remonstrated against this identification; the idea is too firmly rooted. Even if it is true that the blond type is found at present pre-eminently among Teutonic people, it is not confined to them alone. Among the Finns, Poles, French, North Italians, not to speak of the North African Berbers and the Kurds of western Asia, there are many individuals of this type. The heavy-set, dark East-European type is common to many of the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe, to the Germans of Austria and southern Germany, to the North Italians, and to the French of the Alps and of central France. The Mediterranean type is spread widely over Spain, Italy, Greece, and the coast of Asia Minor, without regard to national boundaries.

In western Europe, types are distributed in strata that follow one another from north to south,--in the north the blonde, in the center a dark, short-headed type, in the south the slightly built Mediterranean type.

National boundaries in central Europe, on the other hand, run north and south: and so we find the northern French, Belgian, Hollander, German, and Russian to be about the same in type and descent; the central French, South German, Swiss, North Italian, Austrian, Servian, and central Russian, to be all the same variety of man; and the southern French, to be closely related to the types of the eastern and western Mediterranean area.

At the present moment the relation of German and Slav is of principal interest. During the period of Teutonic migrations, in the first few centuries of our era, the Slavs settled in the whole region from which Teutonic tribes had moved away. They occupied the whole of what is now eastern Germany. In the Middle Ages, with the growth of the German Empire, a slow backward movement set in. Germans settled as colonists in Slavic territory, and by degrees German speech prevailed over the Slavic. In Germany, survivals of the gradual process may be found in a few remote localities where Slavic speech still persists. As by contact with the more advanced Germans the cultural and economic conditions of the Slav improved, his resistance to Germanization became greater and greater,--earliest among the Czechs and Poles, later in the other Slavic groups.

This process has led to the present distribution of languages, which expresses a fossilization of German colonization in the east, and illustrates in a most striking way the penetration of peoples. Poland and part of Russia, Slavonic and Magyar territories, are interspersed with small German settlements, which are the more sparse and scattered the farther east they are located, the more continuous the nearer they lie to Germany.

With the increased economic and cultural strength of the Slav, the German lost his ability to impose his mode of life upon him, and with it his power to assimilate the numerically stronger people in its own home. But by blood all these people, no matter what their speech, are the same.

In short, there is no war of races in Europe; for in every single nationality concerned in the present struggle the various elements of the European population are represented, and arrayed against the same elements as grouped together in another nationality. The conflict has nothing whatever to do with racial descent. The so-called racial antipathies are feelings that have grown up on another basis and have been given a fictitious racial interpretation.

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