“What is relevant about anthropology?” Fashioned as a bright blue com-puter graphic, this question was stamped across each issue of Anthro-pology News during the final year of the twentieth century. The question served as the annual theme for the discipline’s most widely read publica-tion; a century earlier, the architects of the field had grappled with the identical question as they institutionalized the aaa (Brinton and Powell 1892: McGee 1903; Boas 1899). In 1999, members of the aaa were still de-bating not only what was relevant about anthropology but also how one makes anthropology relevant. During the previous year, the newsletter’s theme asked, “Is it race?” and articles and commentaries over the course of that year debated and addressed this question. Race and relevance have served as mutually reinforcing themes of anthropology for many years.
In the United States, a peculiarly enigmatic relationship has formed be-tween race and the relevance of anthropology on one hand and anthro-pology and the relevance of race on the other (Baker 1998; Harrison 1995;
Smedley 1993; Stocking 1968; B. Williams 1989).
Although anthropologists have routinely engaged contemporary social issues that impact the broader public, there is an eerie permanence about the fact that anthropology has always addressed issues pertaining to race and that the U.S. public has always grappled with racial issues. Com-pounded by the fact that anthropology in the United States has never been as eminent as economics or psychology, anthropologists have rou-tinely justified the relevance of their discipline as the science of race. Race and the relevance of anthropology were entwined during the antebellum
period with the emergence of the first American school of anthropology, and the relationship took on increased importance as the institutional foundations of American anthropology were forming after Reconstruc-tion and at the beginning of the industrial revoluReconstruc-tion. Although most nineteenth-century ethnology was concerned with describing and record-ing American Indian languages and customs, those descriptions were al-ways already nestled in a discourse of white supremacy, evolution, and racial hierarchy. Moreover, race and culture were often seen as being one and the same. The evolution of languages, agricultural implements, and kinship systems was integrated within a rubric used to explain the so-called evolution of the races, which meant the anthropology of brains and bodies often spilled over into the ethnology of languages and customs.
As well, anthropometry, anatomy, somatology, and even phrenology were routinely claimed as important fields that encompassed the rather un-wieldy science of humans, as scholars like John W. Powell, Otis T. Mason, and Daniel Garrison Brinton tried to outline the limits and define the no-menclature to professionalize the field (Darnell 2003:32–33). Even when Boas began to sunder race from culture, he kept the then-distinctive mo-dalities in conversation and in close proximity, as evidenced by his ar-rangement of the anthropological building at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and his early efforts to decouple race from civilizations (Boas 1895;
Boas 1911a; Boas 1911b).
In this chapter, I shift the focus of my analysis from the racial politics of culture to the cultural politics of race. I argue that by the late nine-teenth century, the public was more interested in the brains and bod-ies of the many in-the-way races than in the languages and customs of out-of-the-way peoples. Unlike the preeminence it had in the study of American Indians, anthropology did not hold sway over the discourse on race, which was a much more crowded field. Yet race remained highly rel-evant to anthropology, and anthropology remained relrel-evant to the study of race. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Brinton leveraged anthropology and its relevance to the study of race to make a bid to be-come a prominent public intellectual. He also invested time and money in institutionalizing anthropology by organizing and helping to establish professional journals for the consolidating discipline. Despite the fact that he was nominally considered the first university professor of anthropol-ogy, he never practiced anthropology within a department of instruction, which was emerging as the new seat for anthropological production.
Although his timing was impeccable when it came to addressing the hot topic of race, he failed to see how the institutional apparatus for knowl-edge production was shifting under his feet. In short, he bet on the right horse but ran it in the wrong race.
Brinton used the science of race to bolster the relevance of anthropol-ogy during a distinguished career that began with antiquarian research in the 1880s and concluded with research that addressed relevant social issues and public problems in the 1890s. In this chapter, I will map the trajectory of Brinton’s career activities and piece together his segmented biography to shed light on how he articulated a popular anthropology of race that insisted upon a neo-Lamarckianism that emphasized evolution.
I also sketch how Brinton’s popular racialist anthropology was eventually replaced by Boas’s unpopular anthropology of race, which insisted upon an environmentalism that emphasized plasticity.
Additionally, I use Brinton’s complicated biography to highlight what I consider to be a very critical moment in the history of anthropology.
As the arena for the production of knowledge and civic discourse moved from the lyceum and museum to the college and university, anthropol-ogy in the United States became a less reliable narrator in the narrative of white supremacy by deflecting the powerful trajectory of the Ameri-can School of Anthropology while building upon AmeriAmeri-canist anthropol-ogy within the ivory tower (Bender 1993:33; Hinsley 2003:18–19; Darnell 2003:22; Conn 2004:193). Brinton’s considerable influence, much of it predicated upon his appealing racialist science, was never sustained be-cause he never fully understood that in the United States, the university was emerging as the premier venue where academics produced the best scholarship and most trusted science (Brinton 1892a). On the other hand, Boas’s unpopular research on race was sustained precisely because he was viewed as a disinterested scientist who conducted research as a university professor. More importantly, Boas had students to help develop his re-search programs, while Brinton didn’t. Finally, I will offer some historical perspective on that almost Faustian deal between the science of race and the relevance of anthropology by plotting Brinton’s success on the road to obscurity.
Although I focus on Boas in this transition, Frederic Ward Putnam and his visionary leadership should get much of the credit for situating an-thropology within colleges and universities (Browman 2002:510–11). Al-though departments of instruction and university graduate schools came
with their own demands and challenges, it was Putnam more than any other anthropologist in the late nineteenth century who enabled anthro-pology to escape the demands of patrons in the parlor and congressmen on the Hill (Darnell 2003:22; Hinsley 2003:19; Baker 2002:8; Browman 2002; Conn 2004:192).
The transition of anthropology from the museum into the university was not seamless, and there was considerable resistance both inside and outside of the academy to Boas’s early research and writings on race. It took time for Boas to solidify his academic standing in the United States, and it happened only after he and anthropology were securely ensconced within departments of instruction on college campuses. Even with the support of Putnam, Boas had a bumpy ride until he found a permanent faculty appointment, which he used to consolidate enough influence to eclipse scholars like Brinton and Powell. To exemplify this point, I de-scribe the troubles Boas had when he tried to measure schoolchildren’s heads while serving as a docent at Clark University in Worcester, Mas-sachusetts.
Race and the relevance of anthropology have had a long and enduring relationship in the United States. When the institutional home of the field made the transition from the museum to the classroom, the anthropo-logical discourse of race became increasingly less congruent with, and more critical of, the prevailing views and laws of the broader society. In the early twentieth century, departments of instruction, graduate stu-dents, and new doctorates of anthropology began to proliferate within institutions of higher education, while the influential cohort of ethnolo-gists who worked in museums and at the bae simply died. Subsequently, activists and intellectuals regarded this new, more critical, science of race and culture as reliable and normal and began using it to erode and chip away at the legislative and institutional apparatus that reproduced racial inequality and the idea of racial superiority and inferiority (Baker 1998:
127–42).
The professional infrastructure of anthropology in the United States was established, in large measure, by the leadership of Brinton at the University of Pennsylvania, Putnam at Harvard University, and Powell at the Smithsonian Institution. All of these luminaries produced volumes of research, touted the practical and public significance of anthropology, provided leadership in various anthropology societies, and, following in the steps of Lewis Henry Morgan, were elected president of the aaas.
Of these founding fathers of American anthropology, Brinton is per-haps the least well known, but it is his storied past that best illuminates how scholars used the study of race to make anthropology—or, in this case, one’s anthropological research—more relevant. Although the rela-tionship between racial determinism and nineteenth-century anthropol-ogy is well-tilled soil, by focusing explicitly on Brinton I can offer new per-spectives on the roles of patrons and publics, physicians and ethnologists, in the production of anthropology in late nineteenth-century Philadel-phia (Baker 1998; Degler 1991; Frederickson 1965; Hinsley 1981; Smedley 1993; Stocking 1968). The history of anthropological activity in Philadel-phia is often neglected in favor of the histories of anthropology that focus on Cambridge, Washington, and New York (Conn 2003:166). Actually, the reasons for the retrospective insignificance of anthropology in Phila-delphia are yoked in part to Brinton’s inability to securely establish the field at a university in the Delaware Valley.