WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The mind of primitive man cover

The mind of primitive man

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By Franz Boas
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Archaeology & AnthropologySociology

About This Book

The lectures examine and rebut common racial prejudices that equate cultural achievement with innate biological superiority, analyzing anatomical claims, brain size, and alleged mental differences. They survey how environment, growth patterns, selection, and interbreeding affect bodily and psychological traits, assess heredity and Mendelian principles in local and mixed populations, and compare cognitive tendencies across societies using historical, ethnographic, and experimental evidence. The argument emphasizes variability and environmental influence over fixed racial hierarchy, presenting observed distinctions as quantitative and contingent rather than as proof of inherent inferiority.

PREFACE

The problem discussed in the following pages has occupied my attention for many years, and I have at various times dealt with it in brief essays. Some of these, in revised form and enlarged, are embodied in the present volume:—

Human Faculty as determined by Race (Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, vol. xliii [1894], pp. 301-327).

The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology (Science, N. S., vol. iv [1896], pp. 901-908).

The Mind of Primitive Man (Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. xiv [1901], pp. 1-11).

Some Traits of Primitive Culture (Ibid., vol. xvii [1904], pp. 243-254).

Race Problems in America (Science, N. S., vol. xxix [1909], pp. 839-849).

Psychological Problems in Anthropology (American Journal of Psychology, vol. xxi [1910], pp. 371-384).

I have also utilized a small part of the Introduction to my “Handbook of American Indian Languages” (Bulletin 40 of the Bureau of American Ethnology), and some of the results of my report on “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” (vol. 39, Reports of the Immigration Commission, Washington, Government Printing Office).

FRANZ BOAS.