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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 24 Dec 2022

Taken: 24 Dec 2022

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Excerpt •
OF FEAR AND STRANGERS •
Author •
George Makari •

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Photo by Dinesh

Franz Boas among the Inuit, circa 1884

Denis Croissant, Erhard Bernstein have particularly liked this photo

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Were racial characters permanent and unmodifiable? These and other queries seemed reverse-engineered, for one of Alder’s close colleagues, Franz Boas, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas would unveil data at the congress that answered both questions in negative.

Boas would be recognized as the anthropologist most responsible for challenging science’s attachment to race and fostering a shift by which racial science dissolved into racism. Like Felix Alder, he was a German Jew who had left behind his nation and his religion. . . . . Boas studied physics and geography during his university years, he also encountered the anti-Semitic Union of German Students and fought them off with more than his fair share of duels. . . . His hope, he wrote to his parents, was to produce a “fairly major geographical work” while doing work on psychophysics, which he expected would win him a university job. After weeks blinding by fog and frozen in ice, Boas’s expedition arrived at Baffin Island, a German outpost among the Inuit people. Among crashing ice and massive fjords, the young man began collecting Inuit words and scribbling notes on their customs. For years, he observed and photographed these Arctic dwellers, before returning home with a new passion.

On his second expedition, Boas explored British Columbia, then returned via New York and never left. He united with his American fiancee, whom he had met on vacation, and got a job working as an editor at ‘Science’ magazine. By then, he had come to see culture, not biology, as determinative of morality. In 1889, Boas secured a job at Clark University, and seven years later, he was made both curator at the American Museum of Natural history and lecturer in the fledgling discipline of anthrop0logy at Columbia University.

OF FEAR AND STRANGERS
16 months ago. Edited 16 months ago.
 Denis Croissant
Denis Croissant club
A great find....Merry Christmas Dinesh!
16 months ago.

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