Ashley Montagu,
born Israel Ehrenberg in East London in 1905, was one of
those rare men of learning who succeeded in making substantive
scholarly contributions to their academic disciplines while
at the same time maintaining contact with the educated layman,
indeed contributing substantively to the latter's learning.
In addition, he was a dedicated and articulate social critic,
concerned with bringing to bear the findings of the social
and biological sciences toward the betterment of man's lot,
while subjecting some of those very findings to critical
social scrutiny. His accomplishments in these three domains,
the scientific, the public-educational, and the socioethical,
will be treated as a unity in what follows, in accordance
with what is evidently the spirit of the program that has
guided his life's work.
Although Montagu's contributions span a variety of fields
in the social and biological sciences—including work
on problems as diverse as Australian aborigines' concepts
of sexuality and reproduction, the measurement of internal
anatomical landmarks on the heads of intact living human
beings, adolescent infertility in girls, the role of cooperative
behavior in evolution, and the biological and cultural factors
in aggression and in sex roles—his principal legacy
will indisputably consist of his critical analysis of the
concept of race.
The problem
of race preoccupied Montagu from the beginning of his intellectual
career, more than a quarter century before the 1954 U.S.
Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v Board of
Education of Topeka, which heralded the civil rights activism
that has since followed in America. Montagu's work played
a role in that Supreme Court decision, as well as in shaping
the social consciousness that ushered it in and has attended
it ever since. If some of his ideas, as they are discussed
below, appear to be relatively uncontroversial and a matter
of common knowledge and assent, let it not be forgotten
that that very knowledge and assent is in some measure due
to the work and efforts of Montagu, and that he was also
forcefully expounding those ideas at an earlier time, when
they were far from accepted, and indeed being brutally violated
on a scale unparallelled in human history .
Young
Montagu. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print
Department.
Montagu's
papers on race in the late 1930s, culminating in his book
Man's Most Dangerous Myth: TheFallacy of Race
and followed by a series of works, had the effect of upsetting
the traditional concept of race accepted by most anthropologists
in that it challenged the reality of anything corresponding
to that notion. Montagu emphasized that gene-frequency analysis
of traits would tell us more about the evolution of human
populations, arguing that the omelet conception of racial
mixing was totally artificial and did nothing to explain
the origins and consequences of the differences between
populations. Since men were all originally gatherer-hunters,
wherever they were, the environmental challenges faced by
different populations tended to be very similar; hence,
one would not expect mental differences. This theory, as
set forth in an article coauthored with the geneticist Theodosius
Dobzhansky, subsequently became generally accepted by anthropologists.
Montagu was also asked to draw up the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization's Statement on Race
in 1950.
In addition to his work on race, Montagu was among the first
to present a number of views, since widely accepted, on
such familiar social and psychological themes as aggression
and war, social factors in crime, women's rights, psychoanalysis
and psychiatry in anthropology, love, home birth and prenatal
care, AfroAmerican studies, sociobiology, birth order, privacy,
and even smoking and natural foods. In these and other works
Montagu was always a strong advocate of gene-environment
interactionism, stressing that heredity is not biologically
given in the genes, and that man's constitution is a dynamic
process arising out of the interaction between his unique
experiential history and the constraints and potential encoded
in his genetic material.
This interactionist
stance allowed Montagu to be an effective exponent of the
often polarized realms of cultural and biological anthropology.
He could adduce evidence on behalf of the biosocial nature
of man while at the same time showing the virtually limitless
capacity of education and culture to shape that very nature.
His interactionism attempted to reconcile these two poles,
not only in terms of the history of the dual influences
acting during one man's lifetime, but also those in mankind's
evolutionary history. Montagu emphasized social cooperation
and love as critical selectional factors in evolution—ideas
that considerably predated the sociobiological preoccupation
with altruism in the late 1970s.
Other works by
Montagu had fewer social repercussions, but still represented
important contributions to anthropology. "Coming Into Being
Among the Australian Aborigines" is one of the classic works
on this subject and continues to be a useful source, treating
such topics as awareness of the facts of maternity and patemity
and the significance of ritual sexual mutilation. This was
not only a pioneer study which served to stimulate many
students and research workers, but its approach systematized
a field which, aside from Bronislaw Malinowski's Sexual
Life of Savages, had been only vaguely and poorly understood
previously. In addition, Montagu's work on the adolescent
sterility period solved a perplexing problem encountered
by many anthropologists—most notably by Malinowski
in his studies on the Trobrianders—that although adolescent
girls engaged in extensive premarital sexual relations,
they rarely became pregnant.
Ashley
Montagu, Wheelock College Commencement Speakers,
1953. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print
Department.
Montagu's doctorate
in anthropology was conferred by Columbia University in
1937. His early academic and intellectual background had
been as richly varied as his later contributions. After
a long-standing childhood interest in skulls, fossils, and
medical matters, fostered by encouragement from the anatomist-anthropologist
Arthur Keith, of the Royal College of Surgeons in London,
Montagu enrolled at 17 years of age at University College
London, for a diplomate in psychology, with a view to transfernng
to anthropology. Montagu became Malinowski's first student,
and surely bears the latter's imprint (along with an even
stronger one, some feel, from his other great teacher, Franz
Boas); but he soon diverged in favor of a strong biological
orientation, particularly in matters pertaining to psychology.
(Montagu was one of the first exponents of Sigmund Freud
in anthropology, although he later became a critic of the
psychoanalytic approach.)
C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of
Michigan, feels that "Montagu has done more than anyone
except Margaret Mead to bring the findings of anthropology
to the attention of the public." Weston LaBarre of Duke
University describes him as "the most prolific and effective
popularizer of humanistic subjects since H. G. Wells." Not
all anthropologists take such a favorable view of popularization,
however, and this may have adversely affected Montagu's
own intradisciplinary popularity; yet more than one of his
colleagues have suggested that this negative attitude may
well reflect sour grapes
.Popularization
has not been the only factor diminishing Montagu's professional
popularity. According to Marcus Goldstein of Tel Aviv University:
"The reason for this, in my opinion, has been his forthrightness,
his fearless and blunt attack on works and issues that he
felt were scientifically wrong, and perhaps more important,
were or could be socially harmful. Two examples come to
mind. At one of the early meetings of the American Association
of Physical Anthropologists, he sharply criticized Prof.
E. A. Hooton's work on a typology of U.S. criminals, a virtual
return to Lombrosoism. One must remember in this connection
that Hooton was the revered teacher of nearly all of the
young physical anthropologists of the day! In a subsequent
paper co-authored with Robert Merton, Hooton's premises
and methodology were systematically demonstrated to be invalid.
At another meeting of the Association, Montagu proposed
a motion to censure the German anthropologists who were
patently misusing the discipline to conform with the vicious
Nazi ideology. The motion was defeated, yet the following
year the very man instrumental for its defeat proposed the
same motion, which passed unanimously. "
The
final arbiter as to the value of popularization will of
course have to be history. Whether in the mid- to later
part of the twentieth century, with its unprecedently well-educated
and well-informed general population and its pervasive and
powerful communications media it was still possible for
scientists, particularly social scientists, to pursue their
research, particularly on socially sensitive or otherwise
significant topics, without simultaneously assuming an advocates,
or at least an exegete's role vis-à-vis the educated
populace, is an empirical question that only the actual
turn of events can answer. In any case, it is clear that
Ashley Montagu cast his lot with the new dual role of the
social scientist, and fulfilled both aspects of it admirably.
From
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/archives/Psycoloquy/2000.V11/0018.html
The
following article, published in The
Christian Register issue of November 1952, is prefaced
by noting that Ashley Montagu was responible for drafting
the statement on race for UNESCO, 1949-1950. The article
identifies Dr. Montagu as a member of the Princeton Unitarian
Fellowship.
The
"Go-Getter" Spirit
Competition thrives on insecurity, works against
democracy
By M. F. Ashley Montagu
It
is often urged that America owes its greatness to the spirit
of competition which characterizes its citizens. "Rugged
American individualism," "the go-getter spirit," and other
such phrases, give implicit recognition to this idea. Commerce,
it is said, through competition, is the life-blood of a
nation.
These ideas,
I am going to suggest, are erroneous, tragically erroneous.
I am going to suggest that such greatness as America has
achieved it has achieved not through competition but in
spite of competition; that the life-blood of a nation is
not commerce through competition, but social welfare through
cooperation; that, indeed, commerce through competition
can be the death of a nation, and that only through the
dominance of the cooperative motive can any people or nation
survive. Finally, that in a competitive society freedom
of inquiry is not genuinely possible; that freedom of inquiry
is proportional to the development of cooperation within
any society, in which there is an absence of dictatorship
of any sort, and the person is free to arrive at and express
his own judgments without fear of punishment, and in the
expectation of the desire in his fellows to understand.
In view of the
fact that there exists, at the present time, a widespread
belief in the innate nature of competition, that is to say,
that competition is a form of behavior with which every
organism is born, and that this is particularly true of
man, it will be necessary to discuss such facts, with which
scientific studies have recently acquainted us, which throw
light upon this notion.
Just when the
idea of the innate competitiveness of man came into being
I have not the least idea. It is at least several thousand
years old, and was probably in circulation long before The
Old Testament came to be written. It is quite possible that
the idea of the innate competitiveness of man is as old
as man himself. There are some existing non-literate cultures,
such as the Zuni of the American Southwest, which abhor
competition and in which the idea of innate competitiveness
is non-existent. It is quite possible that many prehistoric
peoples held similar notions. But here we are largely in
the field of conjecture. One thing, however, is certain,
and that is the scientific validation of the idea of the
innate competitiveness of man was provided in the nineteenth
century by Darwin and his supporters, and particularly by
Spencer and the whole school of Social Darwinists who followed
his lead.
Man's
Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Ashley Montagu
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1942; Oxford University
Press paperback, 1974). The
Natural Superiority of Women, Ashley Montagu (New York:
Macmillan 1953; revised edition, 1974).
It
is often urged that America owes its greatness to the spirit
of competition which characterizes its citizens. "Rugged
American individualism," "the go-getter spirit," and other
such phrases, give implicit recognition to this idea. Commerce,
it is said, through competition, is the life-blood of a
nation.