Boasian cultural anthropologists, interdisciplinary initiatives, and the making of personality and culture during the interwar years

Abstract

This chapter will examine the manner in which a group of major American cultural anthropologists came to play a key role in formulating and promoting the personality and culture approach in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. It will thus focus on the group of Boasian cultural anthropologists - namely, Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, and, perhaps more significantly, his students Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead - who created and elaborated the emerging field, in part as the result of their participation in the interdisciplinary initiatives of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Rockefeller philanthropic organizations during the interwar years. Accordingly, the chapter will deal with various projects, networks, and seminars and conferences sponsored and fostered by the Rockefeller foundations and the SSRC in which the Boasian anthropologists participated; the role of Lawrence K. Frank and Robert S. Lynd in fostering SSRC and Rockefellersponsored initiatives will be indicated. The trajectory of the culture concept as elaborated by the Boasian anthropologists will also be examined. The chapter will argue that this group, with the encouragement of Frank and Lynd, viewed personality and culture as an interdisciplinary endeavor that would integrate the social sciences. It would also, they hoped, elaborate an approach to reform and social engineering oriented toward altering the cultural patterns associated with child rearing and education. It was thus affiliated with what has been called by J. Meyerowitz the "biopolitics of child rearing." The chapter will offer a critical assessment of this approach.