Book ID: CBB544344509

From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology (2019)

unapi

Anderson, Mark (Author)


Stanford University Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 272
Language: English

From Boas to Black Power investigates how U.S. cultural anthropologists wrote about race, racism, and "America" in the 20th century as a window into the greater project of U.S. anti-racist liberalism. Anthropology as a discipline and the American project share a common origin: their very foundations are built upon white supremacy, and both are still reckoning with their racist legacies. In this groundbreaking intellectual history of anti-racism within twentieth-century cultural anthropology, Mark Anderson starts with the legacy of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and continues through the post-war and Black Power movement to the birth of the Black Studies discipline, exploring the problem "America" represents for liberal anti-racism. Anderson shows how cultural anthropology contributed to liberal American discourses on race that simultaneously bolstered and denied white domination. From Boas to Black Power provides a major rethinking of anthropological anti-racism as a project that, in step with the American racial liberalism it helped create, paradoxically maintained white American hegemony. Anthropologists influenced by radical political movements of the 1960s offered the first sustained challenge to that project, calling attention to the racial contradictions of American liberalism reflected in anthropology. Their critiques remain relevant for the discipline and the nation.

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Reviewed By

Review Nicholas Barron (2021) Review of "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology". History of the Human Sciences (pp. 362-373). unapi

Multimedia Object Lachlan Summers; Anderson, Mark (2020) Mark D. Anderson, “From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology” (Stanford UP, 2019). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB544344509/

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Authors & Contributors
Morris-Reich, Amos
Anderson, Mark
Millar, Krystina
King, Charles
Mendes, Gabriel N.
Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy
Concepts
Science and race
Cultural anthropology
Racism
Anthropology
Science and culture
African Americans and science
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, early
19th century
Modern
Enlightenment
21st century
Places
United States
New York City (New York, U.S.)
Germany
Americas
Chicago (Illinois, U.S.)
Institutions
Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic
Columbia University
American Museum of Natural History, New York
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