What was the significance of Franz Boas skull experiments?
Franz Boaz was a very prominent public intellectual, and he taught at Columbia and gave birth to a brand of anthropology that was labeled “cultural relativism.” Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neal Hurston were among the followers. But earlier he found himself in an unremarkable place and did remarkable things with it. He actually worked with the immigration office at Ellis Island, and had the opportunity to measure skulls of individuals in families – of which some of the siblings were born in Europe and some were born in the United States. It was assumed that different groups of Europeans – Slavs, Jews, Italian, Irish – that they had distinct skull types and shapes, and that these wouldn’t change with environmental circumstances; they were primordial. There was an Irish type, a Jewish type – all were types and races, and all unchanging. So if you knew that, you could then read into the skull certain characteristics such as intelligence. But what Boaz noticed and wrote about in t
