Language, race, and cultural relativity in Boas and Whorf

Language as Mirror and Prism

If one had to pick a single attribute that defines us as human, our ability to talk to each other must surely be among the top choices. Certainly there is our opposable human thumb and our use of sophisticated tools, and these would also be possible choices. But most people can imagine a world in which they had to recreate all of the tools that they need. And certainly there are thousands upon thousands of individuals who are missing one or both thumbs (or hands) and are still essentially human. But if one were to find oneself suddenly without language (or without another person to speak to) what would this feel like? Would it not be as if one had been hollowed out? As if one's essential humanity scooped away? In the folktales of the world, even ghosts can still speak. For what kind of afterlife could follow this life that would not be made terrible by the loss of words?

And yet, despite the centrality of language to our understanding of what it means to be human (as well as what it means to be a member of a culture), we tend to accept language with relatively little curiosity. It is like air and gravity, both vital and yet fundamentally invisible. We are not inclined to ask where language comes from or how it shapes us.

Reading the work of Franz Boas on language and its connections to race as it was understood and parsed at the time alongside Benjamin Lee Whorf's model of the ways in which reality is created, influenced, reified, experienced, and recreated through the syntax and grammar of our first language(s) is a revelatory experience. This is true not in the least because it requires one to question the most basic ideas about language. Does one come into the world programmed to speak? How much difference does language make to our understanding of ourselves as human -- and how central was it to our evolution as a species? Does the language we speak influence the way we see the world? Does it do more than influence it? How would this process work if one is bilingual? This paper explores two essays, one by each scholar, first presenting a summary and assessment of each separately and then looking at the two in conjunction with each other.

Franz Boas: Race and Language

Boas did not begin as an anthropologist. Indeed, beginning in the discipline that he would eventually be most closely connected with was not an option available to him as it was not yet established as a fully recognized discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus his own intellectual career began in the hard sciences -- in physics -- before shifting to geography and then anthropology. It is important to remember the hard science background of Boas's work because there are fundamentally scientific principles running through his work.

Boas became involved in the evolutionary debates of his time (Herbert, 2001, p. 382). He was familiar with both Darwin's theory of evolution and Lamarck's model of evolution. Neither theory was at the time entirely satisfying, since Darwin (lacking the genetic knowledge that the twentieth century would bring to scientists) could not explain the mechanism of inheritance (and thus of natural selection) and Lamarck's idea that traits acquired during an individual's lifetime could be passed along to offspring was also intellectually weak.

Of the two models, however, Boas favored Darwin's. He was attracted to the idea that all humans were bound together, that as a species we are all fundamentally connected to each other. He saw cultural and thus linguistic variations as much less important than the unified, universal origin that we all share as humans (Herbert, 2001, p. 384). In presenting his writings on different peoples, different cultures, and different languages, however, Boas was to some extent caught between his beliefs about the unity of humanity and contemporary ideas about race that transformed the cultural distinctions of race into purely biological ones. As he writes in the introduction to The Handbook of American Indian Languages:

When Columbus started on his journey to reach the Indies, sailing westward, and discovered the shores of America, he beheld a new race of man, different in type, different in culture, different in language, from any known before that time. This race resembled neither the European types, nor the negroes, nor the better-known races of southern Asia. As the Spanish conquest of America pro- gressed, other peoples of our continent became known to the invaders, and all showed a certain degree of outer resemblance, which led the Spaniards to designate them by the term "Indios" (Indians), the inhabitants of the country which was believed to be part of India. Thus the mistaken geographical term came to be applied to the inhabitants of the New World; and owing to the contrast of their appearance to that of other races, and the peculiarities of their cultures and their languages, they came to be in time considered as a racial unit.

For Boas, humanity was both fundamentally unified and fundamentally differentiated, which is certainly a fair understanding of the connections and discontinuities among different human populations. And while his understanding of race may seem overly simplified (and in many ways suspect) from the advantage of the twenty-first century, Boas himself clearly struggled to come to a more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which physical appearance and cultural attributes were related to each other.

It is hard for us to fathom this, but a number of scholars of Boas's time argued that there was a one-to-one correlation between physical form (primarily skin color, but also other attributes such as hair color and texture), cultural forms, and linguistic forms. The following (also from the Introduction to the Handbook) describes the then-common attitudes about the connections between race and language:

The most typical attempt to classify mankind from a consideration of both anatomical and linguistic points-of-view is that of Friederich Muller, who takes as the basis of his primary divisions the form of hair, while all the minor divisions are based on linguistic considerations.

This is such a bizarre understanding of the connections between race and language that it is a great relief that Boas immediately goes on to reject it. History, he argues, is replete with examples of people who change language without changing physical type. Italians look remarkably like their Roman ancestors, even though Italian is clearly distinct as a language from Latin. American blacks of the time looked very similar to their African forebears, but they spoke English or French like their white neighbors.

In making this distinctions between race and language, Boas was actually remarking on the exact same distinction that exists between Darwinian and Lamarkian evolutionary models, although Boas himself does not make this explicit in these terms. But he does clearly understand that some traits (like skin color) are biological and inherited (thus siding with Darwin) and that others (like language) are learned from the people with whom one grows up (Herbert, 2001, p. 386).

If this is true [that there is no one-to-one correlation between race and language), then it is obvious that attempts to classify mankind, based on the present distribution of type, language, and culture, must lead to different results, according to the point-of-view taken; that a classification based primarily on type alone will lead to a system which represents, more or less accurately, the blood relationships of the people, which do not need to coincide with their cultural relationships; and that, in the same way, classifications based on language and culture do not need at all to coincide with a biological classification.

Another way of expressing this is that race is (while in many ways a cultural construct) biological and genetic in the sense that skin color is inherited. We know this now, just as Darwin knew it to be true even before Watson and Crick. But culture, including language, can legitimately be seen as being passed on in Lamarckian fashion: Language is an acquired trait that we can pass on to our offspring.

In other words, Boas's understanding of the ways in which biological inheritance (especially vis-a-vis race) is different from cultural transmission is an educated, reasonable one that we find to be still perfectly serviceable today. However, later in the Handbook he demonstrates how different his concept of race and its relationship to language is from both Whorf's and current scholarship. Like Whorf, Boas believes that there is a connection between thought and language, but Boas also believes that the American Indian languages that he is writing about are inferior to languages like English -- and they are inferior because of the brains of the Indians.

He writes:

First of all, it may be well to discuss the relation between language and thought. It has been claimed that the conciseness and clearness of thought of a people depend to a great extent upon their language.

The ease with which in our modem European languages we express wide abstract ideas by a single term, and the facility with which wide generalizations are cast into the frame of a simple sentence, have been claimed to be one of the fundamental conditions of the clearness of our concepts, the logical force of our thought, and the precision with which we eliminate in our thoughts irrelevant details. Apparently this view has much in its favor.

When we compare modern English with some of those Indian languages which are most concrete in their formative expression, the contrast is striking. When we say "The eye is the organ of sight, the Indian may not be able to form the expression the eye, but may have to define that the eye of a person or of an animal is meant. Neither may the Indian be able to generalize readily the abstract idea of an eye as the representative of the whole class of objects... (p. 64).

It does not seem to occur to Boas anywhere in the Handbook that such a way of talking about the world might not arise because the mind of the American Indians that he is writing about is "primitive" but rather because he or she is seeing the world in a very different way.

Boas would no doubt have argued that this is only a single truth, one that can be measured and experienced and agreed upon by reasonable men. (And, perhaps, some women.) But the idea that culture, and specifically language, actively shapes what we see in the world does not enter into his model. Indians speak differently from you and me, he argues, because they are primitive, simple people who do not have to bother themselves overly with abstract thoughts. That their world might be more complex than his own is not an idea that Boas considers. Moreover, even as he has rejected the idea that language is based in the biology of race, he teeters on the edge of believing that there is a connection between the degree of "primitiveness" and race as defined as biological.

Boas and Darwin (and Chomsky) -- and Whorf and Lamarck

Boas argued with perfect correctness that language does not and has never existed in a perfectly correlative relationship with race. He understood that languages change over time, although it is also true that he did not understand as well as we do how both the genetic make-up of racial groups changes along with cultural definitions of race. He did, however, believe that there was a general correlation between primitive peoples and primitive languages. Primitive people thought and spoke in more basic, more concrete terms than educated white men like himself. It is possible that he thought that primitive "man" might someday become more sophisticated, more abstract in thought. But for the time being, there were intellectual races with their intellectual languages and primitive peoples with their primitive languages.

In key ways, we can see that Boas is making an essentially Darwinian argument about the relationship between language and biology. (Williams, 1996, p. 81). Although he does not support the universal grammar argument that Chomsky will make (since this argument requires that one believe that all races are intellectually and culturally equal in sophistication and complexity), but he is arguing like Chomsky that the reality of the world in which humans live is constant and predictable. It is objective, built upon facts on the ground that are absolutely real. These facts are something like grains of sand on a beach: They can be experienced individually or as a Gestalt-like whole. But each one of us sees them as discrete. Those of us who are "advanced" know more about beaches and sand and have more intricate ways of talking about them than do the primitives. But we are all walking along the same beach. This is true because, although Boas would not have put it this way I believe that he would have agreed with it, we are all born with the same basic biological apparatus.

Whorf could not agree more. He understood language in if we stretch the metaphor here just a bit what we can see as Lamarckian terms. Lamarck argued that giraffes are shaped by their own view of the world -- growing their necks if that seems to be the best strategy and keeping them short if that seems better. Whorf's view of language is not so reductionist, but it is parallel in that he believed that different members of the same species (in this case humans) will by the end of their lives have been fundamentally changed by their experiences. And at the very top of the list of the kinds of experiences that have the power to change us and the world we know ourselves to be living in are the deep structures of the languages we speak.