The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences

If. .. we were to treat Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa as utopia , not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate. Several writers have commented on the " radical changes " that occurred in the goals and methods of the social sciences consequent to the entry of Jews to notes that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the emergence of any new empirical data. He also notes that Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other biological perspectives in 1 In sociology, the advent of Jewish intellectuals in the pre–World War II period resulted in " a level of politicization unknown to sociology's founding fathers. It is not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but also that the sense of America as a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of conflicting definitions " (Horowitz 1993, 75). In the post–World War II period, sociology " became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes abounded: one did not need the synagogue, the minyan [i.e., the minimum number of Jews required for a communal religious service] was to be found in sociology departments; or, one did not need a sociology of Jewish life, since the two had become synonymous " (Horowitz 1993, 77). Indeed, the ethnic conflict within American sociology parallels to a remarkable degree the ethnic conflict in American anthropology that is a theme of this chapter. Here the