Intelligenz und Rasse: Franz Boas' psychologischer Antirassismus zwischen Amerika und Deutschland, 1920-1942

Abstract

The German (Jewish)-American cultural anthropologist Franz Boas’s impact on a number of academic disciplines—from ethnology and linguistics to biology and psychology—is well known. Less well-studied are Boas’s contributions to a broader transatlantic dialogue on the link between heredity and intelligence. In her impeccably-researched, carefully-argued new monograph, Alexa Geisthövel employs Boas’s research on intelligence testing as a case study for understanding the similarities and differences in scientific practice and (anti-)racist thinking in Germany and the United States. After a helpful introduction, the book’s next three chapters analyse the American discourse on race psychology in the interwar period. Chapter 2 suggests that America was the epicentre of psychometric testing during the first third of the twentieth century, and is replete with lively debates on the connection between race, culture, and intelligence. Before the First World War, many American psychometricians believed that race was a decisive factor in determining human intelligence. In contrast, Boas and ‘anti-racist’ colleagues such as Otto Klineberg suggested through a number of empirical studies that it was the interaction of the individual with the cultural and social environment that determined intellectual development.

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