Lynn:++++++++++++OT+++++++++++
Was there a TV presenter in the US named Dick Calvert - a diminutive man, good talker, finished up on PBS. He once mentioned that as a freshman at Harvard he was required to pose for such a "record".
In a paper I wrote, I described Franz Boas as a "quartermaster sergeant zealously collecting facts", who not only institutionalised the quantitative approach in the US but also, through Sapir and others, in Canada too. I was criticising the poverty of its explanatory powers. (However, I learned in working closely with many aboriginal nations in Canda, that they had their own positive "reconstructive" use for many of the Boasian records of their societies and culture.)
So many in early academia in the US were of German immigrants that it is tempting to see in this fascination both with eugenics and evolution some of those origianl German preoccupations.
On the other hand, it might have been a huge rationalisaton of a scheme whereby frustrated University professors got to have a peek at their students. In Oxford, it is all rather less formal. "Moral turpitude" being a cause for dismissal, a new Don once asked a Master what qualified. "With Goats", he replied. |
