Boas’s book begins, ‘Proud of his wonderful achievements, civilised man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him.’34 This statement was something of a lure, designed to lull the reader into complacency. For Boas then set out to question – all but eradicate – the difference between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ man. In nearly three hundred pages, he gently built argument upon argument, fact upon fact, turning the conventional ‘wisdoms’ of the day upside-down. For example, psychometric studies had compared the brains of Baltimore blacks with Baltimore whites and found differences in brain structure, in the relative size of the frontal and orbital lobes and the corpus callosum. Boas showed that there were equally great differences between the northern French and the French from central France. He conceded that the dimensions of the Negro skull were closer to those of apes than were the skulls of the ‘higher races,’ but argued that the white races were closer to apes because they were hairier than the Negro races, and had lips and limb proportions that were closer to other primates than were the corresponding Negroid features. He accepted that the average capacity of the skulls of Europeans was 1560 cc, of African Negroes 1405 cc, and of ‘Negroes of the Pacific’ 1460 cc. But he pointed out that the average cranial capacity of several hundred murderers had turned out to be 1580 cc.35 He showed that the ‘primitive’ races were quite capable of nonimpulsive, controlled behaviour when it suited their purposes; that their languages were just as highly developed, once you understood the languages properly; that the Eskimos, for example, had many more words for snow than anyone else – for the obvious reason that it mattered more to them. He dismissed the idea that because some languages did not have numerals above ten, as was true of certain native American tribes, this did not mean that members of those tribes could not count above ten in English once they had been taught to speak it.36
An important feature of Boas’s book was its impressive references. Anthropological, agricultural, botanical, linguistic, and geological evidence was used, often from German and French language journals beyond the reach of his critics. In his final chapter, ‘Race Problems in the United States,’ he surveyed Lucca and Naples in Italy, Spain and Germany east of the Elbe, all of which had experienced large amounts of immigration and race mixing and had scarcely suffered physical, mental, or moral degeneration.37 He argued that many of the so-called differences between the various races were in fact ephemeral. Quoting from his own research on the children of immigrants in the United States, he explained how within two generations at the most they began to conform, even in physical dimensions, to those around them, already arrived. He ended by calling for studies to be made about how immigrants and Negroes had adapted to life in America, how they differed as a result of their experiences from their counterparts in Europe or Africa or China who had not migrated. He said it was time to stop concentrating on studies that emphasised often imaginary or ephemeral differences. ‘The similarity of fundamental customs and beliefs the world over, without regard to race and environment, is so general that race [appears] … irrelevant,’ he wrote, and expressed the hope that anthropological findings would ‘teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilisation different from our own.’38
Boas’s book was a tour-de-force. He became very influential, leading anthropologists and the rest of us away from unilinear evolutionary theory and race theory and toward cultural history. His emphasis on cultural history helped to fashion what may be the single most important advance in the twentieth century in the realm of pure ideas: relativism. Before World War I, however, his was the only voice advancing such views. It was another twenty years before his students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in particular, took up the banner.
At the same time that Boas was studying the Kwakiutl Indians and the Eskimos, archaeologists were also making advances in understanding the history of native Americans. The thrust was that native Americans had a much more interesting culture and past than the race biologists had been willing to admit. This came to a head with the discoveries of Hiram Bingham, an historian with links to Yale.39
Born in Honolulu in 1875, Bingham came from a family of missionaries who had translated the Bible into some of the world’s most remote languages (such as Hawaiian). A graduate of Yale, with a Ph.D. from Harvard, he was a prehistorian with a love of travel, adventure, exotic destinations. This appetite led him in 1909 to Peru, where he met the celebrated historian of Lima, Carlos Romero, who while drinking coca tea with Bingham on the verandah of his house showed him the writings of Father de la Calancha, which fired Bingham’s imagination by describing to him the lost Inca city of Vilcabamba.40 Although some of the larger ancient cities of pre-Columbian America had been recorded in detail by the Spanish conquerors, it was not until the work of the German scholar Eduard Seler in the late 1880s and 1890s that systematic study of the region was begun. Romero kept Bingham enthralled with his account of how Vilcabamba – the lost capital of Manco Inca, the last great Inca king – had obsessed archaeologists, historians, and treasure hunters for generations.
It was, most certainly, a colourful tale. Manco Inca had taken power in the early sixteenth century when he was barely nineteen. Despite his youth, he proved a courageous and cunning opponent. As the Spanish, under the Pizarra brothers, made advances into the Inca lands, Manco Inca gave ground and retreated to more inaccessible hideouts, finally reaching Vilcabamba. The crunch came in 1539 when Gonzalo Pizarra led three hundred of ‘the most distinguished captains and fighting men’ in what was by sixteenth-century standards a massive assault. The Spaniards went as far as they could on horseback (horses had become extinct in America before the Spanish arrived).41 When they could go no farther as a mounted force, they left their animals with a guard and advanced on foot. Crossing the Urumbamba River, they wound their way up the valley of the Vilcabamba to a pass beyond Vitcos. By now, the jungle was so dense as to be all but impassable, and the Spaniards were growing nervous. Suddenly they encountered two new bridges over some mountain streams. The bridges were inviting, but their newness should have made Pizarro suspicious: it didn’t, and they were caught in an ambush. Boulders cascaded down on them, to be followed by a hail of arrows. Thirty-six Spaniards were killed, and Gonzalo Pizarro withdrew. But only temporarily. Ten days later, with a still bigger party, the Spaniards negotiated the bridges, reached Vilcabamba, and sacked it. By then, however, Manco Inca had moved on. He was eventually betrayed by Spaniards whose lives he had spared because they had promised to help him in the fight against Pizarro, but not before his cunning and courage had earned him the respect of the Spaniards.42 Manco Inca’s legend had grown over the intervening centuries, as had the mystery surrounding Vilcabamba. In fact, the city assumed even greater significance later in the sixteenth century after silver was discovered there. Then, in the seventeenth century, after the mines had been exhausted, it was reclaimed by the jungle. Several attempts were made in the nineteenth century to find the lost city, but they all failed.