Ashley Montagu

Ashley Montagu (June 28 1905 - November 26, 1999), was an English anthropologist and humanist who popularized issues such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development.

Biography

Born June 28, 1905 in London's East End as Israel Ehrenberg, he later changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu" and went by Ashley Montagu, Montagu decided in childhood to learn everything he could to understand how some children could grow up to be so injurious to new children. He read whatever he could find in libraries and bookstores, focusing on physical and human sciences, and early on astonishing his teachers with his intellectual virtuosity. His interests gradually centered on the manifestations and human significance of love, the underlying focus much of his later work.

At twelve, Ashley summoned the courage to make an impromptu visit to celebrated British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith, Curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, to request identification of an unfamiliar skull found in an excavation. The scientist was so impressed with the boy that he spent several hours with him and invited him to return at will to study anatomical collections at the museum he directed. The two remained friends for the rest of Keith's life.

In 1922, at the University of London (and later at the University of Florence) Montagu became a student of psychology and anthropology. As an example of his incomparable gifts, he was invited to present to the Critical Society at University College a pioneering course on psychoanalysis. In 1936, at Columbia University he earned a Ph.D. in anthropology under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.

For twenty years Ashley taught anatomy in American medical schools, and then for six years he served as the chairman of the department of Anthropology at Rutgers. Resigning in 1949 to live in Princeton, he devoted himself to writing and teaching as visiting guest lecturer at such universities as Princeton, UC Santa Barbara, and Harvard, continuing to make signal scientific contributions while simultaneously becoming the most popular writer and lecturer on the human sciences.

Montagu is best known for his argument that aggression is not a natural human drive and for having discredited “race” as a specious and dangerous concept in the social sciences. Two appropriate quotes from Ashley Montagu are self-explanatory in this context: "The cultured man is an artist, an artist in humanity" and "Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason" (Montagu 1942).

For his achievement, Montagu was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award of The American Anthropological Association and the Darwin Award of the Society of American Physical Anthropologists. As for the latter, the power of his ideas about the health of babies and mothers (childbirth at home, breast-feeding, close physical contact) in his books and lectures, and his witty personality in his television appearances, as a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and The Phil Donahue Show, and in print, such as The Ladies Home Journal, is attested to by the fact that the formerly uncommon name "Ashley" has in the last 30 years become one of the most frequently chosen names for girls of several major ethnic groups.

Ashley Montagu died of unexplained causes in 1999.

Work

In addition to his scientific prowess, Ashley Montagu was a dedicated and articulate social critic, concerned with bringing the findings of the social and biological sciences to bear upon the betterment of man's lot, while subjecting some of those very findings to critical social scrutiny. His accomplishments in these three domains, the scientific, the public-educational, and the socio-ethical, will be treated as a unity in what follows, in accordance with what was clearly the spirit of the program that guided his life's work.

One of his more memorable quotes encompasses his attitude towards the human work-span:

It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison. (Montagu 1947)

And his perceptive wit is also revealed in his maxim: The idea is to die young as late as possible (Montagu 1956).

Although Montagu's contributions span a variety of fields in the social and biological sciences— including work on problems as diverse as Australian aborigines' concepts of sexuality and reproduction, the measurement of internal anatomical landmarks on the heads of intact living human beings, adolescent infertility in girls, the role of cooperative behavior in evolution, and the biological and cultural factors in aggression and in gender roles—his principal legacy will indisputably consist of his critical analysis of the concept of race.

Analysis of the concept of race

The problem of race preoccupied Montagu from the beginning of his intellectual career (Montagu 1925; 1926), more than a quarter century before the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483), which heralded the civil rights activism that has since followed in America. Montagu's work played a role in that Supreme Court decision, as well as in shaping the social consciousness that ushered it in and has attended it ever since.

If some of his ideas, as they are discussed below, appear to be relatively uncontroversial and a matter of common knowledge and assent, let it not be forgotten that that very knowledge and assent is in some measure due to the work and efforts of Montagu, and that he was also forcefully expounding those ideas at an earlier time, when they were far from accepted, and indeed being brutally violated on a scale unparallelled in human history (Montagu 1939, 1941a).

Montagu's papers on race in the late 1930s, culminating in his book "Man's Most Dangerous Myth; The Fallacy of Race" ( Montagu 1942) and followed by a series of works (including Montagu 1951; 1964; 1975), had the effect of upsetting the traditional concept of race accepted by most anthropologists in that it challenged the reality of anything corresponding to that notion.

Montagu emphasized that gene-frequency analysis of traits would tell us more about the evolution of human populations, arguing that the omelette conception of racial mixing was totally artificial and did nothing to explain the origins and consequences of the differences between populations.

Since men were all originally gatherer-hunters, wherever they were, the environmental challenges faced by different populations tended to be very similar; hence, one would not expect mental differences. This theory, as set forth in an article co-authored with the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1947), subsequently became generally accepted by anthropologists. Montagu was also asked to draw up the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations Statement on Race (1951) in 1950.

Cultural and biological anthropology

This interactionist stance allowed Montagu to be an effective exponent of the often polarized realms of cultural and biological anthropology. He could adduce evidence on behalf of the biosocial nature of man ( Montagu 1956) while at the same time showing the virtually limitless capacity of education and culture to shape that very nature ( Montagu 1962).

His interactionism attempted to reconcile these two poles, not only in terms of the history of the dual influences acting during one man's lifetime, but also those in mankind's evolutionary history.

Another Montagu’s quote explains his feeling towards this problem:

“……Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof…..” ( Montagu 1962 ).

Montagu emphasized social cooperation and love ( Montagu 1953a; 1974) as critical selectional factors in evolution — ideas that considerably predated the sociobiological preoccupation with altruism (in the new inclusive fitness sense) in the late 1970s.

Anthropometry

Montagu also worked on technical problems in anthropometry. He established certain craniometric reference points on the scalp and devised measuring instruments to determine homologous points on the underlying skull in living subjects (1960). His anatomical work on nonhuman primates and on fossils culminated in the publication of one of the earliest textbooks of physical anthropology ( Montagu 1945), which continued for a long time to be a widely used and authoritative work on the subject.

Montagu's other texts include reference works on heredity ( Montagu 1959) and anatomy and physiology (Montagu & Steen 1959), an excellent biography of Edward Tyson (1943), and a large variety of elegant and informative books written for the educated layman.

Other works

Other works by Montagu had fewer social repercussions, but still represented important contributions to anthropology. "Coming Into Being Among the Australian Aborigines" ( Montagu 1937) is one of the classic works on this subject and continues to be a useful source, treating such topics as awareness of the facts of maternity and paternity and the significance of ritual sexual mutilation. This was not only a pioneer study which served to stimulate many students and research workers, but its approach systematized a field which, aside from Bronislaw Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages ( Montagu 1929), had been only vaguely and poorly understood previously.

In addition, Montagu's work on the adolescent sterility period ( Montagu 1946a) solved a perplexing problem encountered by many anthropologists — most notably by Malinowski in his studies on the Trobrianders (1929) — that although adolescent girls engaged in extensive premarital sexual relations, they rarely became pregnant.

Legacy

The world demands specialists. But to fit their fragmentary perspectives into a coherent whole, we urgently need generalists. A world-renowned specialist (anthropology), Ashley Montagu, by transforming himself into the foremost integrator and interpreter of all sciences, also has become the most significant generalist of the last millenium.

The same man who worked out the embryology of the upper jaw (now employed by surgeons everywhere to repair cleft palate) has also in his 50 published books contributed epochally to practically every major social movement of the last 70 years.

Montagu garnered many awards and honors throughout his life. Only a few years ago he received the Charles Darwin Award for Lifetime Achieve- ment from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA), shortly after the award was established. It was presented at the 1994 AAPA meeting by his long-time friend and co-author, Loring Brace. The following year, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.

C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, feels that "…..Montagu has done more than anyone except Margaret Mead to bring the findings of anthropology to the attention of the public….." Weston LaBarre of Duke University describes him as "…….the most prolific and effective popularizer of humanistic subjects since H. G. Wells……."

There will never be another like Ashley Montagu. He was a man of fascinating complexity, perhaps the last great general anthropological scholar, a tireless fighter for the best (and a victim of the worst) of what academics and the human sciences have to offer, and certainly the most quotable anthropologist of all time ( Jonathan Marks, UCB ).

References
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Montagu, A., "The Colour Question", Vincula (Journal of the University of Londons Student Union) Dec. 14: 66 only, 1925
Montagu, A.,"Intelligence Tests and the Negro in America", Wasu, Journal of the West African Students Union of Great Britain 1, no. 1, p.57.,1926
Montagu, A., Coming Into Being Among the Australian Aborigines, ( foreword by B. Malinowski ), Dutton, New York 1937, 1938
Montagu, A., "Race and Kindred Delusions", Equality 1, no. 7,pp. 20-24, 1939
Montagu, A., "The Socio-biology of Man", Scientific Monthly 50, p. 483-490, 1940
Montagu,A.,and Robert Merton, "Crime and the Anthropologist", American Anthropologist, 42, pp.384-408, 1940
Montagu, A., "The Concept of Race in the Light of Genetics", Journal of Heredity 32, pp. 243-247, l941a
Montagu, A., "Nescience, Science, and Psycho-analysis", Psychiatry 4, pp.45-60, 1941
Montagu, A., Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Columbia Univ. Press, New York 1942 ( A paperback edition was published in 1974 by Oxford University Press )
Montagu, A., Edward Tyson, M.D., F.R.S., (1650-1708), and the Rise of Comparative Anatomy in England, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia 1943
Montagu, A., "The African Origins of the American Negro and His Ethnic Composition", Scientific Monthly 58, pp. 58-65, 1944
Montagu, A., An Introduction to Physical Anthropology, Thomas, Springfield, Ill, 1945
Montagu, A., Adolescent Sterility, Thomas, Springfield, Ill. 1946a
Montagu, A., "Racism, the Bomb, and the Peoples of the World", Asia and the Americas,46 pp.533-535, 1946b
Montagu, A., and T. Dobzhanski, "Natural Selection and the Mental Capacities of Mankind", Science 105 , pp. 587-590, 1947
Montagu, A., "Sex-order of Birth and Personality", Am. Journal of Orthopsychiatry 18, pp.351-353, 1948
Montagu, A., Statement on Race, 3d ed. Oxford Univ. Press, New York 1951, 1972
Montagu, A., (editor) The Meaning of Love, Julian, New York 1953a
Montagu, A., The Natural Superiority of Women,( Rev. ed. ) Macmillan, New York 1953b, (1974 )
Montagu, A., The Biosocial Nature of Man, Grove Press, New York 1956
Montagu, A., Human Heredity, World Publishing, New York, 1959
Montagu, A., and E. Steen, Anatomy and Physiology, 2 vols., Barnes & Noble, New York 1959
Montagu, A., A Handbook of Anthropometry, Thomas, Springfield, Ill. 1960
Montagu, A., (ed.) Culture and the Evolution of Man, Oxford Univ. Press, New York 1962
Montagu, A., The Concept of Race, Free Press, New York 1964
Montagu, A., Culture and Human Development, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J 1974
Montagu, A., (ed.) Race and IQ, Oxford Univ. Press, New York 1975
Montagu, A., The Nature of Human Aggression, Oxford U. Press, New York 1976

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