The Intertwining of Culture and Nature:

Franz Boas, John Dewey, and Deweyan Strands

of American Anthropology

Gabriel Alejandro Torres Colón and Charles A. Hobbs

I. INTRODUCTION

Both anthropologists and philosophers have been concerned with under-

standing human experience, with the former studying similarities and dif-
ferences among humans across space and evolutionary time, and the latter
tackling questions spanning an array of affairs. Since the boundaries of
both disciplines roughly correspond to the limits of human experience and
imagination, it is somewhat surprising that there have not been more schol-
arly collaborations on the historical intersections of these modes of inquiry.
After all, contemporary conversations have developed between influential
figures in both disciplines.1
Historically, a quite striking association was that between Franz Boas
(1858–1942) and John Dewey (1859–1952), a relationship that has
remained largely unexamined.2 For over thirty years, Boas and Dewey were

1
See, e.g., Clifford Geertz’s Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophi-
cal Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 6; and Keith H. Basso and
Edward S. Casey, Sense of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996).
2
Notable exceptions are: Loren Goldman, ‘‘Dewey’s Pragmatism from an Anthropologi-
cal Point of View,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48 (2012): 1–30; and
Herbert Lewis, ‘‘Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology,’’ Current Anthropology 42
(2001): 381–94.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

intellectual and political allies at Columbia University, and even taught a

seminar together. Both had moved to New York from Chicago: Boas from
the Field Museum in 1896; Dewey from the University of Chicago in 1904.
Their collaboration lasted until Boas’s dramatic death at the University Fac-
ulty Club in the presence of Columbia anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Mar-
garet Mead, and Ralph Linton, as well as the guest of honor, Paul Rivet,
and Claude Lévi-Strauss.3
In this essay, we present our initial findings on the intellectual connec-
tions between Boasian and Deweyan thought, by exploring the relationship
between culture and nature both conceptually and historically. The relation-
ship is foregrounded by the critical place of experience in both the Boasian
and Deweyan projects. For Boas and early American anthropology, there was
a scientific imperative to carefully record the experience of different peoples
around the world. Boas’s development of the culture concept brought meth-
odological order to the understanding of meaningful experiences in different
societies. Likewise, for Dewey and much of ‘‘classical’’ American philosophy,
there was a reconceptualization of the very starting-point for inquiry, namely
that it should be lived experience itself. From this phenomenological perspec-
tive, Boas and Dewey situated their work in opposition to traditional anthro-
pological and philosophical models in which theory was the point of
departure. As such, both were insisting on the primacy of experience in their
respective disciplines and rejecting hierarchical approaches to inquiry.
There was an affinity between Boas and Dewey regarding to the primacy
of experience within the broader contexts of Euro-American scholarly cur-
rents in this era. Barbara Herrnstein Smith explains that in the early twentieth
century, and in certain quarters of the academy, intellectual life was marked
by ‘‘a continued radical questioning of positivist, realist, and universalist
views.’’4 There are examples of such critical interrogations of positivism in
Boas’s and Dewey’s incarnations of American anthropology and Ame-
rican philosophy, respectively. Challenging positivism, of course, was not a
straightforward intellectual task and involved a willingness to retain impor-
tant strands of nineteenth-century positivist thought. Perhaps these early

3
See, e.g., Patrick Wilcken’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (New York:
The Penguin Press, 2010), 139.
4
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘‘Relativism, Today and Yesterday’’ in Common Knowledge
13 (2007): 227–49, at 241. In support of this claim, Herrnstein Smith relies on Peter
Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘‘Objectivity Question’’ and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also H. Stuart Hughes,
Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); and Morton White, Science and Sentiment in
America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1972).

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

twentieth-century anthropological and philosophical reactions should be

envisioned as refinements or subtle intimations of positivism. In particular,
an engaged refinement of positivist thought can be seen in the manner by
which Boas and Dewey dealt with various strands of evolutionary thought.
Herbert S. Lewis has made a compelling case about the analogous
influence of Darwin on the early pragmatists and Boas. On one hand, prag-
matists such as Dewey and William James (1842–1910) applied the concept
of the tendency of organisms to adapt to nature to the tendency of humans
to adapt to the history of their culture as well as to the behavior of other
individuals.5 They viewed the aspect of variation as demonstrating ‘‘. . . that
cultural materials had undergone a sort of ‘trial by experience’ through
which behaviors that resulted in positive outcomes were ‘selected.’ ’’6 On
the other hand, Lewis explains that a major Boasian theme was ‘‘. . . the
tendency of people to do things, to act to develop new activities without
conscious design or awareness but then to invent secondary rationalizations
for them after the fact. . . .’’7 Boas expressed this by drawing from the
Darwinian metaphor of selective retention and blind variation.8 By placing
Boas within the same intellectual stream as pragmatism, Lewis suggests a
series of investigations into the intellectual history of Boasian anthropology
and American philosophy. Murray J. Leaf does the same by connecting
Boas to George Herbert Mead, who was, in turn, closely tied to Dewey’s
philosophy and was his colleague at the University of Chicago in the
1890s.9 Indeed, Lewis has suggested ‘‘. . . that Boas and his American con-
temporaries [such as Dewey] were exposed to the same general intellectual
trends at the time [i.e., early twentieth-century] . . . ,’’ and that while the
full extent of their mutual influence remains unclear, there are ‘‘direct links’’
between pragmatism and Boas.10 A contrasting assessment has been offered
by Dewey biographer Alan Ryan, who has expressed grave doubts that any
‘‘Deweyan strand’’ can be found in the work of anthropologists trained by
and following Boas.11 Here we agree with Lewis and disagree with Ryan.
We maintain that it is possible, and worthwhile, to follow the intellectual
convergence of these two respective disciplinary worldviews in various

5
Lewis, ‘‘Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology,’’ 384–86.
6
Ibid., 386.
7
Ibid., 387.
8
Ibid.
9
Murray J. Leaf, Man, Mind, and Science: A History of Anthropology (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1979), 188–90.
10
Lewis, ‘‘Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology,’’ 384—bracketed comments ours.
11
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1997), 167.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

directions, specifically in Boas’s theory of culture and refinement of ethnog-

raphy as a form of anthropological knowledge and in Deweyan philosophi-
cal strands in the development of American cultural anthropology. Rather
than a simple response to Ryan ours is a constructive inquiry into the rela-
tionship between American philosophy and anthropology.
In this essay, we intend to trace a number of Lewis’s ‘‘direct links.’’ We
argue that Dewey, influenced by Boas and early American anthropology,
made the first attempt to understand nature from a modern anthropological
perspective. First, we explain how Boas helped develop the culture concept,
which played a key role in the development of American cultural anthro-
pology and Dewey’s own understanding of experience. We also highlight
the conceptual status of nature in early anthropology in order to facilitate
a thorough discussion of how Dewey was instrumental in developing an
anthropological concept of nature. Finally, in support of our interpretation
of Dewey’s anthropology of nature, we conclude with a consideration of
how Dewey’s anthropological philosophy served as an inspiration for Ruth
Benedict (1887–1948), Gene Weltfish (1902–80), Alexander Lesser (1902–
82), and Leslie White (1900–1975), anthropologists who worked on quite
different projects with theoretical agendas that did not always overlap. We
maintain that Dewey’s influence in the work of these anthropologists dem-
onstrates how his philosophy of nature transcends any one anthropological
intellectual tradition.

II. BOAS, CULTURE, AND NATURE

Boas’s influence on Dewey can be narrowed down to the former’s ability to

provide ethnological data and analytical concepts that led to more sophisti-
cated claims about humanity. The anthropological study of ‘‘primitive’’
peoples allowed a more thorough understanding of human experience, and
Boas was at the forefront of American anthropology. Before reviewing
some of the key features of his anthropology, we call attention to the 1914/
1915 seminar co-taught by Boas and Dewey, the precise content of which,
regretfully, is not fully known. Abraham Edel and Elizabeth Flower report
that the title was ‘‘An examination of the evolutionary and historical meth-
ods in the study of the intellect.’’12 Robert Lowie recalled in 1956 that the

12
Abraham Adel and Elizabeth Flowers, Introduction to The Later Works of John
Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 7:
xv, n7.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

seminar was on ‘‘comparative ethics.’’13 In addition, in a letter from March

29, 1916, Boas outlined for Dewey a potential comparative research project
on the development of ethical concepts in various societies. From the outset,
Boas cast this research problem as ‘‘One of the most important . . . in order
to gain a satisfactory basis for ethical studies.’’14 This is a compelling reason
for why Boas would provide Dewey with a specific plan of action for a
comparative study of ethical belief systems. Boas specifies potential ethno-
logical sources in North America and Africa, speculates about who could
carry out such research, and provides estimates for research costs—
suggesting that whatever the exact content of the seminar, Boas and Dewey
were intellectually engaged. It is plausible to assume that the letter was
preceded by some extended conversations between Boas and Dewey about
how anthropological insights could inform a philosophy of ethics.15 Their
seminar is the most direct evidence of a convergence of ideas, and a brief
exploration of Boas’s anthropology should help us better understand Dew-
ey’s philosophy of nature.
Boas accepted Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and appreciated
the idea of variation and selective retention as a metaphor for cultural evo-
lution. But he rejected the assumption that ‘‘the same ethnological phenom-
ena are always due to the same causes.’’16 He objected to theories that
bypassed historical explanations and assumed universal evolutionary
stages. Note how in the following statement in his 1909 unpublished lecture
on ‘‘The Relation of Darwin to Anthropology,’’ Boas at once embraces
evolutionary theory, dismisses its expression in nineteenth-century social
evolutionary thought, and also advances a historical approach that is open
to the independent development of human culture:

The significance of parallel developments in different groups,

which is of importance for a clear understanding the history of the
animal series, is infinitely greater importance in the mental life of

13
Robert Lowie, ‘‘Reminiscences of Anthropological Currents in America Half a Century
Ago,’’ American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 995–1016, at 1012.
14
Franz Boas to John Dewey, March 29, 1916, in Franz Boas Papers, Box 21, available
at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
15
For a similar argument regarding the influence of Boas’s anthropology on Dewey’s
philosophy of education, see Thomas D. Fallace’s ‘‘John Dewey and the Savage Mind:
Uniting Anthropological, Psychological, and Pedagogical Thought, 1894–1902,’’ Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44 (2008): 335–49.
16
Franz Boas, ‘‘Methods of Cultural Anthropology,’’ in Race, Language, and Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1896] 1940): 273.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

man, and many of the traits that are apparently adequately inter-
preted by the theory of a line of mental for the whole human fam-
ily may be better interpreted as due to parallel but mental
development.17

As Lewis points out, the ‘‘independent mental development’’ of humans

is consistent with ‘‘Darwin’s key ideas of purposeless, undirected, ‘blind’
variation and selective retention.’’18 Furthermore, in the North American
academy, Boas advanced such investigation of groups’ ‘‘independent men-
tal development’’ through field-based ethnographic research. His—and his
students’—studies often focused on the historical development and spread
of cultural traits. Such an approach is now widely referred to as ‘‘historical
particularism.’’19 However, historical accounts differ about the source of
Boas’s historicity, which could be attributed to his early interest in natural
history, nineteenth-century German ethnology, and/or Wilhelm Dilthey’s
philosophy of history.20
Boas did not publish an explicit definition of culture until 1930: ‘‘Cul-
ture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the
reactions of the individuals as affected by the habits of the group in which
he lives, and the products of human activities as determined by those hab-
its.’’21 Yet for many years he had already worked with a functional defini-
tion, or understanding, as shown through the ways he employed the noun
‘‘culture’’ and the adjective ‘‘cultural.’’ George Stocking, Jr. has explored
Boas’s central role in the development of the modern relativistic notion of
culture. Critical in this development is the move that Boas made away from
the use of culture in its singular to its plural form.22 Boas’s notion of culture

17
Herbert Lewis has graciously provided us with a copy of Boas’s lecture. See Lewis’s
‘‘Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology’’ for a detailed analysis of this lecture.
18
Lewis, ‘‘Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology,’’ 387.
19
Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture
(New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968): 250–89.
20
Alexander Lesser, ‘‘Franz Boas,’’ in Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History
of Anthropology, ed. Sydel Silverman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981),
7–11; Clyde Kluckhohn and Olaf Prufer, ‘‘Influences during the Formative Years,’’ in The
Anthropology of Franz Boas, ed. Walter Goldschmidt (San Francisco: American Anthro-
pological Association, 1959), 4–28; George Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution:
Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968),
151–53.
21
Franz Boas, ‘‘Anthropology,’’ Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin R. A.
Seligman and Alvin Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 2: 73–110.
22
Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 195–233.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

is also universally experiential and politically progressive—universally

experiential because every society is assumed to have a culture, and politi-
cally progressive because a serious anthropological inquiry into the cultures
of primitive peoples necessarily challenged Western assumptions about the
lack of civilization, or inferior development, of non-Western peoples.23
Moreover, Boas was keenly aware of the participation of individuals in
cultural processes. For example, in a 1920 article on ‘‘The Methods of Eth-
nology,’’ he describes the problem of understanding the individual-societal
relationship as ‘‘one of the most important ones to be taken up in a study
of cultural changes.’’24 He was not just concerned with the collective history
of single groups, but also with a contextualized understanding of how
social environments both influence and are influenced by the individual.
Boas was in fact concerned with the ability of individuals to continue or
change cultural forms—a significant component of the progressive and lib-
eral democratic politics that Boas embraced. His attention to the individual
is especially clear when considering the nature and importance of the ethno-
graphic fieldwork that he and his students carried out in various societies.
It was the individual in culture, not abstractions of some collective of indi-
viduals, that served as the methodological cornerstone of Boasian inquiry
and the development of early American anthropology.
Boas’s conceptualization of the cultural universalized human experi-
ence is one according to which such experience is collective, context-
dependent, and inclusive of individual thought and communication—a
series of commitments that, as we shall see, are integral to Dewey’s work.
It was this ability of Boas and Dewey to understand individual differences
through a cultural prism that solidified the intellectual grounds upon which
both men stood in making their public calls for social justice. With their
models of experience and inquiry, Dewey and Boas would agree, for exam-
ple, that differentials in the attainment of ‘‘civilization’’ by respective
‘‘races’’ were problems to be solved, or at least ameliorated, rather than
merely accepted in terms of biological notions of immutable racial differ-
ence.
However, regarding the concept of nature, Boas and early American

23
E.g., Regna Darnell, ‘‘Franz Boas: Scientist and Public Intellectual,’’ in Visionary
Observers: Anthropological Inquiry and Education, ed. Jill B. R. Cherneff and Eve Hoch-
wald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 1–23; Stephen J. Whitfield, ‘‘Franz
Boas: The Anthropologist as a Public Intellectual,’’ Society 47 (2010): 430–38.
24
Franz Boas, Race, Language, and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1940), 285.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

anthropology did not have a marked influence on Dewey’s understanding.

This lack of intellectual impression has less to do with fundamental differ-
ences in philosophical outlook than with a difference of topical and theoret-
ical preoccupations. When addressing nature, Boas generally used the
concept as it was commonly accepted in the scholarly discourse of the day:
nature as ‘‘human nature’’; nature as ‘‘the non-human natural world’’;
nature as ‘‘wilderness’’; and other similar usages of the term. While Boas
was consistent with a naturalist approach that placed humans as evolution-
ary products of the natural world, he did not explicitly challenge the
assumption that humans stand apart from a non-human nature. Yet this
does not mean that Boas was unconcerned with the relationship between
humans and the natural world around them. From his early days in geogra-
phy and physics, Boas had studied and theorized about the influence of
geography and environment on culture. However, the way that he ad-
dressed questions about the relationship between nature and culture was
shaped by the era’s debates over social evolution, which were concerned
with racial determinism and the evolution of culture/civilizations. The
problem for Boas was that the social evolutionists had made overly sweep-
ing pronouncements about how human racial differences were the results
of natural evolution.
Boas and other early anthropologists were concerned with something
close to nature, but not quite by that name. Here one could consider
notions of ‘‘environment’’ and ‘‘geography’’ as being synonymous with
nature. Yet the mental faculties of humanity were not systematically consid-
ered as an extension of nature, which is why environment and geography
were often presented as variables in shaping the human condition. In an
effort to promote an anthropology that was attentive to the historical devel-
opment of cultural forms, Boas was hesitant theoretically to elaborate on
any one theme that could emerge from cross-cultural research. Dewey,
unlike Boas, was not burdened by the constraints of the discipline of
anthropology and, being a philosophical naturalist, he was in a good posi-
tion to advance a theory of nature that was inclusive of culture as a hall-
mark of human experience. Indeed, we can properly understand Dewey as
a cultural naturalist.

III. DEWEY ON CULTURE AND NATURE

Dewey is often described as one of the great classical American pragmatist

philosophers, but he much preferred to be called a ‘‘naturalist.’’ Viewing

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

humans as an aspect of nature as opposed to something independent of it,

he acknowledged us as completely natural products of completely natural
processes. Indeed, in Dewey’s view, the worst kind of dualism was that of
separating nature and the human organism. He instead assumed a culture-
nature unity, a theme found in one way or another throughout his works,
from at least as early as the 1890s to his last writings in the 1940s and
early ’50s. In this, the profound influence of Hegel is apparent. Notice, for
example, this brief passage from Dewey’s 1897 Lecture on Hegel, in which
Dewey gives voice to a position that he would continue to defend for over
fifty years:

Matter is not one thing and soul another; it is the very nature of
matter to come to itself out of its externality, and thus to feel itself,
to become internal and ideal. Matter, in other words, is so far from
being the fixed, rigid opposition of soul that it must necessarily in
its development manifest as soul. The soul, in other words, is the
truth of matter; it is the real meaning of matter.25

Now, the key terms used by Dewey here are ‘‘matter’’ and ‘‘soul,’’ for which
we could substitute, respectively, ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘culture,’’ as he goes on to
do. Such a culture-nature unity was particularly evident in works of Dewey
from the early and mid-1920s, including Human Nature and Conduct and
Experience and Nature. This view, and its implications, are further under-
scored by the recently discovered manuscript of Dewey entitled Unmodern
Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, a work dating from the early 1940s,
once thought to have been lost, but recently re-discovered and published.26
In it he argued that experience and knowledge are perfectly natural occur-
rences within a world where we attempt to manage our affairs and to
resolve problematic situations.
There are, of course, a variety of philosophical naturalisms. With this
in mind, Dewey’s cultural naturalism was far from being a scientistic or
otherwise reductionist approach. Because of his focus on the study of the
human experience of reality, Dewey maintained that meanings and values
are naturally occurring realities. Meanings and values occur in our experi-
ence; hence they are natural. This claim allows Dewey to completely avoid
reductionist naturalism. There is not a negative refutation of reductionism,

25
John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, ed. John R. Shook
and James A. Good (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 122.
26
John Dewey, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, ed. Philip Deen (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

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as refutation requires an affirmation. This is the point of the conjunctions

of many of Dewey’s titles (e.g., Experience and Nature, Human Nature
and Conduct), which show how significant the affirmative refutation of
reductionism was to him. This humanistic, cultural naturalism was a unify-
ing theme running throughout Dewey’s philosophical development, and it
is especially exemplified by Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.
In Experience and Nature, as well as in other sources, Dewey provided
an organically oriented approach to the broad conditions of human life and
existence; and in a 1951 ‘‘Re-Introduction’’ to that text, he admitted to a
preference for a different title. Dewey wished that it could be known as
Culture and Nature, with ‘‘culture’’ replacing ‘‘experience.’’ He explained
that ‘‘I would substitute the term ‘culture’ because with its meanings as
now firmly established [perhaps by Boas] it can fully and freely carry my
philosophy of experience.’’27 Despite careful attempts at explanation, and
the centrality of this concept in his philosophical work over many years,
Dewey was of the opinion that his employments of ‘‘experience’’ had been
largely misunderstood as suggesting something merely individual and sub-
jective. As Thomas M. Alexander puts it, experience for Dewey means ‘‘our
shared cultural inhabitation of the world’’ or, ‘‘. . . our shared, embodied,
symbolic life, the meaningful ways we inhabit the world.’’28 This anthropo-
logical conception of experience constitutes a challenge to the dualistic
opposition of mind and nature established, at least in modernity, by Des-
cartes. By experience (again, ‘‘culture’’), Dewey means all of the qualified
and mediated ways that the world arises through our involvement in and
with it, with his fundamental acceptance of experience as mediated pointing
again to the deep and lasting influence of Hegel.29
In the ‘‘Re-Introduction’’ to Experience and Nature, Dewey observes
that culture, as an anthropological construct, indicates the great variety of
experienced things, and that such cultural facts include all of the attitudes,
beliefs, and dispositions that ‘‘. . . decide the specific uses to which the
‘material’ constituents of culture are put and which accordingly deserve,
philosophically speaking, the name ‘ideal’. . . .’’30 He goes further to

27
The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1981), 1: 361, from Appendix I (‘‘Experience and Nature: A Re-
Introduction’’), bracketed comment ours.
28
Thomas M. Alexander, The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Exis-
tence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1, 4.
29
See James A. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: The ‘‘Permanent Hegelian
Deposit’’ in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006).
30
The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1–from Appendix I (‘‘Experience and Nature: A
Re-Introduction’’).

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

indicate that such uses of ‘‘the ‘material’ constituents of culture’’ even

deserve the term spiritual, ‘‘if intelligibly used.’’31 Culture, then, denotes
how and in what ways humans inhabit existence. Consistent with Boasian
thought, it is a summary way of designating everything in human experi-
ence, from our intense ecstasies and suffering to seemingly mundane activi-
ties of life, as Alexander has noted.32
As for nature, Dewey treats it not as a thing, but as a matter of begin-
nings and endings, in which human beings are characterized as within and
a part, not outside of or external to. Alexander states that, for Dewey,
‘‘nature is what nature does,’’ and the human organism, as opposed to
being separated from evolutionary history, is the active forefront of what
nature does.33 This is to say that we are literally a significant aspect of the
very meaning of nature. With the emergence of such reflective conscious-
ness, nature comes to have a mind of its own. That is, for Dewey, mind
could be said to emerge functionally from nature.
We may start, then, to answer the question of the relationship between
culture and nature. For Dewey, contrary to many traditional views, there
was not any real conflict between humanity and the whole of the natural
environment. Instead, as Dewey argued in a late 1890s essay, ‘‘Ethics and
Evolution,’’ humans adapt ‘‘one part of the environment with reference
to another part,’’ utilizing one aspect to modify another aspect.34 He cites
gardening as an example of how this human activity of modification, and
thus culture, is one aspect of nature.35 In short, nature is not ontologically
independent of culture, and likewise, of course, nor is culture independent
of nature. Rather, nature is understood as a complex construction that has
painstakingly and gradually evolved through various human inquiries over
the course of vast expanses of history—inquiries including, as Larry A.
Hickman says, ‘‘. . . the arts, religion, magic, hunting, manufacture, and
experimental science, to recall just a few.’’36 Thus it is not that nature is
constructed ex nihilo, but that the unrefined material of antecedent experi-
ence, unplanned events, random insights, habits, institutions, and tradition
have over time been transformed and reconstructed by tools including, but

31
Ibid.
32
See Alexander’s ‘‘Dewey, Dualism, and Naturalism’’ in A Companion to Pragmatism
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 189.
33
Alexander, The Human Eros, 17.
34
The Early Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1972), 5: 37.
35
Ibid., 38.
36
Larry A. Hickman, Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 134.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

not limited to: religious ritual; works of philosophy and anthropology; sci-
entific hypotheses; poems; novels; and films. As such, nature is never a com-
pletely finished product. As a consequence of Dewey’s affirmation of the
nature/culture whole nature, too, is subject to continual reconstruction and
re-evaluation in order to bring about adjustment to changing conditions.
Culture, then, is one of the ways by which nature transacts business
with itself. In any intelligent activity, such as the practice of gardening, each
part of the environment is modified with respect to the other part of the
environment. Accordingly, deliberation and intelligent management enter
into the history of evolutionary development. That is to say that delibera-
tion and intelligence are themselves an outcome of evolutionary develop-
ment. Hence Dewey undercuts the ground for nature and culture dualisms.
A further example of this is his rejection of the assumptions of the so-called
‘‘Nature vs. Nurture’’ debates. Consistent with Boasian anthropological
inquiry, nurture and nature need not be understood as fundamentally
opposing phenomena. A Deweyan approach challenges such a juxtaposi-
tion as a false dichotomy, with the understanding that, given a sufficiently
long temporal duration, there is no clear differentiation between that which
is native and that which is acquired. Underscoring this position is Dewey’s
early 1930s article on ‘‘Human Nature,’’ in which he argues that ‘‘The
supposition that there is such a thing as a purely native original contribu-
tion of man [sic] which can be distinguished from everything acquired and
learned cannot be justified by appeal to the facts.’’37 Such a theory assumes
a static conception of the human person, ignoring her history and the future
in which presumed fixed structures shall change through environmental
interaction. Further, Dewey argues that ‘‘The acquired may moreover
become so deeply ingrained as to be for all intents and purposes native, a
fact recognized in the common saying that ‘habit is second nature.’ ’’38 Tak-
ing into consideration the long road of biological evolution, what is now
considered given or native is in fact an outcome of far-reaching processes
of growth.
Such Aristotelian anti-dualism is quite consistent with the Darwinian
context in which Dewey lived and which he himself emphasized. With cul-
ture thoroughly naturalized, the bifurcation of culture versus nature is left
behind as a facile construction of modernity. This means that Dewey’s
account meshes with and, indeed, assumes a pluralism of cultural concep-
tions, for a Deweyan naturalism embraces anthropology. As it is for Boas,

37
The Later Works of John Dewey, 6: 31.
38
Ibid., 32.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

human experience is fundamentally cultural. Consistent with this, for

example, is Dewey’s early 1940s remark (from Unmodern Philosophy and
Modern Philosophy) that ‘‘. . . the conclusions of the anthropologist pro-
vides priceless data for the study of the origin and course of philosophy
itself.’’39 Such a statement serves as explicit evidence of the influence of
anthropology on Dewey’s own philosophical thinking and a kind of Dew-
eyan prescription for the future of philosophy itself: namely, that cultural
anthropology ought to serve as a resource for philosophy.40
At this point we are still left with the question of how communication
occurs among the various aspects of the natural environment. What is the
language, so to speak, of the cultural-evolutionary process in which one
part of the environment is modified with respect to another? The fifth chap-
ter of Experience and Nature (‘‘Nature, Communication and Meaning’’)
indicates the beginning of an answer. In one of his more poignant moments,
Dewey describes communication as the most wonderful of affairs.41 As an
extension of his evolutionary naturalism, he writes that ‘‘Where communi-
cation exists, things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire representatives,
surrogates, signs and implicates which are indefinitely more amenable to
management, more permanent and more accommodating, than events in
their first estate.’’42 Communication is a transactional intelligence that
makes naturally occurring experiences more meaningful by relating them to
other naturally occurring experiences. It requires careful attention to lived
moments of experience in order that their shared characteristics are ren-
dered explicit.
As Hickman puts it, communication for Dewey ‘‘. . . is a multiplier.’’43
In Dewey’s own words, communication is defined as ‘‘. . . the establishment
of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the
activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership.’’44 As such, it is
more than simply providing expression to that which already exists. Such
shared participation enlarges perception, which is in large part why Dew-
ey’s theory of communication is closely linked with his social and political
philosophy, according to which democracy is fundamentally a moral ideal
as opposed to merely some particular understanding of the essence of, or
primary role for, government.

39
Dewey, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, 4.
40
Alexander agrees, although he does not draw upon Unmodern Philosophy and Modern
Philosophy. See The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence, 13.
41
The Later Works of John Dewey, 1: 132.
42
Ibid.
43
Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism, 146.
44
The Later Works of John Dewey, 1: 141.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

At the basis of Dewey’s understanding of communication is the

assumption that we have developed the ability to recognize unattained pos-
sibilities and to draw connections between events.45 Natural events are
transformed by communication such that communication is a transubstan-
tiation of nature; it comes to have a dynamic as opposed to a static mean-
ing. Dewey explains that ‘‘When communication occurs, all natural events
are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet
the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that
preliminary discourse termed thinking.’’46 More than merely ‘‘their original
existence,’’ events lead a double life: ‘‘. . . their meanings may be infinitely
combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of this inner
experimentation—which is thought—may issue forth in interaction with
crude or raw events.’’47 Dewey elaborates further, claiming that through
communication qualitative immediacy gives rise to contemplation and
instruction, and pedagogy comes into existence.48 It is with communication,
a development over evolutionary time, that nature comes to know itself
better through emergent awareness and self-understanding.
Dewey further explains that ‘‘Even the dumb pang of an ache achieves
a significant existence when it can be designated and descanted upon . . . ,’’
for it gains significance beyond its merely oppressive aspect.49 Citing Boas’s
The Mind of Primitive Man, Dewey goes on to acknowledge that the two
external traits expressed by distinctions between human and non-human
minds are the employment of tools of various use (in non-humans) and the
existence of clear organized speech (in humans).50 On this basis he observes
that ‘‘. . . what has been said about the role of tools is subject to a condition
supplied by language, the tool of tools.’’51 With this ‘‘tool of tools,’’ even
the seemingly mundane toothache attains a new level of meaningful
existence—language allows it a more significant meaning, it is not painful
as a merely private affair.
Drawing upon Alexander, permit us to offer a brief clue to the signifi-
cance of Dewey’s point about communication. If, for example, one is hold-
ing the hand of her terminally ill and close-to-death parent or close friend,

45
Ibid., 143.
46
Ibid., 132.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., 133.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., 134.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

there is one sense in which we might simply call such situations events, to
use an earlier term from Dewey. Yet such occurrences are indeed much
more than mere events. My holding hands with my parent or friend is no
mere biological event of just one hand holding another: there is a greater
significance of meaning by virtue of shared experience. The event is partici-
patory, and transcends the merely biological. In this way, communication
is an art of making the present more meaningful, an emphasis particularly
evident in later parts of Human Nature and Conduct.52 For Dewey, none
of this would occur outside of, or somehow independently, of nature. It
is all perfectly natural and simultaneously cultural, that is, it is radically
experiential.
As we have seen, Dewey relies on a fundamentally anthropological
notion of culture to develop his ideas about nature. Thus we propose the
following interpretation of Dewey in relation to Boas and the development
of American anthropology: Dewey made the first attempt to understand
‘‘nature’’ from a distinctively modern anthropological perspective. In his
conceptualization, there is a unity or singularity between humans and
nature that is not explicitly stated by Boas. Fundamental to Dewey’s elo-
quent articulation is his theory of communication, a theory not articulated
by Boas, but, nonetheless, consistent with Boasian anthropology.

IV. DEWEYAN STRANDS OF AMERICAN

ANTHROPOLOGY: AN INTERTWINING OF
CULTURE AND NATURE

Evidence of Dewey’s influence comes from anthropologists working on

divergent projects and with different theoretical foci. Ruth Benedict (1887–
1948), Alexander Lesser (1902–82), and Gene Weltfish (1902–80) were all
students of Boas. They took classes with Dewey, engaged his work during
and after their graduate training, and explicitly cited his work as inspira-
tional in their respective initial, significant post-graduate publications.
Leslie White (1900–1975) also studied with Dewey, but not with Boas—
indeed, he was vehemently anti-Boasian. White found in Dewey a naturalist
philosophy consistent with his own scientific and neo-evolutionary intellec-
tual agenda. Despite their differences, Benedict, Lesser, Weltfish, and White

See Thomas M. Alexander’s John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The
52

Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 159.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

shared a common philosophical grounding in Dewey in their studies of the

human condition.
As mentioned above, Boas and Dewey were clearly aligned in many
intellectual and political matters. Yet their collective bodies of work do not
represent parallel lines in different disciplines. If we are to trace a ‘‘Dew-
eyan strand’’ in early American anthropology, we must identify what
aspects of Dewey’s philosophical anthropology are complementary to or
different from Boas’s scholarship and influence. First, Dewey’s philosophy
comprehensively bridged a gap between ideal types in the study of human-
ity (e.g., nature, communication, aesthetics, democracy, and education) and
the socio-political contexts of his era. For Dewey, experiential context gives
way to philosophical inquiry, and philosophical inquiry informs questions
about societal progress. Boas was similarly invested in anthropological
research that could be translated into socio-political issues. Perhaps his
largest theoretical contribution to anthropology, the culture concept, was
grounded in ethnographic experience and was used to counter hegemonic
ideas about the inferiority of non-Western peoples and non-white races.
Indeed, Boas questioned the validity of race as a way to explain human
cultural differences. As such, Dewey and Boas did not differ significantly in
their progressive scholarship. Yet Dewey’s philosophy did provide a peda-
gogical and civic framework that appealed to intellectuals invested in social
change through education and political action. This was not the case with
Boas, whose direct scholarly attack on racism was met with resistance both
inside and outside of the academy.53
Secondly, as we have argued above, Boas did not object to the basic
tenets of evolution, but was concerned with the manner in which evolution-
ary thought influenced the analysis of ethnographic data. As for Dewey, he
couched much of his philosophy in evolutionary naturalism. He presumed
an evolutionary history for humanity, but because he was not focused on
cultural diversity per se: it was enough that cultures differed in relation to
experience. His philosophy of human nature and experience never touched
upon the intellectual field of environmental determinism. Yet Dewey’s polit-
ical resonance with regard to education and freedom and his embrace of
naturalistic/evolutionary terms allowed his philosophical anthropology to
influence a generation of anthropologists who were immersed in and—in
one significant case—opposed to Boasian anthropology.

53
Lee D. Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 156–219.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

Ruth Benedict first gained international recognition in 1934 with the

publication of Patterns of Culture. Within that work and throughout her
career, Benedict was concerned with the cohesiveness of cultural systems
and the dominating strains in those systems, strains which were to be
understood as psychological characteristics. In Patterns of Culture, she con-
trasted the cultural psychological makeup of the Zuni, the Kwakiutl, and
the Dobu in order to demonstrate that ‘‘psychological norms’’ were cultur-
ally relative. Although the title of the book suggests an emphasis on collec-
tive social forms, Benedict argued that people in any given society had the
ability, over the course of their lives, to choose the character of their culture.
The last chapter of Patterns of Culture is entitled ‘‘The Individual and the
Pattern of Culture,’’ and there Benedict follows Boas in several ways in
articulating principles of cultural relativity and makes an epistemological
commitment to individuals and individuality in the historical development
of culture. Boas, however, in his ‘‘Introduction’’ to the text, suggests that
she is moving away from a historical approach with the long term goal of
discovering laws concerning the evolution of cultures. Instead, he argues
that since

. . . hardly any trait of culture can be understood when taken out

of its general setting. . . . The desire to grasp the meaning of a
culture as a whole compels us to consider descriptions of standard-
ized behaviour merely as a stepping-stone leading to other prob-
lems. We must understand the individual as living in his culture;
and the culture as lived by individuals.54

Given that Benedict’s work was comparative, Boas was endorsing what he
perceived to be the logical scientific direction of anthropological inquiry.
Yet Benedict’s work was comparative in a way that Boas had cautioned
against and had resisted in prior years. This slight disjuncture between Boas
and Benedict provides us with a reason to seriously consider Dewey’s influ-
ence on her.
Sidney Ratner, a student and close friend of Dewey, reported that in
1935 Benedict had told him that Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct was
an important source of inspiration for her Patterns of Culture.55 Benedict’s

54
Franz Boas, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1934), xx.
55
The Later Works of John Dewey (Introduction), 6: xvi. See Ratner’s footnote: ‘‘Oral
statement to Sidney Ratner by Ruth Benedict, ca. 1935.’’

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

initial encounter with Human Nature and Conduct was in 1922, when she
presented a paper on it to anthropology professors and fellow students
(including then undergraduate Margaret Mead) in a seminar at Columbia.56
She also took classes with Dewey at that university during the Fall of 1918
and the Spring of 1919.57 We would argue that this biographical informa-
tion not be taken lightly since Dewey is the first person mentioned in Pat-
terns of Culture:

John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by
custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against
any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the pro-
portion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against
those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernac-
ular of his family.58

Although Dewey’s statement is not cited, this is unquestionably a reference

to the fourth chapter, ‘‘Custom and Habit,’’ of Human Conduct and
Nature. Custom—social interaction—is conceptually and historically ante-
cedent to the individual. Fitting comfortably with Dewey’s naturalism, Ben-
edict’s recognition of the significance of individuals acting in relation to a
collective psychology meant that not only were they communicating with
other parts of nature, but also communicating with other parts of human
nature. Dewey’s inspiration for Benedict was, in fact, a strategic perspective
for the comparative study of cultures.
The Deweyan strand, by way of a subtle intimation, is again present in
the work of Gene Weltfish, whose anthropological legacy has been
described as ‘‘pragmatic’’ by Juliet Niehaus because of its affinity with
Dewey’s anthropology. Weltfish’s first significant publication in 1953, The
Origins of Art, derived from direct graduate training under Boas.59 In the
first paragraph of the Preface she explains that: ‘‘This book really had its
beginning in 1923 when as a student at Barnard College I sat at the feet of
the great Franz Boas in his class Anthropology I.’’60 She continues in the
second paragraph to recount her intellectual genealogy:

56
See, e.g., Louis W. Banner’s Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and
Their Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 181, 214.
57
Margaret M. Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1989), 94.
58
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 2.
59
Juliet Niehaus, ‘‘Education and Democracy in the Anthropology of Gene Weltfish,’’ in
Visionary Observers, 94.
60
Gene Weltfish, The Origins of Art (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
1953), 9.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

Later, in the philosophy classes of John Dewey and Morris R.

Cohen, I considered many more abstract questions, and as a grad-
uate anthropology student I began work on problems such as the
nature of language and meaning, the economic determinant in cul-
ture, parallelism and convergence in culture, and other such
abstract matters. . . .61

Niehaus’s biographical comments suggest the extent of Dewey’s influence

on Weltfish. Like Benedict, Weltfish took Boas’s anthropology in a new
direction via Dewey. In The Origins of Art, ‘‘. . . cultural history was, in
Weltfish’s thinking . . . strongly colored by the Deweyan notion of growth
through problem-solving and intercultural communication.’’62 Niehaus
explains that Weltfish’s lifework was colored by the ‘‘idiom’’ of Dewey,
especially as it pertained to education and democracy.63 An additional, sig-
nificant piece of evidence regarding Weltfish’s anthropological, educational,
and democratic engagement can be found in her collaboration with Bene-
dict in The Races of Mankind, published in 1943 as a Public Affairs Pam-
phlet intended for U.S. troops around the world. The pamphlet makes the
Boasian case against racism and points forward to a more racially inclusive
global order.64
Alexander Lesser was, like his wife Gene Weltwish, a student of both
Boas and Dewey. In the Preface to his 1933 The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand
Game, Lesser wrote that:

. . . I must express my intellectual obligations to Professor Franz

Boas and John Dewey. For many years I have believed their con-
ception of method to be basically in harmony, and in my own
thought and work I have leaned heavily on their teachings.65

Neither Boas nor Dewey were mentioned again in Pawnee Ghost Dance.
But the influence of Dewey’s work was evident in at least one additional
article, ‘‘Research Procedure and Laws of Culture,’’ published in 1939 in
the journal Philosophy of Science. There Lesser argued that anthropologists

61
Ibid.
62
Niehaus, ‘‘Education and Democracy,’’ 107.
63
Ibid.
64
Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (Public Affairs Pamphlet no.
85. New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1943).
65
Alexander Lesser, The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1978 [1933]).

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

needed to be more conscientious about their research experiences in order

to formulate nomothetic ideas or hypotheses about humanity. He acknowl-
edged the importance of the Boasian doctrine of the need for close attention
to cultural histories and differences, but argued that there was sufficient,
legitimate ethnographic data available to permit for the very generalizations
that Boas had discouraged when, years earlier, he had sought to undermine
social Darwinism.
There are two significant elements in Lesser’s article that are indicative
of Dewey’s influence. First, Lesser calls for anthropologists to be more
aware of their own experience in formulating social theory. He believes
that evidence for similarities and trends between different peoples is already
available in the ethnographic record. But it was the responsibility of anthro-
pologists to reflect more deeply and critically about such material. Secondly,
the development of a nomothetic anthropology was tied to the possibility
of anthropology affecting social change and intellectual currents. Both of
these elements are emphasized in the article’s final sentences:

Laws for social action must be derived from actual experience and
practice in dealing with social events and phenomena and only
then can be expected to have fruitful application to the problems
of social life. To derive such laws a fundamental requirement is
that we make more explicit the assumptions or expectation which
link past experiences to present situations, within any special or
technical discipline, and ultimately within the milieu of social ex-
perience itself.66

This was part of the challenge to return to lived experience itself, just as
for Dewey, and classical American philosophy more generally, the challenge
was to reconsider what the proper starting-point for human inquiry
should be.
It is also important to consider Lesser’s understanding of the intellec-
tual relationship between Boas and Dewey. In a piece about Boas’s own
intellectual trajectory, Lesser explained that ‘‘In anthropological thinking
and explanation, the concept cultural replaced the concept natural.’’67
Lesser went on to provide two lengthy quotations from Dewey’s ‘‘Human

66
Alexander Lesser, ‘‘Research Procedure and Laws of Culture,’’ Philosophy of Science 6
(1939): 345–55, at 355.
67
Lesser, ‘‘Franz Boas,’’ 25.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

Nature’’ article to demonstrate the influence of Boas’s notion of culture. In

the first, Lesser quotes Dewey as arguing that ‘‘. . . the varieties of cultural
and institutional forms . . . are functions, in the mathematical sense, of
institutional organization and cultural traditions, as these operate to shape
raw biological material into definitely human shape.’’68 Secondly, Lesser
quotes Dewey as arguing that ‘‘It is demonstrable that many of the obsta-
cles to change which have been attributed to human nature are in fact due
to the inertia of institutions and are to the voluntary desire of powerful
classes to maintain the existing status.’’69 The former quotation points
towards a nomothetic anthropological approach, while the latter ties social
theory to democratic social change. As such, Lesser’s historical understand-
ing of the intellectual relationship between Boas and Dewey is reflective of
his own bridging of American anthropology and philosophy in ‘‘Research
Procedure and Laws of Culture.’’
In an article in the journal Philosophy of Science, Julian Steward, usu-
ally credited with the revival of evolutionary anthropology, cites Lesser’s
piece as part of his proposals that there are, to some extent, laws governing
the evolution of cultures.70 The other anthropologist credited with that
revival—Leslie White—was ferociously anti-Boasian, although he was, nev-
ertheless, significantly influenced by Dewey. White often wrote against Boas
and his students because he saw them as obstructing the incorporation of
evolution into anthropology. Yet Steward’s recognition of Lesser’s article
and other historical accounts of Boasian anthropology suggest that White
overstated Boas’s anti-evolutionism.71 Indeed, we argue that White’s
engagement with Dewey’s philosophy ties him, ironically, to Boas’s intellec-
tual milieu.
If Benedict and Weltfish were inspired by Dewey’s humanistic spirit,
White found scientific inspiration in Dewey’s philosophy of culture and
nature.72 During his undergraduate studies at Columbia, White took a class

68
Ibid., 26.
69
Ibid.
70
Julian H. Steward, ‘‘Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the
Development of Early Civilizations,’’ American Anthropologist 51 (1949): 1–27.
71
See Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, Chapter 5; Marian W. Smith, ‘‘Boas’
‘Natural History’ Approach to Field Method,’’ in The Anthropology of Franz Boas, ed.
Walter Goldschmidt (San Francisco: American Anthropological Association and Howard
Chandler): 46–60.
72
Robert L. Carneiro, ‘‘Leslie White,’’ in Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the His-
tory of Anthropology, ed. Sydel Silverman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981),
153.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

with Dewey, and, like Benedict, reported about being inspired by Human
Nature and Conduct.73 And, like Benedict, White produced an undergradu-
ate review of Human Nature and Conduct as part of the requirements for
a course on social psychology offered by Robert S. Woodworth, who him-
self had been a student of William James at Harvard. White’s unpublished
review of Dewey is in the holdings of the Bentley Historical Library at the
University of Michigan. This early document provides a unique glance into
Dewey’s influence on White.
In its opening, White candidly exclaims that: ‘‘I liked it immensely!’’—
while acknowledging Dewey’s difficult writing style.74 Dewey provided ‘‘an
interpretation of objective phenomena which has its basis in the empirical
facts themselves, not in abstract conceptions.’’75 An interested and inquiring
reader would find real joy, White observed, in Human Nature and Con-
duct—‘‘in spite of the style’’—and he judged the work to be quite satisfac-
tory.76 Dewey, White noted, provides an excellent articulation of the
relationship between human behavior and its broader environmental context:

His interpretation is to me the most satisfactory one I have ever

known. In fact with the exception of one or two others, Dewey is
the only man I know of who has, apparently intentionally, worked
out an interpretation which seems to fit the objective facts on
which it rests; which embodies all human conduct as interrelated
activities, and indicates their always-present relation to the envi-
ronment. His interpretation is illuminating. It seems to me that
herein he has given us a method by which we can study social
psychology much more profitably in the future.77

Moreover, White saw Dewey as offering something quite close to Marx’s

conception of human nature as opposed to a more Cartesian notion. We
are rather part and parcel of our social life.78 White went on to cite Dewey
several times in subsequent publications. For example, the 1939 article

73
William J. Peace, Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology (Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 13.
74
White, unpublished review of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (White papers,
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan).
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid.

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 Torres and Hobbs ✦ Franz Boas and John Dewey

‘‘Mind is Minding’’ demonstrates the direct influence of Dewey’s own func-

tional understanding of mind:

Mind is minding, the reacting of an organism as a whole, as a

coherent unit (as distinguished from the reacting of parts of the
organism with reference to other parts). Mind is a function of
body. The ‘‘organ’’ of the mind is the entire organism functioning
as a unit. Mind is to body as cutting is to a knife.79

Although White does not cite Dewey in this quite brief article, there could
hardly be a more explicit rendition of the Deweyan view of mind as verb
and not noun, as an organic function and not substance: mind as a means
of interacting with the world, as Dewey had expressed in the tenth chapter,
‘‘The Human Contribution,’’ of Art as Experience (1934). Further, in a
1944 article on ‘‘The Use of Tools by Primates,’’ White relied on Dewey’s
idea of communication as transubstantiation of nature in order to distin-
guish tool use in humans and apes.80
As an anthropologist, White was instrumental in helping to develop an
approach according to which humans and their cultures were best under-
stood as integral parts of ecosystems. In The Evolution of Culture (1959),
White sought, in Deweyan fashion, to explain how cultures had developed
differently, in response to environmental conditions and to stress the auton-
omy of culture as a unique force in natural history, a force with purpose
and fueled by semiotics that controlled other parts of ecosystems, rather
than taking a deterministic, materialist view of the relationship between
nature and culture. Thus while White identified himself as fervently anti-
Boasian, he was inspired by Dewey, an inspiration that encouraged him
to help a generation of anthropologists think about culture in relation to
evolution.

V. CONCLUSION

We have argued that (1) Boas was instrumental in developing the culture
concept in such a way that (2) allowed Dewey to probe human experience
culturally; and (3) Dewey, in turn, developed an anthropological critique

79
Leslie White, ‘‘Mind is Minding,’’ The Scientific Monthly 48 (1939): 88.
80
Leslie White, ‘‘On the Use of Tools by Primates,’’ Journal of Comparative Psychology
34 (1944): 369–74.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2015

of nature which inspired a generation of anthropologists seeking holistic

accounts of humans and their environment. These relationships, both con-
ceptual and biographical, are significant because they allow us to histori-
cally and intellectually contextualize concepts that remain central to
contemporary American philosophy and anthropology. As for our own
work, we hope that the recovery of past collaborations will encourage simi-
lar collaborations in the future.81

University of Notre Dame and Texas State University.

81
For helpful comments, criticisms, questions, and suggestions on earlier versions of this
essay, we thank: Trevor Pearce, Thomas Kies, James Good, Larry Hickman, Thomas
Jeannot, Richard McClelland, Ann Clark, Cherilyn Keall, Caleb Reynolds, Justin Bur-
gard, and the audience for our conference presentation at the 39th annual meeting of the
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (March 2012, Fordham University,
New York City). We also thank the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michi-
gan for access to Leslie White’s unpublished review (1922) of Dewey’s Human Nature
and Conduct, as well as the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia for
access to the Franz Boas papers. Partial funding for this project was provided by the
Center for Women’s Intercultural Leadership at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame,
Indiana.

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