Montagu, Ashley
Montagu, Ashley 1905-1999
The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was born as Israel Ehrenberg into a poor Russian Jewish immigrant family in the East End of London. He was a precocious schoolboy, and with the encouragement of a kind schoolteacher, he took a skull found on the banks of the Thames to the anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), and peppered the great man with questions. As a result of Keith’s encouragement, he was admitted as a diploma student to University College London at the age of seventeen, and studied physical anthropology with Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937) and statistics and psychology with Karl Pearson (1857–1936) and C. E. Spearman (1863–1945). He was, at the same time, Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1884–1942) first student in social anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Israel Ehrenberg immigrated in 1927 to the United States, where he changed his name to Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu (he was an admirer of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1689–1762]). He explained that this name opened doors that were at that time closed by anti-Semitic prejudice. He completed a PhD with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) at Columbia University (1937) and taught at various universities and medical colleges, but he largely supported himself independently through writing and lecturing. He became, with Margaret Mead (1901–1978), one of the most effective communicators in anthropology, becoming a regular guest on The Tonight Show.
Montagu’s sixty books cover an enormous range and vary from technical tracts on human genetics and Australian Aboriginal reproductive beliefs, to more popular accounts such as The Elephant Man (1971), which became the basis for the play and film of that name. In all his work he emphasized the interplay of genetic and environmental factors in producing human behavior. Two books in particular had tremendous influence: Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942) and The Natural Superiority of Women (1953). The former stemmed from his work for UNESCO in its “Statement on Race” (1950), but he had long opposed the orthodox view of the existence of discrete races, and his position that “race” was not a scientific category but a “social construction” has become, in turn, its own orthodoxy. The matter is still in dispute however, and proponents of the “reality” of racial differences are making a comeback. His position on women was prescient, but his argument that their superiority was based on their quality as nurturers of the young caused him to be attacked by early feminists.
Montagu saw himself as carrying out the Mali-nowskian program of understanding culture in terms of human needs, and this required a detailed knowledge both of culture and of human evolutionary biology. He championed the idea of neoteny —the retention of infant traits into adulthood—as the basis of human sociability, with a consequent stress on playfulness, creativity, curiosity, and love. Love he saw as the basic human attribute, rooted in the mother-child relationship, and our failure to capitalize on it as our greatest danger. Human neoteny was biologically rooted, but it gave us an astonishing flexibility and the opportunity to create cooperative societies. Montagu’s vision of a unified anthropology that would use knowledge of our evolutionary past to illuminate the possibilities of a peaceful future was perhaps his greatest gift to science and to humankind.
SEE ALSO Anthropology; Race
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Montagu, Ashley. 1942. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Columbia University Press.
Montagu, Ashley. 1953. The Natural Superiority of Women. New York: Macmillan.
Montagu, Ashley. 1996. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. 3rd ed. Lafayette, LA: Acadian House.
Robin Fox