Montagu, Ashley

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Montagu, Ashley 1905–1999

One of the most successful and prolific scholars of anthropology of the twentieth century, Ashley Montagu is most noted for addressing important social issues in terms accessible both to scholars and to the lay public. Born in London in 1905 (as Israel Ehrenberg), he was educated at University College, London and at the London School of Economics. After leaving England and settling in the United States, Montagu taught anatomy at the Graduate School of Medicine, New York University, from 1931 to 1938. After earning his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1937, he taught at the Hahnemann College of Medicine in Philadelphia and then at Rutgers University from 1949 to 1955 (as well as, briefly, at New York University, Harvard, and Princeton). He was a scholar with a significant record of scientific work and a record of iconoclastic ideas about anthropological problems. He had a history of challenging anthropological shibboleths and some of their famous proponents. In one instance, he attacked a physical typology of criminals proposed by the enormously influential anthropologist E. A. Hooton.

After retiring from Rutgers in 1955, Montagu shifted his focus increasingly toward the study of social problems, becoming a very effective social critic. He became widely renowned as a public speaker, occasionally appearing on television. His success as a “popularizer” of anthropological ideas and his own iconoclastic ideas made him anathema to a discipline priding itself on its relative inaccessibility to the public. But despite his “outsider” status, he was ultimately awarded both the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Anthropological Association and the Darwin Award of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Montagu wrote about an enormous range of topics, including the nature of humanity; “race” and racism; evolution and genetics; sexuality, reproduction, childbirth, and breastfeeding; gender and women’s rights; anatomy; aggression, violence, criminality and war; creationism; and even Joseph Merrick (the “Elephant Man”). Of a total of more than eighty books, his most important works include Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942, with multiple revisions through 1977), The Natural Superiority of Women (1953; revised ed. 1970), The Concept of Race (1964), The Elephant Man (1971), The Nature of Human Aggression (1976), and Science and Creationism (1984).

Montagu was an early “feminist” and an early critic of the concept of “race.” Much of his most important work focused on dispelling the myth of “race.” His analysis embraced not only blacks but also Native Americans and Jews. He has been called the most important theorist of race and race relations of the twentieth century. Montagu was one of the first to argue forcefully that the human species could not, scientifically, be divided into “races” despite the assumption, very widespread in both scholarly and popular circles, that such races were not only well defined but blindingly obvious. A key argument was (at first in theory, later as a matter of fact) that the various traits thought to be packaged in stereotyped groups actually had independent and only partly overlapping distributions. A second key argument was that the boundaries of traits such as color were not abrupt but gradual, over geographic space, a pattern that had earlier been described as “clines.” Neither concept was entirely original to Montagu, as he admitted, but he was responsible for their broadest and most broadly influential presentation.

His stance on race, racism, and inherent human equality figured in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, and he was the primary author of the United Nations Statement on Race (1949). His book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, first issued at the height of Nazi power and American racism, is arguably his most important work, standing as a landmark criticism of both race and racism that anticipated and helped frame much of the subsequent debate over racial issues by defining (and to a significant degree anticipating and answering) the questions involved: human biology and the erroneous perception of the existence of “races” and “racial” diversity; eugenics and genetic equality; the interaction of biological and social forces in defining human behavior; cultural definitions of race; and the role of race perceptions in social issues such as aggression, war, the measure of intelligence, and democracy itself. This book and a later edited volume, The Concept of Race (1964), still stand as significant rebuttal of contemporary racist assertions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Montagu, Ashley. 1942. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Columbia University Press.

_____. 1953. The Natural Superiority of Women. New York: Macmillan.

_____. 1964. The Concept of Race. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

_____, ed. 1975. Race and IQ. New York: Oxford University Press.

_____. 1976. The Nature of Human Aggression. New York:Oxford University Press.

SECONDARY WORKS

Brace, C. Loring. 1997. “Foreword.” In Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 6th ed., by Ashley Montagu, 13–23. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Marks, Jonathan. 2000. “Ashley Montagu: 1905–1999” Evolutionary Anthropology 9 (3): 111–112.

_____. 1979. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey.

_____, ed. 1984. Science and Creationism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mark Nathan Cohen

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism