THE DILEMMA OF BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN EARLY 20th C PHILIPPINE ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK Michael Armand P. Canilao American Anthropology of Boas Social Darwinists in 19th c Europe juxtaposed the concept of race with the concept of the biological species. Oddly, the only phenotypic basis used for racial types was skin color (i.e., the tripartite scheme). Boasian American anthropology, on the other hand, invested heavily in promoting itself as the antithesis to the race concept, evolutionary European anthropology. Instead, Boasians branded themselves as cultural relativists. The founder of this movement, Franz Boas, diagnosed the problem of 20th c ethnocentrism to be rooted in race when it is purely a social or cultural construct. Boas believed that the only way to attack the “racial craze that was sweeping the world” was to undermine its alleged scientifc basis (Stocking 1992, 108). A biological species is essentially characterized by its ability to interbreed with similar organisms. Different species cannot interbreed because of reproductive isolation. Thus, a strong counterargument of Franz Boas against race was the fact that there is no reproductive isolation; in fact, inter-racial breeding has been observed widely, using the prevalence of Caucasian-American and African-American inter-marriages as examples (Boas 193, 15). So, Franz “Papa Franz” Boas and his disciples presented Historical Particularism as a ftting dialectic replacement to th c Social Darwinism. The former views cultures as products of particular (1) environmental, (2) psychological, and (3) historical developments, whereas the latter saw societies as products of universal cultural processes (Boas 1896, 90). The Boasians preached cultural relativism, situating themselves in a position in defense of the “other,” i.e., the assimilated, the oriental, the colonized, etc. This was Boas’s grand vision for anthropology. This, however, remained a visionary template as situational and historical factors became entangled with the emergent imperialist US state that still reverberated Social Evolutionist ideologies. The US-Philippines Colonial State Despite the good aims of historical particularism it took shape in a rather wrong place and time in history. According to Stocking (1992, 37):