W. E. B. Du Bois and American Anthropology
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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>W. E. B. Du Bois had a major impact on anthropology because he served as a model and mentor to Franz Boas as he was becoming a public intellectual. Anthropology in the United States changed significantly when Franz Boas (1858–1942) began challenging ideas of racial inferiority and the hierarchy of cultures in the popular press. In first decades of the 20th century the two had developed close relationship. It was Du Bois who invited, pulled, and recruited Franz Boas onto the public stage and into the struggle for Black liberation. Du Bois saw Boas as an ally, and he leveraged anthropology in two specific ways. The first was using anthropology to showcase advanced African civilizations of the past. Second, he used anthropology to demonstrate that there was no proof that one race was inferior to any other. Finally, Du Bois deployed anthropologically inflected categories and types to describe and document the diversity of African American communities.</jats:p>
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Lee D. Baker
Lee D. Baker is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He received his B.S. from Portland State University and doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. He has been a resident fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Johns Hopkins’s Institute for Global Studies, The University of Ghana-Legon, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center. His books include From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998), Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (2003), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010). Although he focuses on the history of anthropology, he has published numerous articles on such wide ranging subjects as socio-linguistics to race and democracy. Baker is also the recipient of Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award. He served as Dean of Academic Affairs from 2008-2016.
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