Carleton S. Coon
Carleton S. Coon | |
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Born | Wakefield, Massachusetts, U.S. | June 23, 1904
Died | June 3, 1981 | (aged 76)
Nationality | American |
Board member of | President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists |
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Academic background | |
Education |
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Thesis | A Study of the Fundamental Racial and Cultural Characteristics of the Berbers of North Africa as Exemplified by the Riffians (1928) |
Doctoral advisor | Earnest Hooton |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropology |
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Carleton Stevens Coon (June 23, 1904 – June 3, 1981) was an American
Early life and education
Carleton Stevens Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts on June 23, 1904.[8] His parents were John Lewis Coon, a cotton factor, and Bessie Carleton.[9] His family had Cornish American roots and two of his ancestors fought in the American Civil War. As a child, he listened to his grandfather's stories of the war and of traveling in the Middle East, and accompanied his father on business trips to Egypt, inspiring an early interest in Egyptology. He initially attended Wakefield High School, but was expelled after breaking a water pipe and flooding the school's basement, after which he went to Phillips Academy. Coon was a precocious student, learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphs at an early age and excelling at Ancient Greek.[8]
Wakefield was an affluent and almost exclusively white town.[10] Coon's biographer, William W. Howells, noted that his "only apparent awareness of ethnicity" was in childhood fights with his Irish American neighbours.[8] Coon himself claimed that "both anti-Semitism and racism were unknown to me before I left home at the age of fifteen, and zero to fifteen are formative years."[11][10]
Intending to study Egyptology, Coon enrolled at Harvard University and was able to obtain a place on a graduate course with George Andrew Reisner based on his knowledge of hieroglyphic. He also studied Arabic and English composition under Charles Townsend Copeland. However he changed his focus to anthropology after taking a course with Earnest Hooton, inspired by his lectures on the Berbers of the Moroccan Rif. Coon obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1925 and immediately embarked on graduate studies in anthropology.[8] He conducted his dissertation fieldwork in the Rif in 1925, which was politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish, and was awarded his PhD in 1928.[12]
Coon was motivated to study the Rif by the puzzle of the "light-skinned" Riffians' presence in Africa. Throughout much of his fieldwork, he relied on his local informant Mohammed Limnibhy, and even arranged for Limnibhy to live with him in Cambridge from 1928 to 1929.[13]
Academic career
After obtaining his PhD, Coon returned to Harvard as a lecturer and later a professor. In 1931 he published his dissertation as the "definitive monograph" of the Rif Berber;[14] studied Albanians from 1920 to 1930; traveled to Ethiopia in 1933; and in worked in Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans from 1925 to 1939.
Coon left Harvard to take up a position at the
He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his wartime services and the Viking Medal in Physical Anthropology in 1952. He was also named a Membre D'Honneur of the Association de la Libération française du 8 novembre 1942.[14] From 1948 to the early 1960s, he was the Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia.[8]
Military career
Coon wrote widely for a general audience like his mentor Earnest Hooton. Coon published The Riffians, Flesh of the Wild Ox, Measuring Ethiopia, and A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent. A North Africa Story was an account of his work in North Africa during World War II, which involved espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in German-occupied Morocco under the guise of anthropological fieldwork. During that time, Coon was affiliated with the United States Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Coon served as a mentor to another Harvard-educated OSS agent and anthropologist who embraced anthropometry (measuring features of the human body, such as crania and nose sizes) as a means asserting racial types and categories. This was Lloyd Cabot Briggs, author of Living Races of the Sahara Desert (1958) and later of No More for Ever: A Saharan Jewish Town (1962) about the Jews of the Mzab region of the Algerian Sahara, which he wrote with Norina Lami Guède (née Maria Esterina Giovanni). The historian Sarah Abreyava Stein (who argued that Guede had done most of the research) noted that Briggs and Coon corresponded during the writing of No More for Ever, joking, for example, about the genital depilation customs of Jewish women in Ghardaïa.[15]
After the war, Coon returned to Harvard, but retained ties to the OSS and its successor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was a scientific consultant to the CIA from 1948 to 1950, and in 1945 wrote an influential paper that argued that the United States should continue the use of wartime intelligence agencies to maintain an "Invisible Empire" in the postwar period.[16][17] In 1956–57, he worked for the Air Force as a photographer.[16]
Racial theories
Before World War II, Coon's work on
The immediate post-war period marked a decisive break in Coon's work on race as the conventional, typological approach was challenged by the "new physical anthropology". Led by Coon's former classmate
Coon concluded that sometimes different
Racial origins
Coon first modified Franz Weidenreich's polycentric (or multiregional) theory of the origin of races. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. Coon held a similar belief that modern humans, Homo sapiens, arose separately in five different places from Homo erectus, "as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state", but unlike Weidenreich stressed gene flow far less.[24][25] Coon's modified form of the Weidenreich Theory is sometimes referred to as the Candelabra Hypothesis. A misunderstanding however has led some to believe that Coon supported parallel evolution or polygenism; this is not true since Coon's evolution model still allows for gene-flow, although he did not stress it.[26][dubious ]
In his 1962 book, The Origin of Races, Coon theorized that some races reached the
Wherever Homo arose, and Africa is at present the most likely continent, he soon dispersed, in a very primitive form, throughout the warm regions of the Old World....If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools.
By this he meant that the Caucasoid and Mongoloid races had evolved more in their separate areas after they had left Africa in a primitive form.[non-primary source needed] He also believed, "The earliest Homo sapiens known, as represented by several examples from Europe and Africa, was an ancestral long-headed white man of short stature and moderately great brain size."[citation needed]
Races in the Indian sub-continent
Coon's understanding of racial typology and diversity within the Indian sub-continent changed over time. In The Races of Europe, he regarded the so-called "Veddoids" of India ("tribal" Indians, or "Adivasi") as closely related to other peoples in the South-Pacific ("Australoids"), and he also believed that this supposed human lineage (the "Australoids") was an important genetic substratum in Southern India. As for the north of the sub-continent, it was an extension of the Caucasoid range.
Debate on race
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and changing social attitudes challenged racial theories like Coon's that had been used by segregationists to justify discrimination and depriving people of civil rights. In 1961, Coon's cousin
Coon published The Origin of Races in 1962. In its "Introduction", he described the book as part of the outcome of his project he conceived (in light of his work on The Races of Europe) around the end of 1956, for a work to be titled along the lines of Races of the World. He said that since 1959 he had proceeded with the intention to follow The Origin of Races with a sequel, so the two would jointly fulfill the goals of the original project.
Geneticist Dobzhansky's shot
His bolt and really gone to pot.
Things which now pass above his pate
Cause him to fume and fulminate
In ways unacademical
And anything but oecumenical.
Querulous cracks with venom spattered
Tell of an ethos sadly shattered.
Poem written by Coon around 1963[38]
The dispute that followed the publication of The Origin of Races was personal as well as academic. Coon had known
Although some of these interpersonal conflicts faded over time—Coon wrote that he had "buried the now‐rusty hatchet" with Dobzhansky in a letter to him in 1975—the animosity between Coon and Montagu was severe and lasting. Before 1962, the two were on friendly terms, but represented rival schools of anthropology (Coon studied under Hooton at Harvard; Montagu under Boas at Columbia), and Coon privately disdained his work.[3] After the publication of Origins, they engaged in a lengthy correspondence, published in Current Anthropology, that "consisted almost entirely of bickering over minutiae, name calling, and sarcasm".[3] Privately, Coon suspected Montagu (a target of McCarthyism) of communist sympathies and of turning Dobzhansky and others against him.[3] As late as 1977, he was quoted as saying to a colleague, "You had Ashley Montagu in your office? And you didn't shoot him?"[39] The enmity was reciprocated; in a 1974 letter to Stephen Jay Gould, Montagu wrote, "Coon… is a racist and an antisemite, as I know well, so when you describe Coon's letter to the editor of Natural History as 'amusing' I understand exactly what you mean—but it is so in exactly the same sense as Mein Kampf was 'amusing'."[3]
Coon continued to write and defend his work until his death, publishing two volumes of memoirs in 1980 and 1981.[40]
Other work
Archaeology
After taking up his position at Pennsylvania in 1948, Coon embarked on a series of archaeological expeditions to Iran, Afghanistan and Syria.
Coon followed up his 1949 expedition with excavations at
Cryptozoology
Coon was, up to his death, a proponent of the existence of bipedal
Cultural historian
Coon's views on cryptids were a major influence on Grover Krantz, and the two were close friends in his later life.[54]
Reception and legacy
Coon's published magnum opus, The Origin of Races (1962), received mixed reactions from scientists of the era. Ernst Mayr praised the work for its synthesis as having an "invigorating freshness that will reinforce the current revitalization of physical anthropology".[55] A book review by Stanley Marion Garn criticised Coon's parallel view of the origin of the races with little gene flow but praised the work for its racial taxonomy and concluded: "an overall favorable report on the now famous Origin of Races".[56] Sherwood Washburn and Ashley Montagu were heavily influenced by the modern synthesis in biology and population genetics. In addition, they were influenced by Franz Boas, who had moved away from typological racial thinking. Rather than supporting Coon's theories, they and other contemporary researchers viewed the human species as a continuous serial progression of populations and heavily criticized Coon's Origin of Races.
In a New York Times' obituary he was hailed for "important contributions to most of the major subdivisions of modern anthropology", "pioneering contributions to the study of human transition from the hunter-gatherer culture to the first agricultural communities." and "important early work in studying the physical adaptations of humans in such extreme environments as deserts, the Arctic and high altitudes."[14] William W. Howells, writing in a 1989 article, noted that Coon's research was "still regarded as a valuable source of data".[57] In 2001, John P. Jackson, Jr. researched Coon's papers to review the controversy around the reception of The Origin of Races, stating in the article abstract:
Segregationists in the United States used Coon's work as proof that African Americans were "junior" to white Americans, and thus unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines the interactions among Coon, segregationist Carleton Putnam, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and anthropologist Sherwood Washburn. The paper concludes that Coon actively aided the segregationist cause in violation of his own standards for scientific objectivity.[2]
Jackson found in the archived Coon papers records of repeated efforts by Coon to aid Putnam's efforts to provide intellectual support to the ongoing resistance to racial integration, but cautioned Putnam against statements that could identify Coon as an active ally (Jackson also noted that both men had become aware that they had General Israel Putnam as a common ancestor, making them (at least distant) cousins, but Jackson indicated neither when either learned of the family relationship nor whether they had a more recent common ancestor).[2] Alan H. Goodman (2000) has said that Coon's main legacy was not his "separate evolution of races (Coon 1962)," but his "molding of race into the new physical anthropology of adaptive and evolutionary processes (Coon et al. 1950)," since he attempted to "unify a typological model of human variation with an evolutionary perspective and explained racial differences with adaptivist arguments."[58][page needed]
Personal life
Coon married Mary Goodale in 1926. They had two sons, one of whom,
Coon retired from Pennsylvania in 1963, but retained an affiliation with the Peabody Museum and continued to write until the end of his life. He appeared on several episodes of television quiz show What in the World? between 1952 and 1957.[9]
Coon died in Gloucester, Massachusetts on June 3, 1981.[14]
Selected publications
This article may contain embedded lists. by removing items or incorporating them into the text of the article. (June 2022) |
Science:[clarification needed]
- Tribes of the Rif (Harvard African Studies, 1931)
- The Races of Europe (1939)
- The Story of Man (1954)
- Caravan: the Story of the Middle East (1958)
- The Origin of Races (1962)
- Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man
- The Hunting Peoples
- Anthropology A to Z (1963)
- Living Races of Man (1965)
- Seven Caves: Archaeological Exploration in the Middle East
- Mountains of Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs
- Yengema Cave Report (his work in Sierra Leone)
- Racial Adaptations (1982)
Fiction and memoir:
- Flesh of the Wild Ox (1932)
- The Riffian (1933)
- Measuring Ethiopia and Flight into Arabia (1935)
- A North Africa Story: Story of an Anthropologist as OSS Agent (1980)
- Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon (1981)
See also
Notes
- ^ "Race" Relations: Montagu, Dobzhansky, Coon, and the Divergence of Race Concepts Archived July 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b c d e Jackson 2001.
- ^ PMID 25950769.
- ^ Spickard 2016, p. 157, "For more than four decades beginning in the late 1930s, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton Coon wrote a series of big books for an ever shrinking audience in which he pushed a pseudoscientific racial angle of analysis."
- ^ Selcer 2012, p. S180, "Most disturbingly for liberal anthropologists, the new generation of racist "pseudoscience" threatened to return to mainstream respectability in 1962 with the publication of Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races (Coon 1962)."
- ^ Loewen 2005, p. 462, "Carleton Coon, whose The Origin of Races [...] claimed that Homo sapiens evolved five different times, blacks last. Its poor reception by anthropologists, followed by evidence from archaeology and paleontology that mankind evolved once, and in Africa, finally put an end to such pseudoscience."
- ^ Regal 2011, pp. 93–94, "Carleton Coon fully embraced typology as a way to determine the basis of racial and ethnic difference .... Unfortunately for him, American anthropology increasingly equated typology with pseudoscience."
- ^ a b c d e Howells, H. W. (1989). Carleton Stevens Coon 1904—1981: A Biographical Memoir (PDF). Washington D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.
- ^ a b Goodrum, Matthew R. (2020). "Coon, Carleton Stevens". Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Encyclopedia.com.
- ^ a b Goodman & Hammonds 2000, p. 29.
- ^ Coon 1981, p. 6.
- ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2005.
- ^ "Harvard in the Rif, 1926-1928 | Peabody Museum". www.peabody.harvard.edu. Retrieved October 29, 2020.
- ^ a b c d e f Harold M. Schmeck Jr. (June 6, 1981). "Carleton S. Coon Is Dead at 76: Pioneer in Social Anthropology". New York Times.
- ISBN 9780226123745.
- ^ a b Kohlstedt 2015, pp. 218–221.
- ^ Price 2008, pp. 255–259.
- ^ a b Goodman & Hammonds 2000, p. 30.
- ^ Coon 1939, p. 441.
- ^ Goodman & Hammonds 2000, p. 29–30.
- ^ a b c Goodman & Hammonds 2000, p. 31.
- ^ a b c Coon 1939.
- ^ Coon 1939, Chapter 2, Section 12.
- ^ The Origin of Races: Weidenreich's Opinion, S. L. Washburn, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 66, No. 5 (Oct. 1964) (pp. 1165-1167).
- ^ An Attempted Revival of the Race Concept, Leonard Lieberman, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Sep. 1995), pp. 590-592.
- ^ Coon's Theory on "The Origin of Races", Bruce G. Trigger, Anthropologica, New Series, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1965), pp. 179-187.
- ^ Coon, Carleton S. (1962) . The Origins of Races. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- '^ The Living Races of Man, On Greater India
- PMID 19411595.
- ^ "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective" (PDF). Retrieved February 8, 2024.
- ^ "Welcome". raceandgenomics.ssrc.org. Retrieved April 8, 2018.
- PMID 19226646.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-525-55757-9.
- ^ Shipman 1994, p. 200.
- ^ Academic American Encyclopedia (vol. 5, p.271). Danbury, Connecticut: Grolier Incorporated (1995).
- ^ Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races, Knopf, 1962, p. vii
- ^ Shipman 1994, p. 207.
- ^ Jackson 2001, p. 247.
- ^ Shipman 1994, pp. 283–284.
- ^ National Anthropological Archives, "Coon, Carleton Stevens (1904-1981), Papers" Archived April 1, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b c d e "Coon, Carleton Stevens". Encyclopaedia Iranica. Retrieved October 5, 2020.
- ^ a b Mortensen, Peder (1987). "Philip E.L. Smith, 1986. — Palaeolithic Archaeology in Iran. (Review)". Paléorient. 13 (1): 137–138.
- .
- ISSN 0003-598X.
- ISSN 0022-2968.
- ISSN 1548-1433.
- ^ ISSN 1548-1433.
- ^ C. S. Coon, "Excavations in Huto Cave, Iran, 1951: A Preliminary Report", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society; 96, 1952, pp. 231–69.
- ^ JSTOR 664896.
- OCLC 489646.
- ^ Coon, Carleton. "Why There Has to Be a Sasquatch". Bigfoot Encounters. Retrieved October 5, 2020.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-226-42913-7.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-525-55757-9.
- ^ Regal 2011.
- ^ Origin of the Human Races, Ernst Mayr, Science, New Series, Vol. 138, No. 3538, (October 19, 1962), pp. 420-422.
- ^ The Origin of Races. by Carleton S. Coon, Review by: Stanley M. Garn, American Sociological Review, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Aug. 1963), pp. 637-638/
- ^ W. W. Howells. "Biographical Memoirs V.58". National Academy of Sciences, 1989.[1]
- ^ Goodman & Hammonds 2000.
References
- Coon, Carleton (1939). The Races of Europe. Macmillan.
- Coon, Carleton S. (1981). Adventures and Discoveries: the autobiography of Carleton S. Coon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 9780130140272.
- Goodman, Alan H.; Hammonds, Evelynn (2000). "Reconciling race and human adaptability: Carleton Coon and the persistence of race in scientific discourse". Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers. 84: 28–44.
- Jackson, John P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races". Journal of the History of Biology. 34 (2): 247–285. S2CID 86739986.
- Kohlstedt, Matthew August (2015). From Artifacts to People Facts: Archaeologists, World War II, and the Origins of Middle East Area Studies (Ph.D. dissertation). George Washington University.
- ISBN 9781565848870.
- ISBN 9780822342373.
- ISBN 978-0-230-11829-4.
- Selcer, Perrin (2012). "Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to Produce UNESCO's Scientific Statements on Race". Current Anthropology. 53 (S5): S173–S184. S2CID 146652143.
- Shipman, Pat (1994). The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674008626.
- JSTOR j.ctvpj76k0.11– via JSTOR.
Further reading
- The Lagar Velho 1 Skeleton
- Two Views of Coon's Origin of Races with Comments by Coon and Replies. 1963. Theodosius Dobzhansky; Ashley Montagu; C. S. Coon in Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 4. (Oct. 1963), pp. 360–367.
- Jackson, John P. (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education. ISBN 978-0-8147-4271-6.
- Lay summary in: "Book Review: Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education". History Cooperative.
- ISBN 978-0-252-07463-9.
External links
- Carleton Stevens Coon Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
- Photographs of Coon, Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth
- Coon's photography in Albania, 1929