Sociology's Hesitancy: Race, culture, and heterodox idea formation in early American sociological and anthropological theory

This thesis explores heterodox idea formation in scientific fields through a comparative historical analysis of academic anthropology and sociology at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, it compares the varying trajectories of evolutionary theories of race and culture in these two emerging academic disciplines. In anthropology, the Boasian rejection of biologically determined race and culture was popularized during a period of increasing rather than decreasing interest in evolutionary theory in sociology. Despite the fact that both Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois published similar critiques of evolutionary theory in the 1890s, only Boas' argument was adopted by the mainstream of his discipline. Using archival sources from these two intellectuals as well as scholars from the Bureau of American Ethnology and the American Sociological Society, this paper sketches out a theoretical model for how heterodox ideas form and are popularized in scientific fields. I argue that heterodox scientific theories were best able to flourish when three conditions were met: (1) the collection of new data, (2) the creation of a new method of data analysis, and (3) an institutional space for research that lacked a hegemonic theory. This theory demands a great deal more testing and expansion through application to new cases, but nonetheless provides an initial theory of how heterodox theories move from the margins to the mainstream of a scientific field.