If Boas had been with me at this lecture last night…

      ...he would have had a lot of material to critique, as do I.

As an Anthropology major, I had not been into the bottom realms of the beautiful new Business School until a talk entitled “Sweatshops: Improving Lives and Economic Growth” caught my eye and brought me to the auditorium packed with business-minded students and faculty. The Adam Smith Society had invited Dr. Benjamin Powell, an economist, to debate the criticism of sweatshops taken up by activists all over the world. The main point of his argument, based on his latest book, examined sweatshops across the globe and regarded them as a necessary step in the development of nations. Dr. Powell compared wages and conditions for sweatshop workers to the average people in the countries in which sweatshops are prominent, stating that oftentimes, sweatshops actually pay better wages and are better situations than most of the alternatives available. He criticized the activist organizations who fight to raise wages, eliminate child labor, and work to end sweatshops by saying that based on other historical situations (in the US and England), sweatshops are actually part of the development plan to a better economic situation and better lives for the people.

Sitting there, as a person with little background knowledge in economic theory but with a strong tendency towards activism, I was very conflicted. Some of the economic theory went over my head, and so I did not quite know what to think of some of his points because I did not think I could theorize on that level. But then I remembered that I now have theories of my own with which I can analyze arguments and view situations! And the more I sat there and listened to Dr. Powell’s arguments, the more I could see through them and point out places in which he would have greatly benefited from knowing an anthropologist- namely, Franz Boas.

One of Boas’ main theories, for lack of a better word, was that culture is holistic, an idea that most modern anthropologists maintain. Unlike some of his predecessors, Boas considered the interdependence of each aspect of culture to be of vital importance when studying a group of people. He brought to light the idea that one cannot analyze one aspect of a culture in isolation, because all aspects interact with one another in a way that cannot be separated. Dr. Powell, in his speech on sweatshops, talked very much about one aspect of culture- labor markets and economics- in isolation from all other considerations. He made no references to gender or racial disparities in the countries he addressed, no mention of the education systems, no mention of religion or rituals or any other part of the interconnected and complex system that is culture.

But mentioning these other pieces that make up culture as a whole would have been difficult, since Dr. Powell was generalizing situations in sweatshops across 20+ countries found on all different continents. There was not even a slight emphasis on cultural relativism, or the economic equivalent, during his discussion of the economic situations in which sweatshops exist. Franz Boas would have been exasperated, to say the least, at the level at which Dr. Powell grouped multiple diverse nations into one discussion.

It was not even just cultural relativism that was missing from Dr. Powell’s argument, but even historical particularism. His main “solution” to having sweatshops was to just wait for them to rebuild the economy over time- using a comparison to factories in the United States during the Industrial Revolution. So not only was his argument based on the major assumption that what happened in the United States, a different culture, would happen in these two dozen countries with varying cultures, but that what happened over a hundred years ago would happen in present day. Instead of suggesting an analysis of each culture that would provide a better idea of the role sweatshops play in the different places, which could perhaps lead to change in a more humane direction for all people, Dr. Powell just lumped all the countries together. This lack of contextualization would not, in my opinion, help anyone get anywhere.

The final reason that Franz Boas would have been critical of Dr. Powell’s speech (at least the final one that I will discuss here…I could go on about Boas’ belief in inter-culture contact and environment having effects on cultures, but that would be hard to measure up to Dr. Powell’s lecture since he did not acknowledge the existence of various cultures) relates to Boas’ strong belief in the equality of men that drove his activism during his lifetime. Dr. Powell, following the economic beliefs of Adam Smith, the namesake of the society which brought Dr. Powell to Wake Forest last night, seemed to forget about the humanity behind the work he discussed and the global connection we all, as a common humanity, have to one another. Adam Smith was criticized for undervaluing man in comparison with money when considering the wealth of a nation, and Dr. Powell similarly ignored the stories of the people who work in the sweatshops he studies so carefully from an economic perspective. Though at the beginning of his speech he stated that he was not undermining the horrible conditions in which people work in sweatshops, Dr. Powell did exactly that by saying that the only way the situation can improve is if development takes its natural course away from sweatshops, as it did in the United States (a point of comparison that could be contested, considering sweatshops do still exist in the United States).  

Dr. Powell did bring up good points about activism- namely, knowing the full consequences of your actions as an activist. But it was hard, after gaining knowledge of Boasian theory, to ignore the flaws in the construction of his argument. Listening to the lecture, all I could think of was how valuable anthropological theory is to everyday life, across disciplines, and was inspired to bring the theory of anthropology through to other fields.