November 29, 1999 – Anthropologist Ashley Montagu died last Friday, November 26, at her home in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, at the age of 95. Known in the French-speaking world as the author of Skin and touch, his only book translated into French (Seuil, 1979), Montagu was a prolific author. Humanist and avant-garde, he is considered one of the most influential anthropologists of this century. His work includes some sixty works including The Natural Superiority of Women (1957) and Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: Fallacy of Race where he attacked the idea of the biological superiority of races.
One of his most popular books, Growing Young (1981), explains how adults are made to grow and develop while preserving the qualities naturally present in children: love, curiosity, enthusiasm, sensitivity, joy, taste for play, honesty, etc. According to Montagu, the human being has, at birth, 27 qualities and needs that adults often have the habit of extinguishing by an education which forces them to become too quickly “like adults”.
In Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (translated under the title Skin and touch), Montagu demonstrates that touch is a universal need and that the harmonious development of the child depends on being touched enough. According to him, a person who has been affected enough as a child will have the ability to relate to all essential human areas. His book provides observations and evidence to support his claims.
Widely unknown in the French-speaking world and still too little known in the English-speaking world, the work and thought of Ashley Montagu were entirely focused on discovering the keys to development and the fulfillment of human potential. For him, humans are born polymorphic, that is, they have the potential to become anything and everything, depending on their upbringing (in the broad sense). The Ashley Montagu Institute, established in 1997, aims to continue to radiate the thinker’s ideas about the importance of love in the development of human beings through research, community intervention and educational activities. .
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Other resource: The Ashley Montagu Institute (www.montagu.org/home.htm)
