Franz Boas
Franz Boas (1858-1942) was a pioneering figure in American anthropology, often referred to as the "father of American anthropology." Born in a liberal Jewish family in Germany, he initially studied physics before shifting his focus to anthropology after an influential trip to Baffinland. Boas's career included significant roles at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, where he taught and mentored many prominent anthropologists, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. His extensive research and writings, which included over 600 articles and several influential books, challenged prevailing notions of race and culture, promoting the idea of cultural relativism and discrediting the theory of unilinear evolution.
Boas believed that cultural traits could not be tied to physical characteristics, arguing for the significance of environmental factors in shaping human societies. His advocacy for cultural pluralism and social justice was evident in both his academic work and his public stances against racism and anti-Semitism. Despite personal tragedies, including the loss of family members, Boas remained committed to his scholarly pursuits and the principles of liberalism and scientific inquiry throughout his life. His contributions fundamentally transformed the discipline of anthropology, grounding it in empirical research and establishing a legacy that continues to influence the field today.
Franz Boas
Anthropologist
- Born: July 9, 1858
- Birthplace: Minden, Westphalia, Prussia (now in Germany)
- Died: December 21, 1942
- Place of death: New York, New York
German-born American anthropologist
Boas made anthropology a vital discipline in the history of twentieth century social science, and his scholarship, in time, had a significant impact on public policy in the United States. In The Mind of Primitive Man he argued passionately against the intellectual assumptions of racism.
Areas of achievement Anthropology, social sciences
Early Life
Franz Boas (BOH-ahs) was the only son of six children (three of whom survived childhood) of Meier Boas and Sophie Meyer Boas, who were Jews. His father was a successful businessman, while his mother was extremely active in political and civic affairs. A spirit of liberalism and freethinking prevailed in the Boas household. It was a family legacy of the ideals of the German Revolution of 1848.
Although a sickly child, Boas had a lively interest in the natural world around him an interest much encouraged by his mother. His enjoyment of nature, music, and school shaped his early life. After attending primary school and the gymnasium in Minden, Boas began his university studies. For the next four years, he studied at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel. In 1881, at the age of twenty-three, he took his doctorate in physics at Kiel; his dissertation was entitled Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water. Later, his academic interests moved from physics and mathematics to physical, and, later, cultural geography.
In 1883, after a year in a reserve officer-training program and another year in further study, Boas made his anthropological trip to Baffinland, a territory inhabited by Eskimos. The experience changed his life, for he determined that he would study human phenomena in nature. Following a year in New York City, he became an assistant at the Museum for Volkerbunde in Berlin. As docent in geography at the University of Berlin, he made a field trip to British Columbia to study the Bella Coola Indians.
Life’s Work
The year of 1887 was a critical one in Boas’s career: He decided to become an American citizen; he married Marie Krackowizer, who, over the years, was an active supporter of his varied projects; and he became assistant editor at the magazine Science. In the summer of 1888, he returned to British Columbia to continue his studies of the northwestern American Indian tribes. Eventually, during his lifetime, he published more than ten thousand pages of material from this area of research.
From 1888 to 1892, he taught at Clark University. He then served as chief assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the World Columbian Exposition. He was also the curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago and worked for the American Museum of Natural History as curator of ethnology and somatology. From 1899 to 1937, he served as professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he shaped the disciplinary future of the “science of man” by teaching the leading members of the next generation of anthropologists, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
His varied activities continued. Boas took part in the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. As honorary philologist at the Bureau of American Ethnology, he published a three-volume work, Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911). Boas founded the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico (1910) and the International Journal of American Linguistics (1917). He served from 1908 to 1925 as editor of the Journal of American Folk-Lore and chaired a committee on Native American languages for the American Council of Learned Societies.
During all these institutional and educational activities, Boas constantly wrote scholarly and popular books and articles. In 1911, he published The Mind of Primitive Man (rev. ed. 1938), “the Magna Carta of race equality.” His book destroyed a claim current among intellectuals that physical type bore an inherent relationship to cultural traits. Other books followed: Primitive Art (1927), Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), General Anthropology (1938), and Race, Language, and Culture (1940), a collection of his most important papers. During his lifetime, Boas published more than six hundred articles in both the scholarly and popular press.
Boas’s writings, museum work, and teaching contributed to the modern concept of cultural pluralism (or relativism). He moved anthropology away from its nineteenth century origin in armchair theory and speculation and toward its twentieth century development as a science, a careful recording of fact and scholarly monographs grounded in empirical history. Thus, Boas contributed to the development of functionalism. Boas discredited the theory of unilinear evolutionism, with its easy assumption of the innate superiority of Western society. He successfully argued that historical differences were significant because environmental opportunity worked diversely on a basically similar human nature.
During his long and productive career, Boas did not neglect his family. He was a strong and loving father; his letters reveal a man committed to his family’s welfare and happiness. Unfortunately, two of his six children died suddenly, and his wife was killed in an automobile accident in 1929. Despite these tragic events and a heart attack at seventy-three, Boas continued his scholarly effort. At a Columbia University Faculty Club luncheon, he died suddenly, on December 21, 1942.
Significance
In his own antiauthoritarian style, Boas created modern anthropology. He disliked authority in all of its cultural forms, which included his own scholarship. Highly critical, he was never satisfied with his work; he never accepted as permanent any single anthropological concept. His scholarly style created a “school,” but his personality did not. His life, thought, and significance in American history are of a piece.
Influenced by his freethinking family, Boas never hid his views, such as his dislike of racism and anti-Semitism, from public knowledge. While he was not prepared to accept Germany as the sole villain in World War I, Boas was one of the first of his generation of intellectuals to see the terror behind Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Boas acted accordingly: He publicly denounced Nazism early in its reign. His scholarship, in addition to adding to human knowledge, contributed to human liberation from fear and unreasonable authority.
The spirit of liberalism and the scientific method shaped his work and personality. His belief in cultural relativism was evident not only in his scholarship but also in his kindness to others, whom he met in the academy and in the field. As a result of this attitude, Boas accepted, without judgment, people as he met them in all of their varied ways.
Boas’s work linked him with every major methodological and theoretical doctrine in modern anthropology. Rejecting conventional wisdom, he held a theory only as long as it challenged the current dogma. In that way, he remained in the forefront of anthropological theory.
Boas was not a remote scientist, but a citizen-scholar. His study of the children of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City, for example, stressed the developmental importance of home environment and resulted in a change in the institution’s administration. The Mind of Primitive Man was a prime weapon against the intellectual assumptions of racism. With this topic, he was concerned with practical humanitarian consequences for public policy.
In brief, with his personal integrity and varied scientific accomplishments, Boas shaped the course of anthropology in the United States. His precision and scholarly certainty in anthropology were extended to his commitment to the policy consequence of the discipline. In both his life and his thought, Franz Boas made vital contributions to the development and ideals of cultural pluralism in America.
Bibliography
Boas, Franz. The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader. Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1974. A brilliant introduction, this work places Boas in the intellectual context of his time. Organized chronologically, these selections allow the student to follow the evolution of Boas’s scholarship.
Glenn, David. “Anthropologists, Few in Number, Revisit a 1919 Debate.” Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 18 (June 7, 2005): A-29. Reports on the American Anthropological Association’s decision to rescind its 1919 censure of Boas, explaining the reasons for the original censure and its later revision.
Helm, June, ed. Pioneers of American Anthropology: The Uses of Biography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. Particularly good on Boas’s fieldwork among the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, and a splendid work on how he moved anthropology from an “armchair” or speculative enterprise to a science that was based on empirical data.
Hinsley, Curtis M., Jr. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1900. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. This book illustrates the changing intellectual and institutional context for the study of humankind during Boas’s early career. In his later career, Boas came to dominate the discipline.
Kardiner, Abram, and Edward Preble. They Studied Man. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1961. Delightfully written, this book is possibly the best introduction to modern anthropology available to students just starting to explore the field.
Lewis, Herbert S. “The Passion of Franz Boas.” American Anthropologist 103, no. 2 (June, 2001): 445. Discusses Boas’s concerns with humans rights and liberty and his desire to eradicate prejudice and discrimination. Examines the political implications of his anthropology.
Penniman, Thomas K. A Hundred Years of Anthropology. 3d rev. ed. London: G. Duckworth, 1965. This book is a standard history, particularly strong on the British contributions to the creation of the discipline. The scope includes the related topics of imperialism and colonialism and how they shaped the early concerns of “gentlemen-anthropologists” a legacy that Boas rejected.
Silverman, Sydel, ed. Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Former students of famous anthropologists tell about their mentors. The essay on Boas is particularly thoughtful and informative because it reveals him as a private person whose ideas about citizenship and contemporary issues influenced his scholarly concerns.
Spencer, Frank, ed. A History of American Physical Anthropology: 1930-1980. New York: Academic Press, 1982. A good source for understanding how Boas changed the emphasis in anthropology from one based on racist assumptions to one with a cultural focus.
Stocking, George W., Jr. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. 1968. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stocking, a leading historian of American anthropology, provides the best intellectual history of anthropology and its place in American thought. The book is richly informative, and it includes a new preface.
Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century
1901-1940: 1911: Boas Publishes The Mind of Primitive Man; August, 1928: Mead Publishes Coming of Age in Samoa; 1934: Benedict Publishes Patterns of Culture.
1941-1970: 1965: Anthropologists Claim That Ecuadorian Pottery Shows Transpacific Contact in 3000 b.c.e.