The German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) established the modern structure of anthropology and applied anthropological findings to problems in education, race relations, nationalism and internationalism, war and peace, and the...

Franz Boas, an anthropologist and linguist, helped to found modern cultural anthropology in the United States. He and his students influenced all areas of anthropology through the 1930's, revolutionizing fieldwork methodology, linguistics, and the...

Franz Boas, born in Germany in 1858, naturalized US citizen in 1892, unquestionably dominated both the intellectual paradigm and institutional development of twentieth-century American anthropology until the Second World War, presiding over the...

During 1883–84 Boas undertook his first fieldwork, a study of the Inuit of Baffin Island. His objective was to compare the physical environment, which he mapped and measured objectively, with the knowledge of it held by its inhabitants. Boas...

BOAS, FRANZ (1858–1942), German-American anthropologist, was born at Minden, Prussian Westphalia, on July 9, 1858, the son of Jewish parents of comfortable means, both of whom were assimilated into German culture. His education was largely at...

1858-1942 German-American Anthropologist Franz Boas is primarily remembered for his pioneering work as an anthropologist and ethnologist. Boas was the founder of the culture-centered (but still scientifically based) approach to anthropology. He...

Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942[2]) was a German anthropologist, a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology".[3] Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his...

Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries. By Vernon J. Williams Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Pp. ix, 152. $34.95.) Historian Vernon J. Williams Jr. has written a little book about a big subject the historical and continuing influence of...

Recently, some neo-Boasian anthropologists have portrayed Boas as an anthropologist with a deep sense of history, of the individual, and of agency. Focusing on Boas's ethnographic practice rather than his theoretical and programmatic statements, I first find an 'atomistic' (opposite of holistic) ethnographer, and...

Lesser was a distinguished American anthropologist who, like Boas, specialized in the study of Native American cultures. In the following excerpt, he summarizes Boas's achievements.

A respected American anthropologist, Mead is noted for her psychological and cultural studies of primitive societies, most notably Coming of Age in Samoa. Mead also studied with Boas, and in the following essay, which incorporates letters, conversations, and lecture notes, Mead discusses Boas's influence on her work as well as his impact on the field of anthropology.

In the following excerpt, the critics describe Boas's approach to the study of human societies and place him in the context of nineteenth-century ethnographic theories.

A basic description of Franz Boas and the relation to today's society