Franz Uri Boas | Biography

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 analysis of local texts and enabling local researchers to document their own history. Boas' studies focused on empirical ethnographic study of the Native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest, particularly of the Kwakiutl.

Born in Minden, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, in 1858, Franz Boas studied mathematics at the University of Heidelberg and Bonn. In 1882, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Kiel. His initial course of study was geography, and he taught geography at the University of Berlin. In 1886, he traveled to Vancouver Island and studied Pacific Northwest Indian tribes. He then moved to New York and taught anthropology from 1888 until 1892 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1893, he went to Chicago to work at the World's Columbian Exposition and the Field Museum of Natural History. In 1896, Boas became the first professor of anthropology in the United States, teaching at Columbia University. He also served as curator of anthropology for the American Museum of Natural History from 1896 until 1905. In 1897, Boas convinced Morris Jesup to fund the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, documenting the native cultures in the Pacific Northwest between 1897 and 1902. He worked on editing the reports of the expedition until 1930. Though Boas formally retired in 1936, he taught as professor emeritus at Columbia until his death in 1942.

A cultural relativist, Boas disdained generalized theories of anthropology in his work and focused on concrete scientific observation. An influential thinker in the area of racism, Boas decried the notion that heredity was the determinant of character and insisted that culture and variations within cultures were of primary concern in any anthropological study. He argued that cultures should be studied as whole systems, made of many interrelated parts, and that cultures should be understood in their own terms. Many thinkers of the time were putting forth the notion that there were specific, identifiable differences between the races of man. Yet Boas found that these ideas were based on biased research, on the assumption that the higher achievement of certain races indicated greater intelligence. He discovered little evidence to support the theory and declared the assumption false. In particular, Boas argued that there was no proof of the inferiority of black Americans, and that negative characteristics that some black Americans showed were "the result of social conditions, rather than of hereditary traits." He argued this point in many of his significant works, such as Race, Language, and Culture (1940) and The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), and thus brought a new approach to modern anthropological study.

Boas was a prolific writer who published over six hundred monographs and articles. He published many different types of works, including field notes, Indian folklore, and linguistic studies of Northwestern Native American tribal languages. His work influenced several generations of anthropologists, including his own students Alfred L. Kroeber, Melville Herskovits, and Ruth Benedict, and her student Margaret Mead.