SOURCE: "The Limits of Boas' Anthropology," in American Anthropologist, Vol. 58, No. 1, 1956, pp. 63-74.

In the following essay, Wax argues that while Boas was successful in introducing a spirit of critical inquiry and empiricism into modern anthropology, he failed to develop viable theories of his own.

This paper will examine the dominant convictions of Franz Boas on a variety of subjects. We will show that, whatever their individual merits, they formed, when linked together, a chain that constricted creative research in cultural anthropology. By their combined standards, scarcely any research was judged satisfactory. The great talents of Boas himself were so restricted that he could not produce any positive, integrated work of significance, and his function became that of critic.

The form of a typical ethnological study by Franz Boas was as follows: A general hypothesis about culture or about cultural processes had been advanced by some scholar. Boas...