Franz Boas
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 subjected the premises of physical anthropology to rigorous and critical analysis. According to Boas, all cultures must be studied in their totality, including their language, religion, art, history, physical characteristics, environmental conditions, diseases, nutrition, child-raising customs, migrations, and interactions with other cultures. Based on his research of many different cultures, he concluded that no truly pure races exist and that no so-called "race" is innately superior to any other.
Boas was born in Minden, Germany, where his father was a merchant. As a child, he was interested in books and the natural sciences. While he was a student at the Minden Gymnasium, he became interested in cultural history. After studying at the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn, he earned his baccalaureate degree from the University of Heidelberg and his Ph.D. in physics and geography from the University of Kiel. After participating in a scientific exploration of the Baffin Island region of the Arctic from 1883 to 1884, he found positions in an ethnological museum in Berlin and on the faculty of geography at the University of Berlin. In 1886, after a study of the Kwakiutl and other tribes of British Columbia, he immigrated to the United States and obtained a job as an editor of the magazine Science. While teaching anthropology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, he worked on the preparation of the anthropological exhibitions for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In 1899 he became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where, as a specialist in North American Indian cultures and languages, he was an influential teacher and a leader in his profession. His work contributed to the fields of statistical physical anthropology, descriptive and theoretical linguistics, and American Indian ethnology. Many of his students, including Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), Margaret Mead (1901-1978), Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), Edward Sapir (1884-1939), and Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), became famous anthropologists in their own right. From 1896 to 1905 Boas was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he directed studies of the relationships between the aboriginal peoples of Siberia and North America. He established the International Journal of American Linguistics and the American Anthropological Association and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Boas can also be considered a pioneer in visual anthropology. He was one of the first anthropologists to use the motion picture camera to collect data in the field in order to study gesture, body movement, and dances. He had been using still photography in the field since 1894. In 1930, when he was 70 years old, he took a motion picture camera and a wax cylinder sound-recording apparatus on another field trip to the Kwakiutl.
Boas made many trips to study the Native American tribes of British Columbia, but he is best known for his work with the Kwakiutl Indians from northern Vancouver and the adjacent mainland of British Columbia. While studying the Kwakiutl, he established a new concept of culture and race, emphasizing the importance of observing all aspects of a culture. Boasian anthropological theory encompassed cultural relativism, which argues that the observed differences among populations are the results of unique historical, social, and geographic conditions. Each culture is, therefore, complete and equally developed in its own framework and is not a stage in a universal scheme of cultural evolution. Boas and his followers opposed the evolutionary view of culture advocated by such ethnologists as Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) and Edward Tylor (1832-1917), who believed that each race, or culture, went through certain "evolutionary" stages as it developed towards "higher" stages of culture according to certain universal laws. Boas also opposed race-based explanations and argued that culture, rather than race, was the fundamental factor in understanding the uniqueness of human societies. For personal as well as theoretical reasons, he was a passionate opponent of anti-Semitism and racial discrimination, especially of Nazi propaganda claiming to provide "scientific" explanations for the racial inferiority of non-Aryans.
Franz Boas. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)He argued that no race was innately superior to any other. In the 1930s the Nazis burned his book
The Mind of Primitive Man (compiled from a series of lectures on race and culture and published in 1911) and rescinded his Ph.D. from Kiel University.
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