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 emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline based on the concept of culture, and establishing a subdisciplinary scope including cultural, physical and linguistic anthropology as well as prehistoric archaeology.
In spite of his focus on professionalism in science, Boas himself was trained in (psycho)physics in his native Germany, thereby coming into contact with the folk psychology of Wundt and the anthropology of Bastian (European folk cultures) and Virchow (anthropometry). Boas’s dissertation at the University of Kiel in 1881 on the colour of sea water led to concern with the inherent subjectivity of observer perception. His work in geography with Fischer initially supported environmental determinism, but his expedition to the Eskimo of Baffin Land in 1882–3 led to a more flexible argument stressing the interaction of culture and environment.
Boas settled permanently in North America only in 1887, recognizing greater opportunities there for an ambitious young Jewish scholar. In the ensuing years, he was crucially involved in the development of American anthropology in all of its early major centres. The institutional framework for the emerging Boasian anthropology was usually collaboration between a university, ensuring the academic training of professional anthropologists, and a museum to sponsor field research and publication. Boas himself settled in New York, teaching at Columbia from 1896 until 1936. He had previously served as Honorary Philologist of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which dominated Washington and government anthropology. Through F.W.Putnam of Harvard, he organized anthropology at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1892 and acquired ties to archaeological work centring at Harvard. Boas’s own students established programmes elsewhere, particularly Kroeber at Berkeley, Speck at Pennsylvania, and Sapir in Ottawa. By about 1920, Boasian anthropology was firmly established as the dominant paradigm of the North American discipline.
Boas’s theoretical position, often characterized as historical particularism, claimed that unilinear evolution was an inadequate model for the known diversity of human cultures. Human nature was defined as variable and learned tradition. Although he was extremely interested in particular historical developments, Boas argued that progress did not necessarily follow a fixed sequence, nor was it always unidirectional from simple to complex. He further parted from evolutionary theorists like E.B.Tylor in his contention that cultural learning is basically unconscious rather than rational. Boas produced particular ethnographic examples to argue the limits of theoretical generalization in anthropology, indeed in social science generally. ‘Laws’ comparable to those of the natural sciences were possible in principle though usually premature in practice. The ultimate generalizations of anthropology would be psychological (1911b), but Boas’s own studies rarely transcended the prior level of ethnographic description. Later students, especially Margaret Mead and Benedict, elaborated these ideas in what came to be called culture and personality.
Particular histories could not be reconstructed in detail for societies without written records. In contrast, Boas stressed the historical dimensions of synchronically observable, particular cultural phenomena. For example, distribution was the primary reconstructive method to trace the diffusion (borrowing) of folklore motifs and combinations on the Northwest Coast. Elements in a single culture had diverse sources rather than a single common origin. Boas applied this same argument to linguistic work, assuming that language was a part of culture. His scepticism about distant genetic relationships of American Indian languages was consistent with his lack of training in Indo-European philology, and brought him into frequent disagreement with his former student Edward Sapir, whose linguistic work was far more sophisticated.
On the other hand, Boas made important contributions to linguistics, being the first to establish the theoretical independence of race, language and culture as classificatory variables for human diversity (1911 a). He broke with the Indo-European tradition in insisting on the ‘inner form’ (Steinthal) of each language in its grammatical patterning, developing new analytic categories appropriate to American Indian languages.
Boas insisted on the importance of firsthand fieldwork in living cultures, and he returned again and again to the Kwakiutl and other Northwest Coast tribes. He trained native informants to record their own cultures, and collected native language texts for folklore as well as linguistics. He was particularly concerned to record the symbolic culture of these tribes, focusing on art, mythology, religion and language, and was influential in the development of the disciplines of folklore and linguistics as well as anthropology.
Boas’s own research spanned the scope of anthropology in its North American definition. In archaeology, he pioneered in Mexico and the Southwest in developing research programmes to reconstruct the history of particular cultures. In physical anthropology, he demonstrated that the head-form of descendants of immigrants can change in a single generation, thereby illustrating the essential variability and plasticity of the human form. He further developed important statistical methods for human growth studies, using longitudinal studies and family-line variation to show the role of environment in modifying heredity. Moreover, Boas was dedicated to the idea that anthropology had practical consequences for society generally, arguing, particularly in response to events in Nazi Germany at the end of his life, for the essential equality of races (defined in terms of statistical variability) and the validity of each cultural pattern.
Boas is, then, more than any other individual, responsible for the characteristic form which the discipline of anthropology has taken in North America. During his long career, he and several successive generations of students stood for a particular scope, method and theory, applied largely to the study of the American Indians. The increasing diversity of North American anthropology since The Second World War still has Boasian roots.
Regna Darnell
University of Western Ontario
References
Boas, F. (1911a) ‘Introduction’, in Handbook of American Indian Languages, Washington, DC.
——(1911b) The Mind of Primitive Man, New York.
Further reading
Boas, F. (1888 [1964]) The Central Eskimo, Lincoln, NB.
——(1940) Race, Language and Culture, New York.
Goldschmidt, W. (ed.) (1959) The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Memoir of the American Anthropological Association 89.
Harris, M. (1968) The Rise of Anthropological Theory, New York.
Stocking, G. (1968) Race, Culture and Evolution, New York.
