franz boas - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Franz Boas

Born July 9, 1858

Minden, Westphalia, Germany[1]

Died December 21, 1942 (aged 84)

New York, U.S.

Education Ph.D. in geography, University of Kiel

(1881)

OccupationAnthropologist

Spouse(s) Marie Krackowizer Boas

(18611929)

Children Helene Boas Yampolsky

(18881963)

Ernst Philip Boas

(18911955)

Hedwig Boas (1893/94)

Gertrud Boas (18971924)

Henry Herbert Donaldson

Boas (18991925)

Marie Franziska Boas

(19021987)

Parents Meier Boas (18231899),

Sophie Meyer Boas

(18281916)

Signature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Franz Uri Boas(/frnz bo.z/; July 9, 1858 December 21,

1942)[2]was a German-American[3]anthropologist and a pioneer of

modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American

Anthropology".[4][5]

Studying in Germany, Boas received his doctorate in physics

specializing in the psychophysics of perception, and completed

post-doctoral work in geography. He participated in an expedition to

northern Canada where he became fascinated with the culture and

language of the Baffin Island Inuit. He went on to do field work with

the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In

1887 he emigrated to the United States where he first worked as a

museum curator at the Smithsonian, and in 1899 became professor of

anthropology at Columbia University where he remained for the rest

of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found

anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their

mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American

anthropology. Among his most significant students were A. L.

Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Zora

Neale Hurston.[6]

Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then popular

ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological

concept and that human behavior is best understood through the

typology of biological characteristics.[7]In a series of groundbreaking

studies of skeletal anatomy he showed that cranial shape and size was

highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health

and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of theday that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked

to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily

determined by innate biological dispositions, but are largely the result

of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way,

Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing

differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central

analytical concept of anthropology.[6]

Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his

rejection of the then popular evolutionary approaches to the study of

culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchictechnological and cultural stages, with Western-European culture at

the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through

the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas, and

that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher"

cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based

organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order

items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural

groups in question. Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural

relativism which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as

higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the

world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to

their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture

conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways, and to do this it was necessary to gain an

understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the

study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with

nz Boas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas

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ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous

languages, Boas created the four field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology

in the 20th century.[6]

1 Early life and education2 Post-graduate studies

3 Fin de Sicle debates

3.1 Science versus history

3.2 Orthogenetic versus Darwinian evolution

4 Early career: museum studies

5 Later career: academic anthropology

5.1 Physical anthropology

5.2 Linguistics

5.3 Cultural anthropology

6 Franz Boas and folklore

7 Scientist as activist

8 Students and influence

9 Legacy

10 Leadership roles and honors

11 Notes

12 Sources/further reading

12.1 Writings by Boas12.2 Writings on Boas and Boasian anthropology

12.3 Boas, anthropology, and Jewish identity

13 External links

Franz Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia. Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced

Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society. Boas's parents were educated,

well-to-do, and liberal; they did not like dogma of any kind. Due to this, Boas was granted the independence to think forhimself and pursue his own interests. Early in life he displayed a penchant for both nature and natural sciences. Boas

vocally opposed anti-Semitism and refused to convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew;[8]indeed,

according to his biographer, "He was an 'ethnic' German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in

America."[9]In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote:

The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a

living force. My father, liberal, but not active in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public

matters; the founder about 1854 of the kindergarten in my home town, devoted to science. My parents had broken

through the shackles of dogma. My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental

home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom.[10]

From kindergarten on, Boas was educated in natural history, a subject he enjoyed. In gymnasium, he was proudest of his

research on the geographic distribution of plants. Nevertheless, when it came time for university, he intended to study


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physics in Berlin, but eventually changed his mind and enrolled in the University of Kiel to be closer to his family. But

prior to that, he attended the university of Heidelberg for a time.

For his dissertation, Boas planned to conduct research on Gauss's law of the normal distribution of errors, but his thesis

supervisor Gustav Karsten instructed him to work on the optical properties of water instead. Boas received his doctorate

in physics from Kiel university in 1881. Unhappy with his dissertation, Boas was intrigued by the problems of perception

that had plagued his research. Boas had been interested in Kantian philosophy since taking a course on aesthetics with

Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg. This interest led Boas to Psychophysics; he considered moving to Berlin to study with

Hermann von Helmholtz, but he had no training in Psychology.[11][12]

Boas took up geography as a way to explore his growing interest in the relationship between subjective experience and

the objective world. At the time, German geographers were divided over the causes of cultural variation.[13]:11Many

argued that the physical environment was the principal determining factor, but others (notably Friedrich Ratzel) argued

that the diffusion of ideas through human migration is more important. In 1883, Boas went to Baffin Island to conduct

geographic research on the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. The first of many

ethnographic field trips, Boas culled his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo, which was

published in the 6th Annual Report from the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1888. Boas lived and worked closely

with the Inuit peoples on Baffin Island, and he developed an abiding interest in the way people lived.

In the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Boas reported, he and his traveling companion became lost and were

forced to keep sledding for twenty-six hours through ice, soft snow, and temperatures that dropped below 46 C. The

following day, Boas penciled in his diary:

I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages' and find, the more I see

of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them ... We have no right to blame them for their forms

and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We 'highly educated people' are much worse, relatively

speaking ... Franz Boas to Marie Krackowizer, December 23, 1883. Franz Boas Baffin Island Letter-Diary,

18831884,edited by Herbert Cole (1983:33).

Boas went on to explain in the same entry that "all service, therefore, which a man can perform for humanity must serve

to promote truth." Boas was forced to depend on various Inuit groups for everything from directions and food to shelter

and companionship. It was a difficult year filled with tremendous hardships that included frequent bouts with disease,

mistrust, pestilence, and danger. Boas successfully searched for areas not yet surveyed and found unique ethnographic

objects, but the long winter and the lonely treks across perilous terrain forced him to search his soul to find a direction

for his life as a scientist and a citizen.

Boas's interest in indigenous communities grew as he worked at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin where he was

introduced to members of the Nuxlk Nation of British Columbia, which sparked a lifelong relationship with the First

Nations of the Pacific Northwest.

He returned to Berlin to complete his studies. In 1886, Boas defended (with Helmholtz's support) his habilitation thesis,

Baff in Land, and was namedprivatdozentin geography.

While on Baffin Island he began to develop his interest in studying non-Western cultures (resulting in his book, The

Central Eskimo, published in 1888). In 1885, Boas went to work with physical anthropologist Rudolf Virchow and

ethnologist Adolf Bastian at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Boas had studied anatomy with Virchow two

years earlier, while preparing for the Baffin Island expedition. At the time, Virchow was involved in a vociferous debate

over evolution with his former student, Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel had abandoned his medical practice to study

comparative anatomy after reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, and vigorously promoted Darwin's ideas in

Germany. However, like most other natural scientists prior to the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900 and the

development of the modern synthesis, Virchow felt that Darwin's theories were weak because they lacked a theory of

cellular mutability. Accordingly, Virchow favored Lamarckian models of evolution. This debate resonated with debates

among geographers. Lamarckians believed that environmental forces could precipitate rapid and enduring changes in

organisms that had no inherited source; thus, Lamarckians and environmental determinists often found themselves on the

same side of debates.


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But Boas worked more closely with Bastian, who was noted for his antipathy to environmental determinism. Instead, he

argued for the "psychic unity of mankind", a belief that all humans had the same intellectual capacity, and that all

cultures were based on the same basic mental principles. Variations in custom and belief, he argued, were the products of

historical accidents. This view resonated with Boas's experiences on Baffin Island, and drew him towards anthropology.

While at the Royal Ethnological Museum Boas became interested in the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and

after defending his habilitation thesis, he left for a three-month trip to British Columbia via New York. In January 1887,

he was offered a job as assistant editor of the journal Science. Alienated by growing antisemitism and nationalism as well

as the very limited academic opportunities for a geographer in Germany, Boas decided to stay in the United States.Possibly he received additional motivation for this decision from his romance with Marie Krackowizer, whom he married

in the same year.

Aside from his editorial work at Science, Boas secured an appointment as docentin anthropology at Clark University, in

1888. Boas was concerned about university president G. Stanley Hall's interference in his research, yet in 1889 he was

appointed as the head of a newly created department of anthropology at Clark University. In the early 1890s, he went on

a series of expeditions which were referred to as the Morris K. Jesup Expedition. The primary goal of these expeditions

was to illuminate Asiatic-American relations.[14][15]

In 1892 Boas, along with another member of the Clark faculty, resigned in protest of the alleged infringement by Hall on

academic freedom. He took the post of chief assistant in anthropology to F.W. Putnam at the Chicago Worlds Fair.

These exhibits later served as the basis for the Field (Columbian) Museum, where Boas served as the curator ofanthropology and was succeeded by William H. Homes. In 1896, Boas was named the assistant curator at the American

Museum of Natural History, again under Putnam.

Science versus history

Some scholars, like Boas's student Alfred Kroeber, believed that Boas used his research in physics as a model for his

work in anthropology. Many others, howeverincluding Boas's student Alexander Lesser, and later researchers such as

Marian W. Smith, Herbert S. Lewis, and Matti Bunzlhave pointed out that Boas explicitly rejected physics in favor of

history as a model for his anthropological research.

This distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th-century German academe, which distinguished

betweenNaturwissenschaften(the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften(the humanities), or between

Gesetzwissenschaften(jurisprudence) and Geschichtswissenschaften(history, historiography). Generally,

Naturwissenschaftenand Gesetzwissenschaftenrefer to the study of phenomena that are governed by objective natural

laws, while the latter terms in the two oppositions refer to those phenomena that have meaning only in terms of human

perception or experience. In 1884, Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband coined the terms nomothetic and

idiographic to describe these two divergent approaches. He observed that most scientists employ some mix of both, but

in differing proportions; he considered physics a perfect example of a nomothetic science, and history, an idiographic

science. Moreover, he argued that each approach has its origin in one of the two "interests" of reason Kant had identified

in the Critique of Judgementone "generalizing", the other "specifying". (Winkelband's student Heinrich Rickertelaborated on this distinction in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science : A Logical Introduction to the

Historical Sciences; Boas's students Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir relied extensively on this work in defining their

own approach to anthropology.)

Although Kant considered these two interests of reason to be objective and universal, the distinction between the natural

and human sciences was institutionalized in Germany, through the organization of scholarly research and teaching,

following the Enlightenment. In Germany the Enlightenment was dominated by Kant himself, who sought to establish

principles based on universal rationality. In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder argued

that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human

rationality. In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would

synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. Humboldt founded the University of Berlin in 1809, and his work in geography,

history, and psychology provided the milieu in which Boas's intellectual orientation matured.

Historians working in the Humboldtian tradition developed ideas that would become central in Boasian anthropology.

Leopold von Ranke defined the task of the historian as "merely to show as it actually was", which is a cornerstone of

Boas's empiricism. Wilhelm Dilthey emphasized the centrality of "understanding" to human knowledge, and that the


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lived experience of an historian could provide a basis for an empathic understanding of the situation of an historical

actor.[16]For Boas, both values were well-expressed in a quote from Goethe: "A single action or event is interesting, not

because it is explainable, but because it is true."

The influence of these ideas on Boas is apparent in his 1887 essay, "The Study of Geography," in which he distinguished

between physical science, which seeks to discover the laws governing phenomena, and historical science, which seeks a

thorough understanding of phenomena on their own terms. Boas argued that geography is and must be historical in this

sense. In 1887, after his Baffin Island expedition, Boas wrote "The Principles of Ethnological Classification", in which

he developed this argument in application to anthropology:

Ethnological phenomena are the result of the physical and psychical character of men, and of its development

under the influence of the surroundings ... 'Surroundings' are the physical conditions of the country, and the

sociological phenomena, i.e., the relation of man to man. Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is

insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations,

and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.

This formulation echoes Ratzel's focus on historical processes of human migration and culture contact, and Bastian's

rejection of environmental determinism. It also emphasizes culture as a context ("surroundings"), and the importance of

history. These are the hallmarks of Boasian anthropology (which Marvin Harris would later call "historical-particularism"), would guide Boas's research over the next decade, as well as his instructions to future students. (see

Lewis 2001b for an alternative view to Harris'.)

Although context and history were essential elements to Boas's understanding of anthropology as Geisteswissenschaften

and Geschichtswissenschaften, there is one essential element that Boasian anthropology shares with

Naturwissenschaften: empiricism. In 1949, Boas's student, Alfred Kroeber summed up the principles of empiricism that

define Boasian anthropology as a science:

The method of science is to begin with questions, not with answers, least of all with value judgements.1.

Science is dispassionate inquiry and therefore cannot take over outright any ideologies "already formulated in

everyday life", since these are themselves inevitably traditional and normally tinged with emotional prejudice.

2.

Sweeping all-or-none, black-and-white judgements are characteristic of categorical attitudes and have no place in

science, whose very nature is inferential and judicious.

3.

Orthogenetic versus Darwinian evolution

One of the greatest accomplishments of Boas and his students was their critique of theories of physical, social, and

cultural evolution current at that time. This critique is central to Boas's work in museums, as well as his work in all four

fields of anthropology. As historian George Stocking noted, however, Boas's main project was to distinguish between

biological and cultural heredity, and to focus on the cultural processes that he believed had the greatest influence over

social life.[17]

In fact, Boas supported Darwinian theory, although he did not assume that it automatically applied to

cultural and historical phenomena (and indeed was a lifelong opponent of 19th-century theories of cultural evolution,

such as those of Lewis H. Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor).[18]The notion of evolution that the Boasians ridiculed

and rejected was the then dominant belief in orthogenesisa determinate or teleological process of evolution in which

change occurs progressively regardless of natural selection. Boas rejected the prevalent theories of social evolution

developed by Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer not because he rejected the notion of

"evolution" per se, but because he rejected orthogenetic notions of evolution in favor of Darwinian evolution.

The difference between these prevailing theories of cultural evolution and Darwinian theory cannot be overstated: the

orthogeneticists argued that all societies progress through the same stages in the same sequence. Thus, although the Inuit

with whom Boas worked at Baffin Island, and the Germans with whom he studied as a graduate student, were

contemporaries of one another, evolutionists argued that the Inuit were at an earlier stage in their evolution, and

Germans at a later stage. This echoed a popular misreading of Darwin that suggested that human beings are descendedfrom chimpanzees. In fact, Darwin argued that chimpanzees and humans are equally evolved. What characterizes

Darwinian theory is its attention to theprocessesby which one species transforms into another; "adaptation" as a key

principle in explaining the relationship between a species and its environment; and "natural selection" as a mechanism of

change. In contrast, Morgan, Spencer, and Tylor had little to say about the process and mechanics of change.


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"Franz Boas posing for figure in US

Natural History Museum exhibit

entitled "Hamats'a coming out of

secret room" 1895 or before. Courtesy

of National Anthropology Archives.

(Kwakiutl culture)

Furthermore, Darwin built up his theory through a careful examination of considerable empirical data. Boasian research

revealed that virtually every claim made by cultural evolutionists was contradicted by the data, or reflected a profound

misinterpretation of the data. As Boas's student Robert Lowie remarked, "Contrary to some misleading statements on the

subject, there have been no responsible opponents of evolution as 'scientifically proved', though there has been

determined hostility to an evolutionary metaphysics that falsifies the established facts".

In an unpublished lecture, Boas characterized his debt to Darwin thus:

Although the idea does not appear quite definitely expressed in Darwin's discussion of the development of mentalpowers, it seems quite clear that his main object has been to express his conviction that the mental faculties

developed essentially without a purposive end, but they originated as variations, and were continued by natural

selection. This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable

activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning.

Thus, Boas suggested that what appear to be patterns or structures in a culture were not a product of conscious design,

but rather the outcome of diverse mechanisms that produce cultural variation (such as diffusion and independent

invention), shaped by the social environment in which people live and act. Boas concluded his lecture by acknowledging

the importance of Darwin's work:

I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of

the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time. (Boas, 1909 lecture;

see Lewis 2001b.)

In the late 19th century anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American Ethnology,

directed by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who favored Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. The BAE

was housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the Smithsonian's curator for ethnology, Otis T. Mason,

shared Powell's commitment to cultural evolution. (The Peabody Museum at Harvard University was an important,

though lesser, center of anthropological research).

It was while working on museum collections and exhibitions that Boas

formulated his basic approach to culture, which led him to break with museums

and seek to establish anthropology as an academic discipline.

During this period Boas made five more trips to the Pacific Northwest. His

continuing field research led him to think of culture as a local context for human

action. His emphasis on local context and history led him to oppose the dominant

model at the time, cultural evolution.

Boas initially broke with evolutionary theory over the issue of kinship. Lewis

Henry Morgan had argued that all human societies move from an initial form of

matrilineal organization to patrilineal organization. First Nations groups on the

northern coast of British Columbia, like the Tsimshian and Tlingit, were

organized into matrilineal clans. First Nations on the southern coast, like the

Nootka and the Salish, however, were organized into patrilineal groups. Boas

focused on the Kwakiutl, who lived between the two clusters. The Kwakiutl

seemed to have a mix of features. Prior to marriage, a man would assume his

wife's father's name and crest. His children took on these names and crests as

well, although his sons would lose them when they got married. Names and crests

thus stayed in the mother's line. At first, Boaslike Morgan before

himsuggested that the Kwakiutl had been matrilineal like their neighbors to the

north, but that they were beginning to evolve patrilineal groups. In 1897,however, he repudiated himself, and argued that the Kwakiutl were changing from a prior patrilineal organization to a

matrilineal one, as they learned about matrilineal principles from their northern neighbors.

Boas's rejection of Morgan's theories led him, in an 1887 article, to challenge Mason's principles of museum display. At


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Columbia University library in 1903

stake, however, were more basic issues of causality and classification. The evolutionary approach to material culture led

museum curators to organize objects on display according to function or level of technological development. Curators

assumed that changes in the forms of artefacts reflect some natural process of progressive evolution. Boas, however, felt

that the form an artefact took reflected the circumstances under which it was produced and used. Arguing that "[t]hough

like causes have like effects, like effects have not like causes", Boas realized that even artefacts that were similar in form

might have developed in very different contexts, for different reasons. Mason's museum displays, organized along

evolutionary lines, mistakenly juxtapose like effects; those organized along contextual lines would reveal like causes.

Boas had a chance to apply his approach to exhibits when he was hired to assist Frederic Ward Putnam, director andcurator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, who had been appointed as head of the Department of Ethnology

and Archeology for the Chicago Fair in 1892. Boas arranged for fourteen Kwakiutl aboriginals from British Columbia to

come and reside in a mock Kwakiutl village, where they could perform their daily tasks in context.

After the Exposition, Boas worked at the newly created Field Museum in Chicago until 1894, when he was replaced

(against his will) by BAE archeologist William Henry Holmes. In 1896, Boas was appointed Assistant Curator of

Ethnology and Somatology of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1897, he organized the Jesup North Pacific

Expedition, a five-year long field-study of the natives of the Pacific Northwest, whose ancestors had migrated across the

Bering Strait from Siberia. He attempted to organize exhibits along contextual, rather than evolutionary, lines. He also

developed a research program in line with his curatorial goals: describing his instructions to his students in terms of

widening contexts of interpretation within a society, he explained that "...they get the specimens; they get explanations

of the specimens; they get connected texts that partly refer to the specimens and partly to abstract things concerning thepeople; and they get grammatical information". These widening contexts of interpretation were abstracted into one

context, the context in which the specimens, or assemblages of specimens, would be displayed: "...we want a collection

arranged according to tribes, in order to teach the particular style of each group". His approach, however, brought him

into conflict with the President of the Museum, Morris Jesup, and its director, Hermon Bumpus. He resigned in 1905,

never to work for a museum again.

Boas was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in

1896, and promoted to professor of anthropology in 1899. However, the various

anthropologists teaching at Columbia had been assigned to different departments.When Boas left the Museum of Natural History, he negotiated with Columbia

University to consolidate the various professors into one department, of which

Boas would take charge. Boas's program at Columbia became the first Ph.D.

program in anthropology in America.[19]

During this time Boas played a key role in organizing the American

Anthropological Association (AAA) as an umbrella organization for the emerging field. Boas originally wanted the AAA

to be limited to professional anthropologists, but W. J. McGee (another geologist who had joined the BAE under Powell's

leadership) argued that the organization should have an open membership. McGee's position prevailed and he was

elected the organization's first president in 1902; Boas was elected a vice-president, along with Putnam, Powell, and

Holmes.

At both Columbia and the AAA, Boas encouraged the "four field" concept of anthropology; he personally contributed to

physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, as well as cultural anthropology. His work in these fields was pioneering:

in physical anthropology he led scholars away from static taxonomical classifications of race, to an emphasis on human

biology and evolution; in linguistics he broke through the limitations of classic philology and established some of the

central problems in modern linguistics and cognitive anthropology; in cultural anthropology he (along with Polish-English

anthropologist Bronisaw Malinowski) established the contextualist approach to culture, cultural relativism, and the

participant-observation method of fieldwork.

The four-field approach understood not merely as bringing together different kinds of anthropologists into one

department, but as reconceiving anthropology through the integration of different objects of anthropological research

into one overarching object, was one of Boas's fundamental contributions to the discipline, and came to characterizeAmerican anthropology against that of England, France, or Germany. This approach defines as its object the human

species as a totality. This focus did not lead Boas to seek to reduce all forms of humanity and human activity to some

lowest common denominator; rather, he understood the essence of the human species to be the tremendous variation in

human form and activity (an approach that parallels Charles Darwin's approach to species in general).


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In his 1907 essay, "Anthropology", Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: "Why are the tribes and

nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?" Amplifying these questions, he

explained the object of anthropological study thus:

We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of man considered as an individual;

but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of men found in different geographical areas and in

different social classes. It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed

differentiation, and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifariousforms of human life. In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living

under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.

These questions signal a marked break from then-current ideas about human diversity, which assumed that some people

have a history, evident in a historical (or written) record, while other people, lacking writing, also lack history. For some,

this distinction between two different kinds of societies explained the difference between history, sociology, economics

and other disciplines that focus on people with writing, and anthropology, which was supposed to focus on people

without writing. Boas rejected this distinction between kinds of societies, and this division of labor in the academy. He

understood all societies to have a history, and all societies to be proper objects of anthropological society. In order to

approach literate and non-literate societies the same way, he emphasized the importance on studying human history

through the analysis of other things besides written texts. Thus, in his 1904 article, "The History of Anthropology", Boaswrote that

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that

heretofore has not been treated by any other science. It is the biological history of mankind in all its varieties;

linguistics applied to people without written languages; the ethnology of people without historic records; and

prehistoric archeology.

Historians and social theorists in the 18th and 19th centuries had speculated as to the causes of this differentiation, but

Boas dismissed these theories, especially the dominant theories of social evolution and cultural evolution as speculative.

He endeavored to establish a discipline that would base its claims on rigorous empirical study.

One of Boas's most important books, The Mind of Primitive Man(1911), integrated his theories concerning the history

and development of cultures and established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen

years. In this study he established that in any given population, biology, language, material and symbolic culture, are

autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is

reducible to another. In other words, he established that culture does not depend on any independent variables. He

emphasized that the biological, linguistic, and cultural traits of any group of people are the product of historical

developments involving both cultural and non-cultural forces. He established that cultural plurality is a fundamental

feature of humankind, and that the specific cultural environment structures much individual behavior.

Boas also presented himself as a role model for the citizen-scientist, who understand that even were the truth pursued as

its own end, all knowledge has moral consequences. The Mind of Primitive Manends with an appeal to humanism:

I hope the discussions outlined in these pages have shown that the data of anthropology teach us a greater

tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater

sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or

another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair

opportunity.

Physical anthropology

Boas's work in physical anthropology brought together his interest in Darwinian evolution with his interest in migrationas a cause of change. His most important research in this field was his study of changes in body form among children of

immigrants in New York. Other researchers had already noted differences in height, cranial measurements, and other

physical features between Americans and people from different parts of Europe. Many used these differences to argue

that there is an innate biological difference between races. Boas's primary interestin symbolic and material culture and


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in languagewas the study of processes of change; he therefore set out to determine whether bodily forms are also

subject to processes of change. Boas studied 17,821 people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. Boas found that

average measures of cranial size of immigrants were significantly different from members of these groups who were born

in the United States. Moreover, he discovered that average measures of cranial size of children born within ten years of

their mothers' arrival were significantly different from those of children born more than ten years after their mothers'

arrival. Boas did not deny that physical features such as height or cranial size were inherited; he did, however, argue that

the environment has an influence on these features, which is expressed through change over time. This work was central

to his influential argument that differences between races were not immutable.[20][21][22]

These findings were radical at the time and continue to be debated. In 2002, the anthropologists Corey S. Sparks and

Richard L. Jantz claimed that differences between children born to the same parents in Europe and America were very

small and insignificant, and that there was no detectable effect of exposure to the American environment on the cranial

index in children. They argued that their results contradicted Boas's original findings and demonstrated that they may no

longer be used to support arguments of plasticity in cranial morphology.[23]However Jonathan Marksa well-known

physical anthropologist and former president of the General Anthropology section of the American Anthropological

Associationhas remarked that this revisionist study of Boas's work "has the ring of desperation to it (if not

obfuscation), and has been quickly rebutted by more mainstream biological anthropology".[24]

In 2003 anthropologists

Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard reanalyzed Boas's data and concluded that most of

Boas's original findings were correct. Moreover, they applied new statistical, computer-assisted methods to Boas's data

and discovered more evidence for cranial plasticity.[25]In a later publication, Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard reviewedSparks and Jantz's analysis. They argue that Sparks and Jantz misrepresented Boas's claims, and that Sparks's and Jantz's

data actually support Boas. For example, they point out that Sparks and Jantz look at changes in cranial size in relation to

how long an individual has been in the United States in order to test the influence of the environment. Boas, however,

looked at changes in cranial size in relation to how long the mother had been in the United States. They argue that Boas's

method is more useful, because the prenatal environment is a crucial developmental factor.[26]

A further publication by Jantz based on Gravlee et al. claims that Boas had cherry picked two groups of immigrants

(Sicilians and Hebrews) which had varied most towards the same mean, and discarded other groups which had varied in

the opposite direction. He commented, "Using the recent reanalysis by Gravlee et al. (2003), we can observe in Figure 2

that the maximum difference in cranial index due to immigration (in Hebrews) is much smaller than the maximum ethnic

difference, between Sicilians and Bohemians. It shows that long headed parents produce long headed offspring and viceversa. To make the argument that children of immigrants converge onto an "American type" required Boas to use the

two groups that changed the most."[27]

Although some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have suggested that Boas was opposed to Darwinian

evolution, Boas in fact was a committed proponent of Darwinian evolutionary thought. In 1888, he declared that "the

development of ethnology is largely due to the general recognition of the principle of biological evolution"; since Boas's

times, physical anthropologists have established that the human capacity for culture is a product of human evolution. In

fact, Boas's research on changes in body form played an important role in the rise of Darwinian theory. It is crucial to

remember that Boas was trained at a time when biologists had no understanding of genetics; Mendelian genetics became

widely known only after 1900. Prior to that time biologists relied on the measurement of physical traits as empirical data

for any theory of evolution. Boas's biometric studies, however, led him to question the use of this method and kind of

data. In a speech to anthropologists in Berlin in 1912, Boas argued that at best such statistics could only raise biological

questions, and not answer them. It was in this context that anthropologists began turning to genetics as a basis for any

understanding of biological variation.

Linguistics

Boas also contributed greatly to the foundation of linguistics as a science in the United States. He published many

descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, and laid

out a research program for studying the relations between language and culture which his students such as Edward Sapir,

Paul Rivet, and Alfred Kroeber followed.[28][29][30][31][32][33]

His 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds", however, made a singular contribution to the methodology of both linguisticsand cultural anthropology. It is a response to a paper presented in 1888 by Daniel Garrison Brinton, at the time a

professor of American linguistics and archeology at the University of Pennsylvania. Brinton observed that in the spoken

languages of many Native Americans, certain sounds regularly alternated. This is clearly not a function of individual

accents; Brinton was not suggesting that some individuals pronounced certain words differently from others. He was


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arguing that there were many words that, even when repeated by the same speaker, varied considerably in their

vocalization. Using evolutionary theory, Brinton argued that this pervasive inconsistency was a sign of linguistic

inferiority, and evidence that Native Americans were at a low stage in their evolution.

Boas was familiar with what Brinton was talking about; he had experienced something similar during his research in

Baffin Island and in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, he argued that "alternating sounds" is not at all a feature of

Native American languagesindeed, he argued, they do not really exist. Rather than take alternating sounds as objective

proof of different stages in cultural evolution, Boas considered them in terms of his longstanding interest in the

subjective perception of objective physical phenomena. He also considered his earlier critique of evolutionary museumdisplays. There, he pointed out that two things (artefacts of material culture) that appear to be similar may in fact be

quite different. In this article he raises the possibility that two things (sounds) that appear to be different may in fact be

the same.

In short, he shifted attention to theperceptionof different sounds. Boas begins by raising an empirical question: when

people describe one sound in different ways, is it because they cannot perceive the difference, or might there be another

reason? He immediately establishes that he is not concerned with cases involving perceptual deficitthe aural

equivalent of color-blindness. He points out that the question of people who describe one sound in different ways is

comparable to that of people who describe different sounds in one way. This is crucial for research in descriptive

linguistics: when studying a new language, how are we to note the pronunciation of different words? (in this point, Boas

anticipates and lays the groundwork for the distinction between phonemics and phonetics.) People may pronounce a

word in a variety of ways and still recognize that they are using the same word. The issue, then, is not "that suchsensations are not recognized in their individuality" (in other words, people recognize differences in pronunciations);

rather, it is that sounds "are classified according to their similarity" (in other words, that people classify a variety of

perceived sounds into one category). A comparable visual example would involve words for colors. The English word

"green" can be used to refer to a variety of shades, hues, and tints. But there are some languages that have no word for

"green".[34]In such cases, people might classify what we would call "green" as either "yellow" or "blue". This is not an

example of color-blindnesspeople can perceive differences in color, but they categorize similar colors in a different

way than English speakers.

Boas applied these principles to his studies of Inuit languages. Researchers have reported a variety of spellings for a

given word. In the past, researchers have interpreted this data in a number of waysit could indicate local variations in

the pronunciation of a word, or it could indicate different dialects. Boas argues an alternative explanation: that thedifference is not in how Inuit pronounce the word, but rather in how English-speaking scholars perceive the

pronunciation of the word. It is not that English speakers are physically incapable of perceiving the sound in question;

rather, the phonetic system of English cannot accommodate the perceived sound.

Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far

reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western

researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in

another culture. As in his critique of Otis Mason's museum displays, Boas demonstrated that what appeared to be

evidence of cultural evolution was really the consequence of unscientific methods, and a reflection of Westerners' beliefs

about their own cultural superiority. This point provides the methodological foundation for Boas's cultural relativism:

elements of a culture are meaningful in that culture's terms, even if they may be meaningless (or take on a radically

different meaning) in another culture.

Cultural anthropology

The essence of Boas's approach to ethnography is found in his early essay on "The Study of Geography". There he

argued for an approach that

... considers every phenomena as worthy of being studied for its own sake. Its mere existence entitles it to a full

share of our attention; and the knowledge of its existence and evolution in space and time fully satisfies the

student.

When Boas's student Ruth Benedict gave her presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in 1947,she reminded anthropologists of the importance of this idiographic stance by quoting literary critic A. C. Bradley: "We

watch 'what is', seeing that so it happened and must have happened".

This orientation led Boas to promote a cultural anthropology characterized by a strong commitment to


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Drawing of a Kwakiutl mask from

Boas's The Social Organization and

the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl

Indians(1897). Wooden skulls hang

from below the mask, which represents

one of the cannibal bird helpers of

Bakbakwalinooksiwey.

Empiricism (with a resulting skepticism of attempts to formulate "scientific

laws" of culture)

A notion of culture as fluid and dynamic

Ethnographic fieldwork, in which the anthropologist resides for an

extended period among the people being researched, conducts research in

the native language, and collaborates with native researchers, as a method

of collecting data, and

Cultural relativism as a methodological tool while conducting fieldwork,

and as heuristic tool while analyzing data.

Boas argued that in order to understand "what is"in cultural anthropology, the

specific cultural traits (behaviors, beliefs, and symbols)one had to examine

them in their local context. He also understood that as people migrate from one

place to another, and as the cultural context changes over time, the elements of a

culture, and their meanings, will change, which led him to emphasize the

importance of local histories for an analysis of cultures.

Although other anthropologists at the time, such as Bronisaw Malinowski andAlfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown focused on the study of societies, which they understood to be clearly bounded, Boas's

attention to history, which reveals the extent to which traits diffuse from one place to another, led him to view cultural

boundaries as multiple and overlapping, and as highly permeable. Thus, Boas's student Robert Lowie once described

culture as a thing of "shreds and patches". Boas and his students understood that as people try to make sense of their

world they seek to integrate its disparate elements, with the result that different cultures could be characterized as having

different configurations or patterns. But Boasians also understood that such integration was always in tensions with

diffusion, and any appearance of a stable configuration is contingent (see Bashkow 2004: 445).

During Boas's lifetime, as today, many Westerners saw a fundamental difference between modern societies, which are

characterized by dynamism and individualism, and traditional societies which are stable and homogeneous. Boas's

empirical field research, however, led him to argue against this comparison. For example, his 1903 essay, "Decorative

Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in a U.S. Museum", provides

another example of how Boas made broad theoretical claims based on a detailed analysis of empirical data. After

establishing formal similarities among the needlecases, Boas shows how certain formal features provide a vocabulary out

of which individual artisans could create variations in design. Thus, his emphasis on culture as a context for meaningful

action made him sensitive to individual variation within a society (William Henry Holmes suggested a similar point in an

1886 paper, "Origin and development of form and ornament in ceramic art", although unlike Boas he did not develop the

ethnographic and theoretical implications).

In a programmatic essay in 1920, "The Methods of Ethnology", Boas argued that instead of "the systematic enumeration

of standardized beliefs and customs of a tribe", anthropology needs to document "the way in which the individual reacts

to his whole social environment, and to the difference of opinion and of mode of action that occur in primitive society

and which are the causes of far-reaching changes". Boas argued that attention to individual agency reveals that "theactivities of the individual are determined to a great extent by his social environment, but in turn his own activities

influence the society in which he lives, and may bring about modifications in form". Consequently, Boas thought of

culture as fundamentally dynamic: "As soon as these methods are applied, primitive society loses the appearance of

absolute stability ... All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state of flux..." (see Lewis 2001b)

Having argued against the relevance of the distinction between literate and non-literate societies as a way of defining

anthropology's object of study, Boas argued that non-literate and literate societies should be analyzed in the same way.

Nineteenth-century historians had been applying the techniques of philology to reconstruct the histories of, and

relationships between, literate societies. In order to apply these methods to non-literate societies, Boas argued that the

task of fieldworkers is to produce and collect texts in non-literate societies. This took the form not only of compiling

lexicons and grammars of the local language, but of recording myths, folktales, beliefs about social relationships and

institutions, and even recipes for local cuisine. In order to do this, Boas relied heavily on the collaboration of literatenative ethnographers (among the Kwakiutl, most often George Hunt), and he urged his students to consider such people

valuable partners, inferior in their standing in Western society, but superior in their understanding of their own culture.

(see Bunzl 2004: 438439)


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Using these methods, Boas published another article in 1920, in which he revisited his earlier research on Kwakiutl

kinship. In the late 1890s Boas had tried to reconstruct transformation in the organization of Kwakiutl clans, by

comparing them to the organization of clans in other societies neighboring the Kwakiutl to the north and south. Now,

however, he argued against translating the Kwakiutl principle of kin groups into any English word. Instead of trying to fit

the Kwakiutl into some larger model, he tried to understand their beliefs and practices in their own terms. For example,

whereas he had earlier translated the Kwakiutl word numaymas "clan", he now argued that the word is best understood

as referring to a bundle of privileges, for which there is no English word. Men secured claims to these privileges through

their parents or wives, and there were a variety of ways these privileges could be acquired, used, and transmitted from

one generation to the next. As in his work on alternating sounds, Boas had come to realize that different ethnologicalinterpretations of Kwakiutl kinship were the result of the limitations of Western categories. As in his work on Alaskan

needlecases, he now saw variation among Kwakiutl practices as the result of the play between social norms and

individual creativity.

Before his death in 1942, he appointed Helen Codere to edit and publish his manuscripts about the culture of the

Kwakiutl people.

Franz Boas was an immensely influential figure throughout the development of folklore as a discipline. At first glance, it

might seem that his only concern was for the discipline of anthropologyafter all, he fought for most of his life to keepfolklore as a part of anthropology. Yet Boas was motivated by his desire to see both anthropology and folklore become

more professional and well-respected. Boas was afraid that if folklore was allowed to become its own discipline the

standards for folklore scholarship would be lowered. This, combined with the scholarships of "amateurs", would lead

folklore to be completely discredited, Boas believed.

In order to further professionalize folklore, Boas introduced the strict scientific methods which he learned in college to

the discipline. Boas championed the use of exhaustive research, fieldwork, and strict scientific guidelines in folklore

scholarship. Boas believed that a true theory could only be formed from thorough research, and that even once you had

a theory it should be treated as a "work in progress" unless it could be proved beyond doubt. This rigid scientific

methodology was eventually accepted as one of the major tenets of folklore scholarship, and Boas's methods remain in

use even today. Boas also nurtured many budding folklorists during his time as a professor, and some of his students are

counted among the most notable minds in folklore scholarship.

Boas was passionate about the collection of folklore, and believed that the similarity of folktales amongst different folk

groups was due to dissemination. Boas strove to prove this theory, and his efforts produced a method for breaking a

folktale into parts and then analyzing these parts. His creation of "catch-words" allowed for categorization of these parts,

and the ability to analyze them in relation to other similar tales. Boas also fought to prove that not all cultures progressed

along the same path, and that, therefore, cultures unlike those of Europe were not primitive, but different.

Boas remained active in the development and scholarship of folklore throughout his life. He became the editor of the

Journal of American Folklorein 1908, regularly wrote and published articles on folklore (often in theJournal of

American Folklore), and helped to elect Louise Pound as president of the American Folklore Society in 1925.

There are two things to which I am devoted: absolute academic and spiritual freedom, and the subordination of the

state to the interests of the individual; expressed in other forms, the furthering of conditions in which the

individual can develop to the best of his abilityas far as it is possible with a full understanding of the fetters

imposed upon us by tradition; and the fight against all forms of power policy of states or private organizations.

This means a devotion to principles of true democracy. I object to teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind,

of whatever kind they may be. (letter from Boas to John Dewey, 11/6/39)

Boas was known for passionately defending what he believed to be right.[35]During his lifetime (and often through his

work), Boas combated racism, berated anthropologists and folklorists who used their work as a cover for espionage,

worked to protect German and Austrian scientists who fled the Nazi regime, and openly protested Hitlerism.[36]


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Many social scientists in other disciplines often agonize over the legitimacy of their work as "science", and consequently

emphasize the importance of detachment, objectivity, abstraction, and quantifiability in their work. Perhaps because

Boas, like other early anthropologists, was originally trained in the natural sciences, he and his students never expressed

such anxiety. Moreover, he did not believe that detachment, objectivity, and quantifiability were required to make

anthropology scientific. Since the object of study of anthropologists is different from the object of study of physicists, he

assumed that anthropologists would have to employ different methods and different criteria for evaluating their research.

Thus, Boas used statistical studies to demonstrate the extent to which variation in data is context-dependent, and argued

that the context-dependent nature of human variation rendered many abstractions and generalizations that had been

passing as scientific understandings of humankind (especially theories of social evolution popular at the time) in factunscientific. His understanding of ethnographic fieldwork began with the fact that the objects of ethnographic study

(e.g., the Inuit of Baffin Island) were not just objects, but subjects, and his research called attention to their creativity

and agency. More importantly, he viewed the Inuit as his teachers, thus reversing the typical hierarchical relationship

between scientist and object of study.

This emphasis on the relationship between anthropologists and those they studythe point that, while astronomers and

stars; chemists and elements; botanists and plants are fundamentally different, anthropologists and those they study are

equally humanimplied that anthropologists themselves could be objects of anthropological study. Although Boas did

not pursue this reversal systematically, his article on alternating sounds illustrates his awareness that scientists should not

be confident about their objectivity, because they too see the world through the prism of their culture.

This emphasis also led Boas to conclude that anthropologists have an obligation to speak out on social issues. Boas wasespecially concerned with racial inequality, which his research had indicated is not biological in origin, but rather social.

Boas is credited as the first scientist to publish the idea that all peopleincluding white and African-Americansare

equal. He often emphasized his abhorrence of racism, and used his work to show that there was no scientific basis for

such a bias. An early example of this concern is evident in his 1906 commencement address to Atlanta University, at the

invitation of W. E. B. Du Bois. Boas began by remarking that "If you did accept the view that the present weakness of

the American Negro, his uncontrollable emotions, his lack of energy, are racially inherent, your work would still be noble

one". He then went on, however, to argue against this view. To the claim that European and Asian civilizations are, at

the time, more advanced than African societies, Boas objected that against the total history of humankind, the past two

thousand years is but a brief span. Moreover, although the technological advances of our early ancestors (such as taming

fire and inventing stone tools) might seem insignificant when compared to the invention of the steam engine or control

over electricity, we should consider that they might actually be even greater accomplishments. Boas then went on to

catalogue advances in Africa, such as smelting iron, cultivating millet, and domesticating chickens and cattle, occurred in

Africa well before they spread to Europe and Asia (evidence now suggests that chickens were first domesticated in Asia;

the original domestication of cattle is under debate). He then described the activities of African kings, diplomats,

merchants, and artists as evidence of cultural achievement. From this, he concluded, any social inferiority of Negroes in

the United States cannot be explained by their African origins:

If, therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently look to the home

of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored people the strength that was their own

before they set foot on the shores of this continent. You may say that you go to work with bright hopes, and that

you will not be discouraged by the slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost

in transplanting the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your

ancestors ever had attained.

Boas proceeds to discuss the arguments for the inferiority of the "Negro race", and calls attention to the fact that they

were brought to the Americas through force. For Boas, this is just one example of the many times conquest or

colonialism has brought different peoples into an unequal relation, and he mentions "the conquest of England by the

Normans, the Teutonic invasion of Italy, [and] the Manchoo conquest of China" as resulting in similar conditions. But

the best example, for Boas, of this phenomenon is that of the Jews in Europe:

Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had not been able to

efface, and which is strong enough to findnot only here and thereexpression as antipathy to the Jewish type.In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough

to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.

Boas's closing advice is that African-Americans should not look to whites for approval or encouragement, because


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people in power usually take a very long time to learn to sympathize with people out of power. "Remember that in every

single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but

do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast insistence on full opportunities for your powers."

Despite Boas's caveat about the intractability of white prejudice, he also considered it the scientist's responsibility to

argue against white myths of racial purity and racial superiority, and to use the evidence of his research to fight racism.

Boas was also critical of one nation imposing its power over others. In 1916 Boas wrote a letter to theNew York Times

which was published under the headline, "Why German-Americans Blame America". Although Boas did begin the letter

by protesting bitter attacks against German-Americans at the time of the war in Europe, most of his letter was a critique

of American nationalism. "In my youth I had been taught in school and at home not only to love the good of my own

country, but also to seek to understand and to respect the individualities of other nations. For this reason one-sided

nationalism, that is so often found nowadays, is to me unendurable." He writes of his love for American ideals of

freedom, and of his growing discomfort with American beliefs about its own superiority over others.

I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how

strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how slow they may be in utilizing the resources

of their countries, or how much opposed their ideals may be to ours ... Our intolerant attitude is most pronounced

in regard to what we like to call "our free institutions." Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and

needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy. That the wishes and

thoughts of the people should find expression, and that the form of government should conform to these wishis is

an axiom that has pervaded the whole Western world, and that is even taking root in the Far East. It is a quite

different question, however, in how far the particular machinery of democratic government is identical with

democratic institutions ... To claim as we often do, that our solution is the only democratic and the ideal one is a

one-sided expression of Americanism. I see no reason why we should not allow the Germans, Austrians, and

Russians, or whoever else it may be, to solve their problems in their own ways, instead of demanding that they

bestow upon themselves the benefactions of our regime.

Although Boas felt that scientists have a responsibility to speak out on social and political problems, he was appalled thatthey might involve themselves in disingenuous and deceitful ways. Thus, in 1919, when he discovered that four

anthropologists, in the course of their research in other countries, were serving as spies for the American government, he

wrote an angry letter to The Nation. It is perhaps in this letter that he most clearly expresses his understanding of his

commitment to science:

A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on deception and secretiveness,

a politician whose very life consists in compromises with his conscience, a business man whose aim is personal

profit within the limits allowed by a lenient lawsuch may be excused if they set patriotic deception above

common everyday decency and perform services as spies. They merely accept the code of morality to which

modern society still conforms. Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth. We all know

scientists who in private life do not come up to the standard of truthfulness, but who, nevertheless, would not

consciously falsify the results of their researches. It is bad enough if we have to put up with these, because they

reveal a lack of strength of character that is liable to distort the results of their work. A person, however, who uses

science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an

investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political

machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.

Although Boas did not name the spies in question, he was referring to a group led by Sylvanus G. Morley, [37]who was

affiliated with Harvard University's Peabody Museum. While conducting research in Mexico, Morley and his colleagueslooked for evidence of German submarine bases, and collected intelligence on Mexican political figures and German

immigrants in Mexico.

Boas's stance against spying took place in the context of his struggle to establish a new model for academic anthropology


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at Columbia University. Previously, American anthropology was based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and

the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and these anthropologists competed with Boas's students for control over the

American Anthropological Association (and its flagship publicationAmerican Anthropologist). When the National

Academy of Sciences established the National Research Council in 1916 as a means by which scientists could assist the

United States government prepare for entry into the war in Europe, competition between the two groups intensified.

Boas's rival, W. H. Holmes (who had gotten the job of Director at the Field Museum for which Boas had been passed

over 26 years earlier), was appointed to head the NRC; Morley was a protg of Holmes.

When Boas's letter was published, Holmes wrote to a friend complaining about "the Prussian control of anthropology inthis country" and the need to end Boas's "Hun regime".[38]Opinion was influenced by anti-German and probably also by

anti-Jewish sentiment. The Anthropological Society of Washington passed a resolution condemning Boas's letter for

unjustly criticizing President Wilson; attacking the principles of American democracy; and endangering anthropologists

abroad, who would now be suspected of being spies (a charge that was especially insulting, given that his concerns about

this very issue were what had prompted Boas to write his letter in the first place). This resolution was passed on to the

American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the National Research Council. Members of the American

Anthropological Association (among whom Boas was a founding member in 1902), meeting at the Peabody Museum of

Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard (with which Morley, Lothrop, and Spinden were affiliated), voted by 20 to 10 to

censure Boas. As a result, Boas resigned as the AAA's representative to the NRC, although he remained an active

member of the AAA. The AAA's censure of Boas was not rescinded until 2005.

Boas continued to speak out against racism and for intellectual freedom. When the Nazi Party in Germany denounced"Jewish Science" (which included not only Boasian Anthropology but Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian physics),

Boas responded with a public statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists, declaring that there is only one science, to

which race and religion are irrelevant. After World War I, Boas created the Emergency Society for German and Austrian

Science. This organization was originally dedicated to fostering friendly relations between American and German and

Austrian scientists and for providing research funding to German scientists who had been adversely affected by the

war,[39]and to help scientists who had been interned. With the rise of Nazi Germany, Boas assisted German scientists in

fleeing the Nazi regime. Boas helped these scientists not only to escape, but to secure positions once they arrived.[40]

Additionally, Boas addressed an open letter to Paul von Hindenburg in protest against Hitlerism.

Boas, and his students such as Melville J. Herskovits opposed the racist pseudoscience developed at the Kaiser Wilhelm

Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics under its director Eugen Fischer: "Melville J. Herskovits (oneof Franz Boas's students) pointed out that the health problems and social prejudices encountered by these children

[Rhineland Bastards] (see Bastard studies) and their parents explained what Germans viewed as racial inferiority was not

due to racial heredity. This "...provoked polemic invective against the latter [Boas] from Fischer. "The views of Mr. Boas

are in part quite ingenious, but in the field of heredity Mr. Boas is by no means competent" even though "a great number

of research projects at the KWI-A which had picked up on Boas' studies about immigrants in New York had confirmed

his findingsincluding the study by Walter Dornfeldt about Eastern European Jews in Berlin. Fischer resorted to

polemic simply because he had no arguments to counter the Boasians' critique."[41][42][43][44]

Franz Boas died of a stroke at the Columbia University Faculty Club on December 21, 1942 in the arms of Claude

Lvi-Strauss.[45][46][47]By that time he had become one of the most influential and respected scientists of his

generation.

Between 1901 and 1911, Columbia University produced seven PhDs in anthropology. Although by today's standards this

is a very small number, at the time it was sufficient to establish Boas's Anthropology Department at Columbia as the

preeminent anthropology program in the country. Moreover, many of Boas's students went on to establish anthropology

programs at other major universities.[48]

Boas's first doctoral student at Columbia was Alfred L. Kroeber (1901),[49]who, along with fellow Boas student Robert

Lowie (1908), started the anthropology program at the University of California, Berkeley. He also trained William Jones

(1904), one of the first Native American Indian anthropologists (the Fox nation) who was killed while conducting

research in the Philippines in 1909, and Albert B. Lewis (1907). Boas also trained a number of other students who were

influential in the development of academic anthropology: Frank Speck (1908) who trained with Boas but received his

PhD. from the University of Pennsylvania and immediately proceeded to found the anthropology department there;

Edward Sapir (1909) and Fay-Cooper Cole (1914) who developed the anthropology program at the University of


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Chicago; Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), who, with Elsie Clews Parsons (who received her doctorate in sociology from

Columbia in 1899, but then studied ethnology with Boas), started the anthropology program at the New School for Social

Research; Leslie Spier (1920) who started the anthropology program at the University of Washington together with his

wife Erna Gunther, also one of Boas's students, and Melville Herskovits (1923) who started the anthropology program at

Northwestern University. He also trained John R. Swanton (who studied with Boas at Columbia for two years before

receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1900), Paul Radin (1911), Ruth Benedict (1923), Gladys Reichard (1925) who

had begun teaching at Barnard College in 1921 and was later promoted to the rank of professor, Ruth Bunzel (1929),

Alexander Lesser (1929), Margaret Mead (1929), and Gene Weltfish (who defended her dissertation in 1929, although

she did not officially graduate until 1950 when Columbia reduced the expenses required to graduate), E. AdamsonHoebel (1934), Jules Henry (1935), Ashley Montagu (1938).

His students at Columbia also included Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who earned his M.A. after studying with

Boas from 1909 to 1911, and became the founding director of Mexico's Bureau of Anthropology in 1917; Clark Wissler,

who received his doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1901, but proceeded to study anthropology with

Boas before turning to research Native Americans; Esther Schiff, later Goldfrank, worked with Boas in the summers of

1920 to 1922 to conduct research among the Cochiti and Laguna Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; Gilberto Freyre, who

shaped the concept of "racial democracy" in Brazil;[50]

Viola Garfield, who carried forth Boas's Tsimshian work;

Frederica de Laguna, who worked on the Inuit and the Tlingit; and anthropologist, folklorist and novelist Zora Neale

Hurston, who graduated from Barnard College, the women's college associated with Columbia, in 1928.

Boas and his students were also an influence on Claude Lvi-Strauss, who interacted with Boas and the Boasians during

his stay in New York in the 1940s.[51]

Several of Boas's students went on to serve as editors of the American Anthropological Association's flagship journal,

American Anthropologist: John R. Swanton (1911, 19211923), Robert Lowie (19241933), Leslie Spier (19341938),

and Melville Herskovits (19501952). Edward Sapir's student John Alden Mason was editor from 1945 to 1949, and

Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie's student, Walter Goldschmidt, was editor from 1956 to 1959.

Most of Boas's students shared his concern for careful, historical reconstruction, and his antipathy towards speculative,

evolutionary models. Moreover, Boas encouraged his students, by example, to criticize themselves as much as others.

For example, Boas originally defended the cephalic index (systematic variations in head form) as a method for describing

hereditary traits, but came to reject his earlier research after further study; he similarly came to criticize his own earlywork in Kwakiutl (Pacific Northwest) language and mythology.

Encouraged by this drive to self-criticism, as well as the Boasian commitment to learn from one's informants and to let

the findings of one's research shape one's agenda, Boas's students quickly diverged from his own research agenda.

Several of his students soon attempted to develop theories of the grand sort that Boas typically rejected. Kroeber called

his colleagues' attention to Sigmund Freud and the potential of a union between cultural anthropology and

psychoanalysis. Ruth Benedict developed theories of "culture and personality" and "national cultures", and Kroeber's

student, Julian Steward developed theories of "cultural ecology" and "multilineal evolution".

Nevertheless, Boas has had an enduring influence on anthropology. Virtually all anthropologists today accept Boas's

commitment to empiricism and his methodological cultural relativism. Moreover, virtually all cultural anthropologists

today share Boas's commitment to field research involving extended residence, learning the local language, and

developing social relationships with informants. Finally, anthropologists continue to honor his critique of racial

ideologies. In his 1963 book,Race: The History of an Idea in America, Thomas Gossett wrote that "It is possible that

Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."

1887Accepted a position as Assistant Editor of Science in New York.

1889Appointed as the head of a newly created department of anthropology. His adjunct was L. Farrand.

1896Became assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, under F.W. Putnam. This was

combined with a lecturing position at Columbia University.


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1900Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April.

1901Appointed Honorary Philologist of Bureau of American Ethnology.

1908Became editor of The Journal of American Folklore.

1910Helped create the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Mexico.

1910Elected president of the New York Academy of Sciences.

1917Founded the International Journal of American Linguistics.

1917Edited the Publications of the American Ethnological Society.

1931Elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

1936Became "emeritus in residence" at Columbia University in 1936. Became "emeritus" in 1938.

^"further information about the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Boas's birth at Minden e. g. an exposition, a

scientific meeting, a theatre play, a special medal, an edition of the diary of Wilhelm Weike, Boas servant on Baffin Island"

(http://www.franz-boas.com).

1.

^Norman F. Boas, 2004, p. 291 (photo of the graveyard marker of Franz and Marie Boas, Dale Cemetery, Ossining, N.Y.)2.^Boas, Franz. A Franz Boas reader: the shaping of American anthropology, 18831911. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

p. 308

3.

^Holloway, M. (1997) The Paradoxical Legacy of Franz Boasfather of American anthropology. Natural History.

November 1997.[1] (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_10_106/ai_53479059)

4.

^Stocking. George W., Jr. 1960.Franz Boas and the Founding of the American Anthropological Association.

AmericanAnthropologist62: 117.

5.

â

b

cMoore, Jerry D. (2009). "Franz Boas: Culture in Context". Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological

Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 3346.

6.

^Gossett, Thomas (1997) [1963].Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

p. 418. "It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."

7.

^Glick, L. B. (1982), Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimiliation. American

Anthropologist, 84: 545565.

8.

^Douglas Cole 1999 Franz Boas: The Early Years, 18581906p. 280. Washington: Douglas and MacIntyre.9.

^Boas, Franz. 1938. An Anthropologist's Credo. The Nation 147:201204.10.

^Liss, Julia E. 1995 Patterns of Strangeness: Franz Boas, Modernism, and the Origins of Anthropology. In Prehistories of the

Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. E. Barkan and R. Bush, eds. Pp. 114130. Stanford. CA:

Stanford University Press.

11.

^Liss, Julia E. 1996. "German Culture and German Science in the Bildung of Franz Boas". In History of Anthropology, vol.

8. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. G. W. Stocking Jr., ed. Pp. 155184. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

12.

^Smith, W. D. (1991), Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany, 18401920 (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&

lr=&id=LOzmvGubipQC), New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195362275

13.

^Cole, Douglas 1983 "The Value of a Person Lies in His Herzensbildung": Franz Boas's Baffin Island Letter-Diay,

18831884. In Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. George W. Stocking Jr., ed. pp. 1352. Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press.

14.

^Cole, Douglas. 1999/ Franz Boas: Te Early Years. 18581906. Seattle: University of Washington Press.15.

Â Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911 (http://books.google.com

/books?id=0gN2LBm3MXsC&dq=), University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 11.

16.

^Stocking, George W., Jr. I968. Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. New York: Free Press.

264

17.

Âlexander Lesser, 1981 "Franz Boas" p. 25 in Sydel Silverman, ed. From Totems to TeachersNew York: Colu

franz boas - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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