Franz Boas

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)
Occupation Anthropologist
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 the
day 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 hierarchic
technological 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
Franz 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 education
2 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 Boas
12.2 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 for
himself 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
2 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
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]:11
Many
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,
Baffin Land, and was named privatdozent in 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 docent in 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 of
anthropology 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
between Naturwissenschaften (the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), or between
Gesetzwissenschaften (jurisprudence) and Geschichtswissenschaften (history, historiography). Generally,
Naturwissenschaften and Gesetzwissenschaften refer 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 Rickert
elaborated 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 descended
from chimpanzees. In fact, Darwin argued that chimpanzees and humans are equally evolved. What characterizes
Darwinian theory is its attention to the processes by 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 mental
powers, 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 and
curator 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 the
people; 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 characterize
American 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 multifarious
forms 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", Boas
wrote 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 Man ends 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 migration
as 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 reviewed
Sparks 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 vice
versa. 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 linguistics
and 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 museum
displays. 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 the perception of 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 such
sensations 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 the
difference 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 and
Alfred 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 "the
activities 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 literate
native 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)
11 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
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 numaym as "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 ethnological
interpretations 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 keep
folklore 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 Folklore in 1908, regularly wrote and published articles on folklore (often in the Journal 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]
12 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
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 fact
unscientific. 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 was
especially 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 the New 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 that
they 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 colleagues
looked 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 publication American 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 in
this 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 (one
of 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
15 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
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. Adamson
Hoebel (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 early
work 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.
16 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
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.
^
a

b

c
Moore, 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, 18581906 p. 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.
^ A 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.
^ Alexander Lesser, 1981 "Franz Boas" p. 25 in Sydel Silverman, ed. From Totems to Teachers New York: Columbia
University Press
18.
17 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
^ (The first American Ph.D in anthropology was actually granted from Clark University, though still under the leadership of
Boas.) Moore, Jerry D. (2009). "Franz Boas: Culture in Context". Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological
Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 33.
19.
^ Franz Boas's Physical Anthropology: The Critique of Racial Formalism Revisited. John S. Allen. Current Anthropology,
Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 7984
20.
^ Jackson, John P. (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education. NYU
Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-4271-6. Lay summary (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/25.2/br_19.html) (30 August
2010).
21.
^ Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ.
of Vermont Press. ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6. Lay summary (http://www.upne.com/1-58465-715-4.html) (29 September
2010).
22.
^ Sparks, Corey S. and Richard L. Jantz 2002. A reassessment of human cranial plasticity: Boas revisited. PNAS November
12, 2002 vol. 99 no. 23 14636-14639 (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/23/14636)
23.
^ Marks, Jonathan What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes, University of California Press,
2003 ISBN 0-520-24064-2 p. xviii [2] (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HUBe0wjowLMC&pg=PR18&lpg=PR18&
dq=Jonathan+Marks+ring+of+desperation++Boas&source=web&ots=HJhskHi6ui&sig=zM8mzpjL_FdGN4lkGP9KNJcoIz0&
hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPR18,M1)
24.
^ New Answers to Old Questions: Did Boas Get It Right? Heredity, Environment, and Cranial Form: A Reanalysis of Boas's
Immigrant Data (http://lance.qualquant.net/gravleeetal03a.pdf).
25.
^ Did Boas Get It Right or Wrong? (http://www.anthro.fsu.edu/people/faculty/CG_pubs/gravlee03b.pdf) 26.
^ THE MEANING AND CONSEQUENCES OF MORPHOLOGICAL VARIATION (http://www.understandingrace.org
/resources/pdf/myth_reality/jantz.pdf)
27.
^ Franz Boas' Approach to Language. Roman Jakobson and Franz Boas. International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol.
10, No. 4 (Oct., 1944), pp. 188195
28.
^ Boas' view of grammatical meaning. R Jakobson American Anthropologist, 1959 29.
^ Mackert, Michael. The Roots of Franz Boas' View of Linguistic Categories As a Window to the Human Mind.
Historiographia Linguistica, Volume 20, Numbers 23, 1993
30.
^ Darnell, Regna. Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and the Americanist Text Tradition. Historiographia Linguistica, Volume 17,
Numbers 12, 1990, pp. 129144(16)
31.
^ Stocking, G. W. 1974. "The Boas plan for the study of American Indian languages," in Studies in the history of linguistics:
Traditions and paradigms. Edited by D. Hymes, pp. 45483. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
32.
^ Boas and the Development of Phonology: Comments Based on Iroquoian. Paul M. Postal. International Journal of
American Linguistics, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1964), pp. 269280
33.
^ Berlin, Bretnt and Paul Kay 1969 Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution 34.
^ Lewis, H. S. (2001), The Passion of Franz Boas. American Anthropologist, 103: 447467. 35.
^ Liss, J. E. (1998), Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois,
18941919. Cultural Anthropology, 13: 127166.
36.
^ David L. Browman, "Spying by American Archaeologists in World War I", Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 2011,
21(2), pp. 1017, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bha.2123.
37.
^ Adam Kuper, 1988 The Invention of Primitive Society p. 149. London: Routledge 38.
^ Robert F. Barsky. 2011. Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism. MIT Press, Apr 15, 2011 p. 196 39.
^ Lewis 2001:458-59 40.
^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 19271945",
Wallstein Verlag, Gttingen, 2003, pp. 212213
41.
^ Lee D. Baker, 2004. Franz Boas out of the ivory tower. Anthropological Theory Vol 4(1): 2951 42.
^ Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture. Richard Handler. American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Jun.,
1990), pp. 252273
43.
^ Beardsley, Edward H. 1973. The American Scientist as Social Activist: Franz Boas, Burt G. Wilder, and the Cause of
Racial Justice, 19001915. Isis 64:5066.
44.
18 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
^ Totems and teachers: key figures in the history of anthropology, Sydel Silverman, Rowman Altamira, 2004 p 16 45.
^ Anthropology in the Ironic Mode: The Work of Franz Boas, Arnold Krupat and Franz Boas, Social Text No. 19/20
(Autumn, 1988), pp. 105118
46.
^ McVICKER, D. (1989), Parallels and Rivalries: Encounters Between Boas and Starr. Curator: The Museum Journal, 32:
212228
47.
^ Briggs, Charles, and Richard Baumann 1999 "The Foundation of All Future Researches": Franz Boas. George Hunt, Native
American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity. American Quarterly 51:479528.
48.
^ Jacknis, I. (2002), The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 18961905. American Anthropologist, 104:
520532. doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.520 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.2002.104.2.520)
49.
^ That Freyre was ever Boas's student is under contention. Boas was opposed to racism, as were students such as Ashley
Montagu, etc. It seems unlikely that the "father" of the modern racist theory of Lusotropicalism had ever worked closely with
Boas. "The invention of Freyre included his self-invention. For example, he too presented himself as if he had been a
follower of Boas ever since his student days." See Peter Burke, Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke: "Gilberto Freyre: social
theory in the tropics", Peter Lang, 2008, p. 19
50.
^ Moore, Jerry D. (2004). Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Rowman Altamira.
p. 234
51.
Writings by Boas
Boas n.d. "The relation of Darwin to anthropology", notes for a lecture; Boas papers (B/B61.5) American
Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Published on line with Herbert Lewis 2001b.
Boas, Franz (1911). The Mind of Primitive Man. ISBN 0-313-24004-3 (Online version (https://archive.org/details
/mindofprimitivem031738mbp) of the 1938 revised edition at the Internet Archive)
Boas, Franz. (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 1). Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin
40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
Boas, Franz (1912). "Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants". American Anthropologist, Vol.
14, No. 3, JulySept, 1912. Boas (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122376519/abstract)
Boas, Franz (1912). "The History of the American Race". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol.
XXI, pp. 177183.
Boas, Franz (1917). Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin tribes (http://www.secstate.wa.gov/history
/publications_detail.aspx?p=42) (DJVU). Washington State Library's Classics in Washington History collection.
Published for the American Folk-Lore Society by G.E. Stechert.
Boas, Franz (1914). "Mythology and folk-tales of the North American Indians". Journal of American Folklore,
Vol. 27, No. 106, Oct.-Dec. pp. 374410.
Boas, Franz (1922). "Report on an Anthropometric Investigation of the Population of the United States". Journal
of the American Statistical Association, June 1922.
Boas, Franz (1906). The Measurement of Differences Between Variable Quantities. New York: The Science
Press. (Online version (https://archive.org/details/measurementofvar00boasuoft) at the Internet Archive)
Boas, Franz (1927). "The Eruption of Deciduous Teeth Among Hebrew Infants". The Journal of Dental Research,
Vol. vii, No. 3, September, 1927.
Boas, Franz (1927). Primitive Art. ISBN 0-486-20025-6
Boas, Franz (1935). "The Tempo of Growth of Fraternities". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Vol. 21, No. 7, pp. 413418, July, 1935.
Boas, Franz (1940). Race, Language, and Culture ISBN 0-226-06241-4
19 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
Boas, Franz (1945). Race and Democratic Society, New York, Augustin.
Stocking, George W., Jr., ed. 1974 A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 18831911
ISBN 0-226-06243-0
Boas, Franz (1928). Anthropology and Modern Life (2004 ed.) ISBN 0-7658-0535-9
Boas, Franz, edited by Helen Codere (1966), Kwakiutl Ethnography, Chicago, Chicago University Press.
Boas, Franz (2006). Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America: A Translation of Franz
Boas' 1895 Edition of Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Kste-Amerikas. Vancouver, BC:
Talonbooks. ISBN 0-88922-553-2
Writings on Boas and Boasian anthropology
Baker, Lee D. 1994. "The Location of Franz Boas Within the African American Struggle". Critique of
Anthropology, Vol 14(2):199217.
Baker, Lee D. 2004. "Franz Boas Out of the Ivory Tower". Anthropological Theory 4(1):2951.
Bashkow, Ira 2004. "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries" in American Anthropologist 106(3):
443458 Bashkow (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120129372/abstract)
Benedict, Ruth. "Franz Boas." Science. New Series, Vol. 97, No. 2507. January 15, 1943. Pages 6062. The
American Association for the Advancement of Science. JSTOR. Print. Franz Boas (http://www.jstor.org/stable
/1670558).
Boas, Norman F. 2004. Franz Boas 18581942: An Illustrated Biography ISBN 0-9672626-2-3
Bunzl, Matti 2004. "Boas, Foucault, and the 'Native Anthropologist'", in American Anthropologist 106(3):
435442 Bunzl (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120129371/abstract)
Cole, Douglas 1999. Franz Boas: The Early Years, 18581906. ISBN 1-55054-746-1
Darnell, Regna 1998. And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology. ISBN
1-55619-623-7
Kroeber, Alfred 1949. "An Authoritarian Panacea" in American Anthropologist 51(2) 318320 Kroeber
(http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122428290/abstract)
Krupnik, Igor; Mller-Wille, Ludger (2010). "Franz Boas and Inuktitut terminology for ice and snow: from the
emergence of the field to the "great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" ". In Igor Krupnik, Claudio Aporta, Shari
Gearheard, Gita J. Laidler, Lene Kielsen Holm (eds.). SIKU: knowing our ice: documenting Inuit sea ice
knowledge and use. Dordrecht; London: Springer Netherlands. pp. 377400. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-8587-0_16
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2F978-90-481-8587-0_16).
Kuper, Adam. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion ISBN 0-415-00903-0
Lesser, Alexander 1981. "Franz Boas" in Sydel Silverman, ed. Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History
of Anthropology ISBN 0-231-05087-9
Lewis, Herbert 2001a. "The Passion of Franz Boas" in American Anthropologist 103(2): 447467
Lewis, Herbert 2001b. "Boas, Darwin, Science and Anthropology" in Current Anthropology 42(3): 381406 (On
line version contains transcription of Boas's 1909 lecture on Darwin.)
Lewis, Herbert 2008. "Franz Boas: Boon or Bane" (Review Essay). Reviews in Anthropology 37 (23): 169200.
Lowie, Robert H. "Franz Boas (18581942)." The Journal of American Folklore: Franz Boas Memorial Number.
Vol. 57, No. 223. JanuaryMarch 1944. Pages 5964. The American Folklore Society. JSTOR. Print. Franz Boas
(18581942) (http://www.jstor.org/stable/535755).
Lowie, Robert H. "Bibliography of Franz Boas in Folklore." The Journal of American Folklore: Franz Boas
Memorial Number. Vol. 57, No. 223. JanuaryMarch 1944. Pages 6569. The American Folklore Society. JSTOR.
Print. Bibliography of Franz Boas in Folklore (http://www.jstor.org/stable/535756).
20 of 22 7/21/2014 2:00 PM
Maud, Ralph. 2000. Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology. Vancouver, BC:
Talonbooks. ISBN 0-88922-430-7
Price, David 2000 "Anthropologists as Spies (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20001120&c=2&s=price)"
The Nation Vol. 271, Number 16, 2427, November 20, 2000.
Price, David 2001 The Shameful Business: Leslie Spier On The Censure Of Franz Boas
(http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/HAN-Spier.htm) History of Anthropology Newsletter Vol.
XXVII(2):912.
Stocking, George @., Jr. 1960. "Franz Boas and the Founding of the American Anthropological Association."
American Anthropologist. Vol. 62, No. 1. Stocking (http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1960.62.1.02a00010)
Stocking, George W., Jr. 1968. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology ISBN
0-226-77494-5
Stocking, George W., Jr., ed. 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the
German Anthropological Tradition ISBN 0-299-14554-9
Williams, Vernon J. Jr. 1996. Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries
(http://www.kentuckypress.com/viewbook.cfm?Category_ID=1&Group=2&ID=922). Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky.
Zumwalt, Rosemary Lvy. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Ed. Alan Dundes. Bloomington
and Indianapolis; Indiana University Press, 1988. Print.
Boas, anthropology, and Jewish identity
Glick, Leonard B. 1982. "Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation" in
American Anthropologist 84(3) pp. 545565. [3] (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122472798
/abstract)
Frank, Gelya. 1997. "Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology" in American Anthropologist 99(4),
pp. 731745. [4] (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120144228/abstract)
Mitchell Hart, 2003. "Franz Boas as German, American, Jew." In German-Jewish Identities in America, eds. C.
Mauch and J. Salomon (Madison: Max Kade Institute), pp. 88105.
Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History (http://anthro.amnh.org/anthro.html) Objects
and Photographs from Jesup North Pacific Expedition 18971902 (section Collections Online, option Collections
Highlights).
Franz Boas at Minden, Westphalia (http://www.franz-boas.com)
Franz Boas Papers (http://amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.B61-ead.xml) at the American
Philosophical Society
Recordings made by Franz Boas during his field research can be found at the Archives of Traditional Music at
Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/)
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir (http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs
/memoir-pdfs/boas-franz.pdf)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Franz_Boas&oldid=617752785"
Categories: 1858 births 1942 deaths American anthropologists American linguists
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University of Bonn alumni Heidelberg University alumni
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