Boas, Franz

Boas, Franz (1858–1942), founder of modern American cultural anthropology.Born in Minden, Westphalia, Germany, into a freethinking Jewish household, Boas attended Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel universities, receiving his doctorate in physics from Kiel in 1881. After a year in the German army and another two years of reading, Boas went to Baffin Island on an expedition to study the cultural geography of the Eskimos. His experiences among the Eskimos created in him a desire to understand the laws of human nature and prompted him to make a gradual transition from cultural geography to ethnology.

In 1887, hoping for career opportunities denied him in the conservative, anti‐Semitic climate of Bismarck's Germany, Boas immigrated to the United States. Yet for almost a decade after his arrival, he confronted serious obstacles in securing and holding professional positions, primarily because of the virulent anti‐Semitism that pervaded the nation. In 1896, Frederic W. Putnam appointed him assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; he advanced to the curatorship in 1901. He was simultaneously serving as a lecturer at Columbia University, where he became professor of anthropology in 1899, a position he held until his death. Before 1920, Boas had trained such prominent anthropologists as Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, Edward Sapir, and Alexander A. Goldenweiser. Students trained after 1920 included Melville J. Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Otto Klineberg. So great was Boas's impact on American anthropology that by the 1950s virtually all the anthropologists in America had studied under him or one of his students.

Boas's scholarship—especially his pathbreaking The Mind of Primitive Man (1911)—profoundly influenced the concepts of “race” and “culture.” Debunking the concepts of cultural hierarchies and of “race” as a supraindividual organic entity, Boas almost single‐handedly ushered in the modern conceptions of race and cultural relativism.

All too aware of the insidious implications of racism during World War II, Boas suffered a fatal heart attack while denouncing Nazi propaganda in 1942.
See also Cultural Pluralism; Social Science.

Bibliography

George W. Stocking Jr. , Race, Culture, and Evolution, 1968.
Vernon J. Williams Jr. , Rethinking Race, 1996.

Vernon J. Williams Jr.