Franz Boas

Franz Boas , 1858-1942, German-American anthropologist, b. Minden, Germany; Ph.D. Univ. of Kiel, 1881. He joined an expedition to Baffin Island in 1883 and initiated his fieldwork with observations of the Central Eskimos. In 1886, Boas began his investigations of the Native Americans of British Columbia. He secured at Clark Univ. his first position in the United States in 1889, and was associated with the American Museum of Natural History from 1895 to 1905. Boas began to lecture at Columbia in 1896, and in 1899 became its first professor of anthropology, a position he held for 37 years. Boas greatly influenced American anthropology, particularly in his development of the theoretical framework known as cultural relativism, which argued against the evolutionary scale leading from savagery to Culture, laid out by his 19th-century predecessors. He believed that cultures (plural) are too complex to be evaluated according to the broad theorizing characteristic of evolutionary "laws" of developing culture (singular). Instead, Boas sought to understand the development of societies through their particular histories. He established the "four-field approach" through his concern with human evolution, archaeology, language, and culture, each of which has become a sub-field in the wider discipline of anthropology in the United States. Boas reexamined the premises of physical anthropology and was a pioneer in the application of statistical methods to biometric study. Boas was an early critic of the use of race as an explanation for difference in the natural and social sciences, emphasizing instead the importance of environment in the evaluation of individual capabilities, and made important contributions to stratigraphic archaeology in Mexico. As a student of Native American languages, Boas emphasized the importance of linguistic analysis from internal linguistic structure, and pointed out that language was a fundamental aspect of culture. His insistence on rigorous methodology served to establish the scientific value of his contributions, and his methods and conclusions are still widely influential. Boas taught and inspired a generation of anthropologists, notably Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict , who pioneered the "culture and personality" school of anthropology. A prolific writer, Boas's works include The Mind of Primitive Man (1911, rev. ed. 1983); Anthropology and Modern Life (1928, repr. 1984); Kwakiutl Ethnography (1966).

Bibliography: See G. W. Stocking, Jr.'s Franz Boas Reader: Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911 (1982); biography by M. J. Herskovits (1953, repr. 1973).

Boas, Franz (1858–1942) A German-born anthropologist who founded modern cultural anthropology (see SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY) in the United States. He and his students came to dominate American anthropology for the first three decades of the twentieth century. Boas revolutionized fieldwork methodology, relying on analysis of local texts, linguistics, and training local representative researchers to document their own culture. His Primitive Art (1927) greatly influenced later approaches to examining the material culture of peoples.

Using these methods Boas provided an enormous amount of ethnographic data on native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He gave priority to empirical ethnographic investigation over any search for scientific laws of cause and effect in culture. Boas was a cultural relativist, arguing that culture should be understood in terms of its own framework of meaning, rather than being judged by outside investigators according to the values of their own culture. He exposed and undermined the grandiose pretensions of evolutionary theory as espoused by Edward Tylor and James Frazer. Instead, Boas insisted on study of cultures as wholes, as systems of many interrelated parts. His later interest in psychology served as a precursor to the culture and personality approach. His other principal works include Race, Language and Culture (1940), and The Mind of Primitive Man (1911).