Boas, Franz

(b. Minden, Germany, 9 July 1858; d. New York, N. Y., 21 December 1942)

anthropology.

Boas exercised considerable influence in the “historical” and “scientific” reorientation of anthropology from about 1890 to 1925, especially in the United States. He made significant contributions to formulation of probelms and methods in human growth, linguistics, folklore, art, and the ethnology of the Indians of the Northwest Coast.

Franz was one of six children of Meier Boas, a moderately successful merchant, and Sophie Meyer, who founded a Froebel-type kindergarten in Minden. At an early age he expressed an interest in traveling to far-off lands to study the life and customs of exotic peoples, but as he pursued his studies at the Gymnasium in Minden, mathematics and physics claimed his attention and remained the focus of his graduate work at Heidelberg. Bonn, and Kiel. At twenty-three Boas received a doctorate in physics, but during his university career his desire to travel and to understand “nature as a whole” was renewed, probably by the inspiration of the naturalist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt. A friendship with the geographer Theobald Fischer also influenced the turn to anthropology.

In the fall of 1882 Boas attended meetings of the Berlin Anthropological Society, where he sought out Adolf Bastian, the foremost German ethnologist, and Rudolf Virchow, the famous anthropometrist. From Virchow he received anthropometric training, while Bastian gave him “good advice,” encouragement, and friendly assistance. By June 1883 Boas was on his way to Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island, on the Polar research schooner Germania.

Before setting out for the Arctic, Boas read widely on Eskimo culture and studied the language, apparently intending to gather both geographic and ethnographic materials. He had every reason to be satisfied with his geographic researches, completed in 1884, for he had corrected many misconceptions about Baffin Island and had established the presence of two large lakes (not one) in the interior. He had also charted some 250 miles of coastline, often at great discomfort and hazard to his life. The expedition was crucial in turning Boas to anthropology, for he not only came to admire the Arctic people but also observed firsthand that geographic forces were not the prime determinants of human behavior. Obviously the source of these determinants must be sought elsewhere, and Boas elected to follow Bastian in focusing on mental processes. By the time Boas published The Central Eskimo in 1888, ethnological contributions were outrunning the geographic.

On Boas’ return to Germany, Bastian found him a position in the Museum für Völkerkunds as an assistant, and in 1886 he became lecturer in geography at the University of Berlin. At the time he was undecided about pursuing a career in Germany, for he felt frustrated by the discrimination and insults to which he had been subject because of his Jewish origins. Still fresh from the Arctic adventure, he was excited by the visit of some Bella Coola Indians “on exhibit” in Berlin. Boas interviewed them and threw himself into the task of ordering the museum’s collection of Northwest Coast materials. He soon had managed a shaky financing that would enable him to live among the Indians of the Northwest Coast for a few months. This was the first of thirteen field trips to the area (the last was in 1931). Altogether he spent some two and a half years among the coastal Indians.

Contact with F. W. Putnam during a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Buffalo, New York, developed into an enduring association; it provided new opportunities for Boas and influenced his decision to remain in the United States. Putnam arranged for Boas to become a foreign associate member of the Association and in 1887, When Boas appeared at the New York office of Science to present an article, he was asked to become assistant editor. This provided a small income, whereupon Boas married Mary krackowizer of New York, whom he had met in Germany.

A chance meeting with G. Stanley Hall led to an invitation to become a lecturer in anthropology at Clark University, a position Boas held until 1892, when he accepted Putnam’s invitation to become his anthropological assistant in charge of exhibits for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In that same year, under Boas’ direction, the first Ph.D. in anthropology in North America was conferred on A.F. Chamberlain, who became his successor at Clark. Boas stayed with Putnam during the formative years of the Field Museum, which had been founded to house some of the riches of the ethnological exhibits of the Columbian Exposition. When Putnam left in 1894, Boas became curator of anthropology, but difficulties already afoot soon provoked his resignation. Boas was virtually destitute until 1896, when Putnam offered him the post of curator of ethnology and somatology at the American Museum of Natural History. The museum appointment led to a lectureship in physical anthropology at Columbia University, followed by a professorship in 1899 (he retired in 1937). Putnam left the museum in 1901, and Boas assumed the post of curator of anthropology, resigning in 1905.

Boas made a number of basic assumptions about the nature of reality which guided his approach to the phenomenon of man and dictated his contributions to anthropology. The heart of his position was the assumption that reality is structured. It has an inner core that remains relatively stable in the face of altered conditions and an outer form that changes in response to alterations in conditions. The scientific problem lay in uncovering the inner core and in finding to what extent it was affected by variations in external form and vice versa. The only way to uncover this hidden reality, in Boas’ view, was to study the variations, and when the variable aspects of range and nature had been determined, it would be possible to describe the inner form with confidence. This empirical-inductive position was not novel, however; it echoed the usual approach of natural scientists at that time. However, the application of an inductive orientation to the “evolutionary” anthropology of the day was bound to produce profound alterations in problem definition, methodology, and results.

Boas’ most general and signal contributions to anthropology stem from his earnest desire to make the discipline a rigorous and exact science. No anthropologist at the time seems to have understood so well as Boas the full implications of the inductive position and why the path of deduction then followed in anthropology must lead to erroneous conclusions and perpetuation of a quasi-science. No one pressed more vigorously for abandonment of uncritical inferences and comparisons than Boas, as he systematically destroyed the popular and “scientific” myths of the day. Except for his ethnographic texts, which presented material with little commentary, he used every review, public lecture, article, introduction, and analytical monograph to rephrase problems and to point out the complex logical and technical operations involved in achieving precise controls and conclusions. Most of the rephrasings picked up the complexities glossed over by uncritical classification: What criteria shall be used when we say that a culture or a custom is simple in comparison with another? How does one classify cultures that are simple in technology, yet complicated in social organization? How can the criteria employed be freed from subjective bias traceable to the relativistic categories of thought found in one’s own culture?

Boas has been cited as a destroyer of the “evolutionist” position, but as a scientist, he was the opponent of any kind of speculation. “Evolutionary” anthropology, dominant when Boas entered the discipline, operated deductively with a number of unproved assumptions. It was therefore necessary to replace this pseudo anthropology and its uncritical “comparative method” with a “scientific” anthropology grounded in a critical use of detailed factual materials. Attention should be directed to process—how forms change.

In the course of unseating “evolutionary” anthropology, Boas contributed some basic principles to practice. (1) All Classifications are relative, and the scientist must realize this when he seeks to conceptualize his findings. The error of forcing the logic of one’s own categories of thought on the “primitive” must be avoided, or the product of research will be useless. (2) Classification is no substitute for process—for what actually happens. Data must be collected in such detail that the operation will record variations in forms and the causes of these variations, thereby offering clues to process. (3) For items to be comparable, they must show similarities not only in outward form but also in their histories. One must beware of using functional analogies produced by convergence as if they were homologies—which alone can pass muster for scientific comparison. (4) Coincidence must not be taken for causal connection. Boas’ classic target here was the alleged relation linking race, language, and culture. With well-known historic illustrations, supplemented by examples out of his own fieldwork, Boas was able to show that race, language, and culture varied independently of each other. (5) No system of explanation can account for everything, yet there can be no scientific explanation at all without accounting for the variations insofar as objective controls can be brought to bear. (6) Valid interpretations are possible only when derived from a relevant context. To seek the source of religious behavior in a “contemplation” of nature is suspect because more likely sources for religious ideas are the “feelings” and “imaginative play’s accompanying “social experience”. (7) The data compared must be quantified before “laws” can be extracted.

The determination to reorient anthropology came gradually, as Boas developed field experience and began to analyze his Northwest Coast materials, especially myths and legends, in the light of their geographic distributions. He paid special tribute to the geographer Friedrich Ratzel in supplying this methodological lead. As early as 1888 he called attention to the great importance of “cultural contact” for the cultural development of “primitive” societies, but he was nevertheless willing to admit that comparative evolutionary studies were sound enough to allow the conclusion that the “human mind develops every where according to the same laws.” By 1896, however, Boas was convinced that the “vain endeavor to construct a uniform systematic history of the evolution of culture” with the aid of the traditional “comparative method” had to be renounced if anthropology were to become a science. The method he advocated was the “historical”.

The historical method would uncover process through a meticulous consideration of individual forms and their variations. By plotting culture “elements” in space, historic relations could be outlined and psychological processes recovered, as one noted alterations in form and meaning made by individual peoples when reinterpreting borrowed traits according to their own social traditions. Properly applied, the historical method would disclose how diverse elements had been accumulated and ordered in a kind of unity not only within particular tribes but also within areas where they seemed to be especially characteristic. Once the variations had been disposed of, the local culture base would be recognizable. In applying the historical method, it was best to begin with a limited area and gradually extend one’s controlled comparisons outward. Certain uniformities could be found in the cultures of societies located in geographic areas suggesting a kind of natural culture region with which to begin.

At all times the investigator must stay within the limits of his data and avoid inferences that have not been checked against facts. The occurrence of similar forms in adjacent tribes usually indicated that diffusion had taken place, but the researcher must consider other contingencies. Likewise, a wide and continuous distribution would suggest an ancient history for the culture element in question, but an age-area principle could not be applied to ethnographic facts as a blanket rule, because historic exceptions were known. To hold that distant tribes with similar customs were linked historically would not be reasonable unless a more or less continuous chain of distribution of elements held in common could be traced, or migration were likely. Boas thus admitted that parallel developments in widely separated areas could occur and that such might owe their similarities to identical psychological processes. In this regard he noted how language elements were distributed so irregularly throughout the world that some phonetic, morphological, and classificatory features must owe their similarities to “psychological causes” operating in the context of a limited number of alternatives. Such an admission would not lend wholehearted support to a unilinear type of development, however. Boas’ viewpoint stressed a generalized psychological base, an impulse as it were, that could be expressed in any number of ways. Therefore, differentiation was more expectable than restriction to a single response. It followed that no unilinear parallelism based on identical psychological processes could be granted until the strictures of historic contact, migration, and convergence had been satisfied. The inner form thus would stand in relief only as the variations had been accounted for.

By the time Boas wrote the introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911), he was able to outline the essentials of his position. He intended to establish the “historical method” and then move on to “problems of cultural dynamics, of integration of culture and of the interaction between individual and society”. All these efforts were programmed to uncover the ultimate anthropological reality— the psychological laws governing human behavior.

Once convinced that he was on the track of a scientific anthropology, Boas drove himself tirelessly and systematically toward the goal. He preferred to operate in the context of problems and methods rather than to formulate neat definitions for the classification and manipulation of data. In consequence, the conceptual language of anthropology owes little to Boas, who rarely offered a definition of culture, the alleged hallmark of anthropology. He was, however, a prime contributor to the emergence of the culture concept, stressing the weight of “social tradition” as a molding force in human behavior. Boas thus was in the vanguard of those who recognized that what individuals experienced and learned as members of a society represented a basic problem for social science investigation, and that the key to human behavior would be found in sociopsychological processes rather than in common human psychological tendencies stressed by evolutionists when reconstructing the stages of culture growth. From his field experience Boas was convinced that the sociopsychological processes linking primitive men to social tradition were basically little different from those of civilized societies. By 1930 two of his students, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, were breaking new ground in learning how cultures stimulate the development of unique personality types.

Boas distinguished three important problems to which anthropology must be directed: “reconstruction of human history”—biological, linguistic, and social; “determination of types of historical phenomena and their consequences”; and the “dynamics of change.” In starting with problems and methods, it is apparent that Boas wished to reorient his readers to the intricate processes involved in human phenomena. Aware of his own deficiencies in ethnographic details, he had no wish to forestall a scientific advance by presentingan elaborate explanatory system. Classifications and explanations must come later—after full description of the phenomena. Ultimate understandings would emerge as psychological processes came to light, but Boas wanted to make it clear that anthropology, since it dealt with “secondary [historic] features,” could not use psychology as a jumping-off point. Rather, “The psychological problem [of inner form] is contained in the results of the historic inquiry.”

when casting about for the most sensitive indicators of psychological processes, Boas was drawn to language, for in the “linguistic categories” of specific languages he hoped to uncover the “unconscious” impulses that had given rise to the “fundamental ideas of language.” Since ethnology could be considered the “science dealing with mental phenomena of the life of the peoples of the world,” the two stood to gain by mutual cooperation, and Boas encouraged the thought that linguistics would make a greater contribution to anthropology as a part of ethnology than were it to go its own way. The study of folklore was selected as the second center of investigation because Boas had observed that “nothing seems to travel as readily as fanciful tales.” Some elements were widely distributed throughout North America, and there were obvious connections between the mythology of northeast Asia and that of the Northwest Coast. Boas labored for thirty years to produce a compilation of folklore elements from throughout the Northwest Coast area and from which he could extract the psychological processes by which they had been altered during their spread and reinterpretation. Many of the conclusions advanced in the voluminous quantitative study Tsimshian Mythology (1916) had been foreshadowed in shorter papers on how folklore traits drawn from a number of sources accumulated gradually and were integrated into the folklore traditions and narrative styles of a particular tribe.

Boas’ theory of culture history, and his view of the integration of culture, owed much to his pursuit of mythological elements on the Northwest Coast. Since mythic elements could be disengaged from narratives and plots and widely diffused, he became convinced that culture seldom, if ever, diffused as a complex and unified whole. He therefore opposed the Kulturkreislehre, who assembled disparate elements into “culture complexes” and treated them as if they had diffused en bloc. Again he found confirmation for his notion that any cultural tradition was a complicated product of intricate historical and psychological processes rooted in the “social life of the people.” Under such circumstances one could hardly expect mythology to be a “direct reflex of the contemplation of nature” and to present a uniform “organic growth” expressing uniformities in the human mind. It was true that incidents and actors in folktales had a way of becoming associated with natural phenomena (stars, animals, mountains, trees), but these were secondary symbolizations projected through the “play of imagination with the events of human life.” In Boas’ historical view, individual cultures might develop some tendencies toward becoming a unity, but none could become a thoroughly consistent and integrated whole.

Myths also proved a useful touchstone for language studies, literary analysis, and world view. When they were dictated by the informant and recorded phonetically in text, a corpus of materials was available for linguistic analysis. Myths often contained theological, philosophical, and scientific explanations, and thus provided an important channel to primitive thought. But although Boas was aware of the uses to which myths could be put in understanding the psychology of a people in their choice of metaphor, in the symbolism expressed in the personalities of the actors, and in explanations of events, he never explored these dimensions in any depth.

Art was the third medium Boas used to demonstrate that human phenomena are highly variable and have complex historic, social, and psychological roots. He confounded those who interpreted the history of art as an evolution from a realistic to an abstract representation by pointing out that within any society there may be found examples of both realistic and geometric design. Actually, an utterly realistic treatment did not occur in primitive art. The intent might he representative, but “symbolic forms” or conventions representing heads, legs, and other body details normally were used, and the primitive artist knew very well that he had not succeeded in duplicating what he portrayed. The imaginative stimulus the artist received from materials and tools while approaching the task within a traditional context provided the key to much of the variation in the artistic expression of any tribe, and Boas cautioned against assuming that conventionalization was so rigid that no variations could occur in primitive art.

Stress on the interplay of tradition, material, tool, and technical virtuosity channeled Boas’ focus on process in art, and helped him explain why individual variations and stylistic conventionalizations must occur. Only the total context of any art could provide relevant and valid source materials for scientific generalization. The elements of art could be explained much better by the rhythmic and alternating movements involved in technical operations than by contemplation of nature’s analogues. Uniformities found in any art were a product of stylistic traditions, which limited human inventiveness, and not the consequence of uniform responses by the human mind.

Physical anthropology constituted Boas’ fourth instrument to promote a scientific anthropology. It seemed highly probable to him that the predominance of heredity over environment assured a great permanence of human types. However, the problem of physical variability had to be dealt with first because variability was not a matter of biology but the result of unknown influences on the more permanent characteristics. The plotting of human types according to their geographic distribution therefore must be the first order of business, paying due attention to variations stemming from “mixture,” the fixing of types through inbreeding and isolation, and differentiations that followed natural tendencies for succeeding generations to vary from parental stems. Subtle physiological changes induced by nutrition and mode of life could not be ignored, because man, like other domesticated species, was not impervious to such influences. The races that anthropologists so easily assumed to be homogeneous and stable in type actually masked a considerable heterogeneity that would become apparent—and significant—as the complex histories of the “genetic lines” of which they were composed came to the surface. When the historic analysis had revealed the range and sources of variations, the permanent features would stand clear and would allow definition of local “genetic” types instead of “ecotypes.” Boas was soon convinced that historic complexities in anatomical variation were such that it would be futile to expect to find any “pure races” or an original race from which a rigid genealogy could be plotted.

Boas set out to document physical variation by investigating alterations that might be due to rates of growth, intermixture, and mode of life. Knowing individuals differed in their maturational rates, he asked how these uneven rates influenced distributions and classifications. He admitted that development of a dynamic set of growth statistics would increase the complexities of research problems, but a vast and interesting array of challenging questions would open up as “physiological changes in the individual and the types and variabilities of these changes become accessible to investigation.”

Measurement of nearly 18,000 immigrants in New York provided Boas with a controversial study in physical variation. In the New World urban setting, round-headed east European Jews became more long-headed, while south Italians, long-headed to begin with, became more short-headed. Two ethnic groups with differing head shapes thus tended to converge in a new urban environment. The changes were registered in children, and native-born children registered a greater shift in stature and in head form than did foreign-born. The study excited anthropometrists, who had viewed physical types as quite stable and had relied on head form as a special index for racial classification and history. Although Boas drew on his data to emphasize the “plasticity” of human types, he realized that genetic organization had not been altered. Nonetheless the study called attention to the dynamic relation linking type and environment, and cautioned against the ready acceptance of external form as a mirror image of genetic type.

Stimulated by an experimental study in which “pure lines” of beans had shown variations apparently traceable to both inheritance and environment, Boas attempted to determine the relative importance of these variables for human physical types. By statistical correlation of variance “averages” among “fraternities” comprising a line of descent, he hoped to measure the heterogeneity of the line. Boas was sufficiently knowledgeable in mathematics to attempt innovations in correlational procedures to suit his anthropometric data, but these ad hoc efforts had no lasting effect, for Pearson and Fisher developed more sophisticated techniques.

With variations the key to his initial scientific purpose, Boas turned to controlled observation and recording of detailed information as prerequisites to the critical and “exhaustive” analysis that must take place. There could be no substitute for facts, which alone could lead to the understanding of forms and processes. Hence, the somewhat natural history approach of Boas to the collection of anthropological data. The anthropologist must be a fieldworker, but he could not approach his task with preconceived ideas. A properly trained anthropologist would observe, but above all he would depend on the people he was studying to supply their own categories of thought for sifting the phenomena. It followed that the interview would not be directed, except incidentally. The informant would be presented with a problem, but he then would be left free to develop his narrative and to follow the lead of his own interests. A fieldworker should strive for language mastery, but in the absence of the language skill, texts dictated by the informant in his own language could be recorded phonetically.

Boas recommended the collection of comparable materials from several informants, but he made no real effort to increase the number of his informants in the hope of increasing reliability. Instead, he customarily sought control through numbers by expanding the list of elements. The historic emphasis tended to focus attention on issues other than the determination of culture patterns or literary style, but Boas’ treatment invariably turned to the presence or absence of literary expression in riddles, moralizing fables, epic poetry, and the like to show that primitive literature had a history and was not a natural and spontaneous product of common human mental processes.

In reviewing Boas’ substantive contributions to anthropology, it is apparent that the key to his success lay in a determined massing of data, a quick grasp of the ramifications of problems, and a perceptive utilization of leads furnished by investigators in related fields.

A restrained and businesslike tone governed Boas’ relations with his Indian informants, preventing him from probing their offbeat habits, but his methodical record established a platform upon which subsequent investigators could build. His publications, often with ethnographic notes, concerned a remarkable number of Pacific Coast and inland tribes: Northern and Southern kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Tsimshian, Chinook, Tillamook, Kathlamet, Kutenai, and a Keresan-speaking pueblo of the Southwest.

In his search for the inner world of the primitive, Boas pioneered in using those who had been raised among the Indians or who were their close associates. He went to some pains to train George Hunt, a mixed-blood Tlingit reared among the Kwakiutl, in phonetic transcription, and Hunt rewarded him with many pages of text, including mythology, potlatch narratives, and Kwakiutl recipes. James Teit, a sheep-herder, also was encouraged to publish extensively on the Thompson and other Indians of the plateau region.

Boas was largely responsible for conduct of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1900), which sought answers to cultural relation linking Siberianand Northwest Coast peoples. His efforts to establish an international school of American archaeology and ethnology dedicated to research in Mexico ultimately failed as a result of the revolution that erupted in 1910, but during his directorship (1911- 1912), Boas was able to acquaint the school and the Mexican appointee, Manuel Gamio, with the uses of stratigraphy and typology in formulating a sequence of cultures for the Valley of Mexico. The interest Boas generated in folklore was passed on to students and associates, including William Jones, George A. Dorsey, Edward Sapir, Pliny E. Goddard, Robert H. Lowie, Melville J. Herskovits, Gladys Reichard, and Melville Jacobs. During his editorship (1908- 1924) of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, Boas assured an outlet for the texts and translations he had inspired. Publications of the American Ethnological Society and of the Columbia University series Contributions to Anthropology also were utilized for folklore works until 1940.

In linguistics, Boas’ accomplishments parallel his achievements in folklore. A self-taught linguist, he used his editorship of the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911–1941) to outline a proper study of language and to provide “grammatical sketches” that would serve as models for future research. His intent was to achieve uniform presentations, treating the grammar “as though an intelligent Indian was going to develop the forms of his own thoughts by analysis of his own form of speech.” In 1917 Boas took the initiative in launching the International Journal of American Linguistics, which he not only edited until his death but also maintained with personal funds.

In physical anthropology, Boas’ pioneer efforts led to discovery of individual variability in “tempo of growth.” He was the first to initiate human growth studies in North America, and his was the first chart of standardized heights and weights for American children according to chronological age, corrected statistically to give the standard deviation or variance at each half-year interval. Boas also pointed out the close correlation between the rate of physiological development and mental development; physiologically advanced subjects made better scores in school work and on psychological tests than did physiologically retarded subjects of the same age.

Boas has been criticized for impeding the progress of American anthropology for two or more decades by training a generation of students antagonistic to evolutionary problems and by exercising his commanding influence in publication and organizational channels. Such an accusation is difficult to evaluate, but the existence on the Continent of a similar antievoutionary drive leaves the charge open to doubt. The basic limitations of Boas’ approach stem from his determined efforts to overturn “speculative” evolutionary theories of the origin and development of human thought and culture. He concentrated on investigation of “mental phenomena” in art, language, and mythology and thus was diverted from the study of cultures in their organizational and functional operations. Preoccupation with historic processes also led to an indifference to the processes of change then taking place in Indian cultures. His methodological practice of reducing larger culture units to elemental parts in order to trace historic relations prevented full appreciation of the stylistic integration that cultures might exhibit. Once Boas developed his position, he was little inclined to change course or to go beyond the scientific boundaries he had outlined. This inflexibility is apparent in an inclination to press more rigorous and searching methods upon unfinished research rather than to open up new problems.

Besides holding honorary and regular memberships in many national anthropological organizations in Europe and in the United States, Boas held a number of presidencies, including those of the American Anthropological Association (1907, 1908), New York Academy of Science (1910), American Folklore Society (1931), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (1931). From 1901 to 1919 he served as honorary philologist to the Bureau of American Ethnology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A select list of papers (some revised or condensed) assembled by Boas in Race, Language and Culture (New York, 1940) offers an excellent introduction to the range of his activities and his theoretical position. This can be supplemented with such reprints as The Central Eskimo (1888; repr. Lincoln, Neb., 1964); The Mind of Primitive Man (1911; repr. new York, 1963); and Primitive Art (1927; repr. New York, 1955). In Kwakiutl Ethnography (Chicago, 1966), Helen Codere has added a number of published selections to an unfinished manuscript in order to furnish a representative account of Boas’ description of this people. The raw data for Boas’ study of bodily changes in immigrants was published as Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man (New York, 1928). He was also contributing editor of the Handbook of American Indian Languages, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.-New York, 1911–1941). A full bibliography is in Memoir 61 (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Two sympathetic views of Boas appeared as memoirs of the American Anthropologist: Franz Boas, 1858–1942, Memori 61 (Menasha, 1943), with contributions by A. L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and others; and Walter Goldschmidt, ed., The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth, Memoir 89 (Menasha, 1959). In June Helm, ed., Pioneers of American Anthropology, American Ethnological Society, Monograph 43 (Seattle, 1966), Ross Parmenter describes the friendship of Boas and Zelia Nuttall, the celebrated Mexican researched, and Robert Rohner presents diary and correspondence material relevant to Boas’ fieldwork on the Northwest Coast. M. J. Herskovits, Franz Boas: The Science of Man in the Making (New York, 1953), offers the appreciative reflections of a student, viewing Boas as teacher, scientist, and citizen of the world. More critical treatments can be found in Leslie white, The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas, Texes Memorial Museum Bulletin 6 (Austin, Tex., 1963), and The Social Organization of Ethnological Theory, Rice University Studies, Monograph in Cultural Anthropology, 52 , no. 4 (Houston, Tex., 1966). For Boas’ contribution to the concept of culture, see George Stocking, Jr., “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historic Perspective,” in American Anthropologist, 68 , no. 4 (1966), 867–882.

Fred W. Voget