Boas, Franz
Boas, Franz
Franz Boas (1858–1942), American anthropologist, was born and educated in Germany. He visited the United States in 1884 and 1886 in the course of expeditions to the Arctic and British Columbia and began his American career in New York in 1887. He became the most influential anthropologist of his time, a major force in the academic and professional development of the science, considered by many the architect of its modern structure. To Boas can be credited a critical reconstruction of anthropology and its principal branches as well as the emergence of the modern concept of culture—a concept central to the integration of anthropology as the study of man “as a member of social groups,” and fundamentally influential with respect to all modern thinking in behavioral sciences. Boas led physical anthropology from taxonomic “race” classification into a field of viable research in human biology, and he exposed and eliminated traditional ambiguities in the area of race and culture study. His leadership in the study of American Indian languages became the established reference point for the development of structural linguistics and for questions of the relation of language to thought and culture. His critique of nineteenth-century unilineal (orthogenetic) cultural evolution established both the historicity of cultural developments and the primary role of culture in human history.
Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia. At school and the Gymnasium in Minden, and at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, he received the thorough German education of his time in sciences, mathematics, languages, and humanities. He took his doctorate at Kiel in 1881; physics and mathematics attracted him, and his principal doctoral thesis, Beitrdge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers (1881), led him into problems of psychophysics, the forerunner of experimental psychology. But he also wrote three theses in geography, his favorite subject in the Gymnasium, and he began his career as a geographer. It was as a geographer that he planned his Arctic expedition of 1883–1884 to Baffin Land. He later was appointed docent in geography at the University of Berlin.
Ethnology, however, had a stronger appeal. Even as a schoolboy he wanted to study cultural history, to travel to “unknown lands,” to learn about primitive peoples; and these interests were nourished by his studies in human geography. In 1882, before his Eskimo trip, he frequented meetings of the Berlin Anthropological Society, contacting Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow and arranging with Virchow for instruction in anthropometry. Among the Eskimos he carried out extensive ethnological research in addition to his geographical work, which became his monograph “The Central Eskimo” (1888). Sometime in 1885, as he came to understand his Eskimo experience, he turned to anthropology as his primary field. That year he was writing his Eskimo monograph and, as assistant in Bastian’s Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, he was associating with leading anthropologists and deepening his relationship with Virchow. Working with British Columbia collections at the museum, and with two Bella Coola Indians then in the city, Boas found the “attraction” of North Pacific culture, and especially its art, “irresistible”; he planned the ethnological expedition which took him to British Columbia in 1886 to begin the study of the region, and especially of the Kwakiutl Indians, that he continued throughout his life. For some years after 1888 he carried on these studies under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
In New York in January 1887, after returning from the field, Boas made a major decision: he gave up his German career to become an American scientist and citizen; accepting an assistant editorship of Science, he married and settled in New York. It was not a sudden decision: he was unhappy with his immediate German position—his docentship in physical geography—and for personal and political reasons he had sought for some years to transfer his career to the United States. Coming from a home “where the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force” and where, with parents who had given up their formal Jewish faith, he “was spared the struggle against religious dogma that besets the lives of so many young people” (1938b), Boas was alienated by the antiliberal climate of Bismarck’s Germany. He had experienced its anti-Semitism at first hand, and he could not accept the state requirement that to hold a scientific position he must make a declaration of religious affiliation. In New York he found a con-genial atmosphere of intellectual, personal, and political freedom. Relatives and friends of the Boas family who had left Germany after the revolution of 1848 were already there—among others, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, an uncle; Carl Schurz, who introduced Boas into academic and cultural circles; and Marie Krackowizer, Boas’ fiancée, whom he had met four years earlier on a vacation in the Harz mountains.
Boas’ work on Science was primarily geographical. Anthropology in the United States, still in a preacademic and largely preprofessional era, offered limited opportunities. From 1888 to 1892 Boas held a post in anthropology at Clark University; and from 1892 to mid-1894 he was chief assistant in anthropology at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and then curator of the museum there established to house its permanent collections. (The museum was first called the Columbian Museum, later the Field Museum.) After he left the museum, Boas was without a regular position for eighteen months. In December 1895 he joined Frederic Ward Putnam at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, becoming assistant curator in 1896 and curator from 1901 until 1905. Concurrently, he joined Columbia University in May 1896 as lecturer in physical anthropology and became professor of anthropology in 1899, his lifetime post, from which he retired in 1936.
Early in his American career Boas became active in promoting the academic and professional development of anthropology. He established anthropology at Clark University and at Columbia; and among the men he trained at Columbia were A. L. Kroeber, who established a department at the University of California in 1903, and F. G. Speck, who did likewise at the University of Pennsylvania in 1909. The work of Putnam and Boas made the Chicago World’s Fair a landmark in the development of anthropology: its collections founded a permanent museum and its “Congress of Anthropology” set the stage for basic research and professional organization to follow. Boas played a leading role in modernizing the American Anthropologist in 1898 and in founding the American Anthropological Association in 1902. In 1899–1900 he reorganized the American Ethnological Society in New York as a viable scientific society; founded in 1842, it had long been inactive. He was tireless in promoting research and in establishing and editing scientific journals and publications. From 1897 to 1902 he organized and directed through the American Museum of Natural History the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, a major research investigation of man in the Americas. He founded and edited the major American publications in anthropological linguistics, and he was a founder of the American Folk-lore Society in 1888 and of its Journal, which he edited from 1908 to 1925. He took the lead in developing anthropology in Mexico, collaborating on the establishment of the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology there and directing it from 1911 to 1912. He was active in the development of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and of its Journal.
Boas was equally indefatigable in his own scientific work, contributing year after year to all branches of anthropology. To these efforts he brought a commitment to empiricism and rigorous scientific methods, an awareness of the complexity of natural phenomena, and a readiness to re-examine traditional ideas. By 1911, when he published The Mind of Primitive Man, collecting some of his important studies “in revised form and enlarged,” he had restructured anthropology, defining in modern terms the scope and problems both of the general field and of its separable branches. Boas’ work thereafter, as that of most modern anthropology, built upon the new base lines he had established.
The science of anthropology
Before Boas, anthropology as a subject matter was little more than a miscellany of anthropometric, linguistic, ethnographic, and archeological data about the evolution of man and his works. Race and language, or race and culture, understood as phases of the same evolution, were treated as inherently interrelated. Culture was defined essentially as the expression of the rational thinking of the human mind, and it was considered a single phenomenon, humanistic and evolutionary, manifested by all mankind but in different degrees. Culture differences or similarities were explained by differences or similarities in racial factors, in geographical factors, or in stages of a progressive (orthogenetic) evolution.
Boas’ work transformed the field by basing it on the conception of cultures as the environments of both human biological and behavioral life, and by establishing the relative autonomy of physical anthropology, linguistics, and ethnology as branches of the general science.
Elementary today, although not at all obvious before his time, was Boas’ demonstration that physical type (race), language, and culture have had relatively independent histories. Traditional classifications of man had assumed that race and language, race and culture, or all three, are interdependent, that they “are in a way interchangeable terms.” Boas showed that classifications based upon racial or biological criteria cannot be reconciled with those based upon linguistic or cultural criteria, nor can linguistic or cultural classifications be reconciled with racial classifications or with one another. The principle established—that human biological history and classification must be based on biological data, linguistic history on linguistic data, and cultural history on cultural data—is fundamental in modern anthropology. Neither variations nor similarities of culture can be explained by considerations of race.
Critique of geographical determinism
During the time that Boas was a university student, the dominant approach to cultural history was geographical determinism. Under Theobald Fischer, Boas wrote a thesis on geography as the foundation of history, and he planned an empirical demonstration of the theory for his Baffin Land expedition— specifically, an investigation of the relations between Eskimo migrations and the physical geography of their region. After his return he published results which he considered satisfactory (1885), unaware for some time of the impact of his Eskimo experience upon his thinking (Stocking 1965). Yet within two years he turned from anthropogeography toward ethnology as his primary work, and in retrospect he saw his Eskimo research on geographical determinism as “a thorough disappointment” and his Eskimo year as a turning point in his interests (1938b). He had found that Eskimo behavior could not be explained by geographical environment except in trivial and shallow ways and that Eskimos often did things not because of geographical conditions but in spite of them.
In his critique of geographical determinism Boas showed that its logical conclusion—“that the same environment will produce the same cultural results everywhere”—is untenable in the light of the facts. Human culture is not simply an adaptation to nature; similarities and differences cannot be explained by geography alone. Environments, Boas showed, interact with pre-existing cultures—cultures “which themselves are due to historical causes” and cannot be explained by “action of the environment alone.”
Evolution
Even in his early thought, Boas interpreted the evolutionary view of nineteenth-century ethnology in historical terms. In 1889 he wrote:
The development of ethnology is largely due to the general recognition of the principle of biological evolution. It is a common feature of all forms of evolutionary theory that every living being is considered as the result of an historical development. The fate of an individual does not influence himself alone, but also all the succeeding generations.… This point of view introduced an historical perspective into the natural sciences and revolutionized their methods. The development of ethnology is largely due to the adoption of the evolutionary standpoint, because it impressed the conviction upon us that no event in the life of a people passes without leaving its effect upon later generations. The myths told by our ancestors and in which they believed have left their impress upon the ways of thinking of their descendants.… ([1889] 1955, p. 633)
To Tylor, Morgan, Spencer and other nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists, evolution was more than a principle of historical continuity and change. It derived not from Darwin—whose conception of natural selection recognized the historical character of evolutionary events—but from eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century ideas of inevitable progress, of order and direction in the events of history. Cultural history was viewed as a universal, unilineal, unfolding process; variations were expressions of differences in stage of development. To Tylor, for example, “civilization” among more evolved peoples was a higher manifestation of culture as a universal attribute of man.
Boas’ critique was directed not against the principle of evolution as historical development, which he accepted, but against the orthogenesis of dominant English and American theory of the time. He opposed history to orthogenesis, showing that sequential developments of technology, religion, art, social organization, moral ideas, and language did not follow the single course required by the orthogenetic theories, or move necessarily from simple to complex. A particular development involved many historical factors and was not simply a realization of inherent potentials. Similarities on which evolutionary conclusions were being based had been torn from their meaningful cultural-historical contexts; the similarity of the phenomena was “more apparent than real”; they were in reality noncomparable. Alleged parallel developments used as evidence were in fact not parallel but convergent outcomes of different histories. The course of historical evolution, Boas argued, must be derived from the comparison of actual histories (19l1b).
Historical evolution made the “progress” inherent in orthogenetic views a separate, additional question—namely, an evaluation of the historic record in terms of human ideals and standards inevitably culture-based and culture-bound. In some aspects of culture, as in social organization, religion, or art, “our own ideals are not uniform” and progress is difficult to define. There is a general consensus, however, that since earliest times there has been progress “in knowledge and control of nature.… If we should value progress entirely by the development of invention and knowledge, it would be easy to arrange the divisions of man-kind in order of progress, beginning with the simplest cultures of early Paleolithic man and leading up to modern civilizations …” (1938a, pp. 676–677).
Boas’ critique was thought by some to be an attempt to disprove the historical reality of evolution, but this is a reflection of the thought and usage of the time rather than of Boas’ meaning. Evolution and orthogenetic development had been identified in biology as well as anthropology. In biology the present understanding of evolution as the history of genetic change was achieved only after a long critical struggle against orthogenetic evolution that lasted into the twentieth century. The critique of cultural evolutionary theory, which Boas led, was a parallel effort in anthropology to displace orthogenetic preconceptions and promote the acceptance of history.
Culture and man
Boas’ work established the relative autonomy of cultural phenomena. Cultural forms are not expressions of differences in outer environment, inner biology, or some directive force within culture itself; they are diverse historical developments, each the outcome of a prior history in which many factors and events, cultural and non-cultural, have played a part. Cultures rather than culture became fundamental to the study of man.
In addition to this critical work Boas added new dimensions to the understanding of the relation of cultures and man: psychological considerations, which defined cultures as the environments of human thought and behavior; and biological considerations, which established the role of cultural environments (and hereditary factors) in human biological life, growth, and variation. This conception of cultures gave anthropology its modern integration: “All the various aspects of human life: bodily form, language, culture, as well as the environment in which man is placed, are interrelated, and the form of culture is a result of this integration” (1930c, p. 98).
Boas brought to anthropology a knowledge of the German psychology of his time: he was familiar with psychophysics, on which he published several papers; and he had studied the folk psychology movement, especially in the work of Wilhelm Wundt, whose conception of a comparative psychology based on studies of language, myth, and custom influenced Boas deeply. Early in his life, the declaration of a theologian friend that “one [has] not the right to doubt what the past [has] transmitted” had made him sharply aware of “the psychological origin of the implicit belief in the authority of tradition” as a fundamental problem (1938b). In psychophysics he found that the experience of the subject plays an important part in perception: quantitative methods alone do not ex-plain the phenomena; and Neo-Kantian philosophy raised fundamental questions in his mind about the role of subjective mental activity in the perception of the external world. A “desire to understand the relations between the objective and subjective worlds” became a lifelong interest of his work in anthropology (Boas 1938b; Benedict 1943). This desire is evident in the problem he studied among the Eskimos, and it drew him to the study of the North Pacific Coast. He was “struck by the flight of imagination” in Northwest Coast art and surmised that “a wealth of thought lay hidden behind the grotesque masks and the elaborately decorated utensils of these tribes” (1909, p. 307). Thus, in his work on Northwest peoples, as in a great deal of his lifework in ethnology, he focused on language, mythology, religion, and art—the symbolic aspects of the cultures, the objective cultural manifestations of inner thought (Codere 1959).
The new psychological dimensions which Boas gave to the relation of man and culture made a radical break with the rationalism of Tylor and the English school. In Tylor, customs and beliefs and culture itself are the rational products of the human mind. In Boas the emphasis is essentially reversed: cultures—the diverse, cumulative results of diverse complex histories—are the behavioral environments in which human thought and feeling are structured and operate. The traditional is learned as habits from childhood on; these habits of thought, of feeling, of behavior become largely unconscious and automatic; and the individual thinks and acts largely in conformity with the traditional and customary (1911b).
What is handed on varies from culture to culture, and the differences are not superficial but involve the fundamentals of human behavior and thought—the modes of experiencing phenomena, of grouping and organizing sense impressions, of understanding what are objects and what are qualities or attributes and how these are associated. The difference in types of thought and feeling between different peoples, as between primitive and modern, are not expressions of organic or biological differences but are the products “of the diversity of the cultures” (1904). The idea of instincts as factors in the adult behavior and thought of man is eliminated, being replaced by the concept of habits learned in society. The understanding of human nature is radically altered: no longer fixed and unchangeable, it is a function of culture, not nature, modifiable by changes in cultural institutions and forms (Dewey 1932).
Boas saw in this view an important implication for education. The comparative study of cultures offered a way to discover and expose the traditional elements in thought and belief, which is essential for freedom of thought and objective scientific inquiry. The philosopher and reflective thinker in any culture, as well as the average individual, reflect the attitudes and ideas current in their social and cultural environment (1902). Only by recognizing the “shackles” that tradition has laid upon us are we “able to break them” (1889; 1938b).
Limits of generalization
Boas’ historical approach—which involved “the consideration of every cultural phenomenon as the result of historical happenings” (1927, p. 1)—conveys the infinite complexity of ethnological data, a complexity not easily factorable into components and determinable relations. It does not deny the possibility of regularities or “laws” in cultural phenomena, as is often asserted by critics of Boas, but stresses the inherent difficulty of discovering them. Boas himself called attention to regularities—for example, the relation of population size and density to food supply and mode of economic life, to complexity of culture, and to forms of political organization; the relation of economic conditions to social, political, and legal organization; the relation of technological complexity to division of labor (1911b; 1930c). But the complexity of the phenomena and the difficulty of controlled analysis of an almost unlimited number of variables made him doubt that the degree of general validity of laws achieved in the natural sciences can be attained in ethnology. “In short, the danger is ever present that the widest generalizations that may be obtained… are commonplaces” ([1930a] 1955, p. 268). He was less skeptical of discoverable regularities in social conditioning than in “sequences of cultural achievement” or “the study of cultural integration.” He wrote, “… if we look for laws, the laws relate to the effects of physiological, psychological, and social conditions …” (Boas [1920c] 1955, p. 287; Benedict 1943).
Boas saw the historical (ideographic) goal of science, rather than the generalizing (nomothetic), as the goal of ethnology (1887). The establishment of general abstract laws, as in physics, in which particular phenomena are significant only as the data of research, cannot satisfy the human interest in human phenomena. Only the thorough under-standing of individual cultural phenomena, as found in history, will suffice. Toward that under-standing, generalizations, when discoverable, are not the end of research but are instrumental and heuristic.
Methods of study
By precept and example Boas made field work among living cultures a hallmark of American ethnology. In the course of his own research effort to understand and record cultural data from the native viewpoint—in particular, in his Northwest Coast studies—he developed new trends in field work, training natives as informants and investigators, recording all basic ideas in native texts, and gathering all relevant native views, however divergent.
He continued for more than forty years to focus on the culture of one people, the Kwakiutl, seeking on the one hand to understand Kwakiutl culture in the historical cultural context of the Northwest Coast and on the other hand to provide as comprehensive and rounded an archive record of a culture as he was able to obtain.
Under Boas’ leadership, field work among non-literate peoples had a special urgency. He had seen among the Eskimos how rapidly natives were changing or disappearing, and he felt a pressing need to record their languages and cultures before they became extinct.
Although Boas referred to the history of culture as an aim of ethnology, in practice “history” to him was more a dimension of the data than an end of research. He was less concerned with historical reconstructions than with techniques for dealing with the historicity of the phenomena involved in a particular problem. He saw in archeology a way to reconstruct history with some accuracy and contributed directly to its development: under his direction, stratigraphy, used for the first time in American archeology in excavations in the Valley of Mexico, revealed the sequence of prehistoric cultures that became the foundation of Central American archeology (Boas 1913; Mason 1943). Distribution studies of similar phenomena on a world, continental, or area scale, supplementing archeology and used cautiously, make some historical inferences possible. For Boas such studies were simply instrumental, and he was critical of tendencies to make them ends of research or to make “culture areas” used in museum presentation into natural classifications.
Boas used distributions instrumentally in studies of mythology and art (1896a; 1903b; 1908; 1916b) and in his general approach to the understanding of an individual culture. Knowing what features a culture has acquired by diffusion and what it has invented independently can reveal the creative individuality of a particular culture, mythology, or art. Boas’ contributions to mythology and folklore and his work on primitive art advanced modern methods in both fields of study (Benedict 1931; Jacobs 1959; Boas 1927). His works on Tsimshian and Kwakiutl mythology were pioneer studies of the ways in which the culture of a people is expressed in its mythology, and they revealed mythology as a rich source of native values and thought (1916b; 1935). His historical treatment of mythologies demonstrated the complexity and diversity of their sources, references, and meanings, and it showed that attempts to explain mythology as “symbolizing or anthropomorphizing natural phenomena” were inadequate ([1891] 1955, p. 445; 1933).
An individual culture was never a unified, organic system to Boas. Its long history, the diverse origins of its content and form, its continuing change, and the continuing influence of other cultures upon it all make complete integration virtu-ally impossible. “Holism” for Boas therefore was not the idea, entertained by some, that a culture can be treated as a unified system; it referred to the importance of understanding a particular phase or pattern in relation to its entire relevant cultural background. It also referred to the necessary investigation of the interrelations of different aspects of culture within the whole cultural frame-work. Boas was critical of attempts to describe a culture or a society in unified, general terms. Such configurations, however suggestive, are inevitably partial and selective, not exhaustive, and affected by subjective attitudes of the observer (1938a; 1933).
Linguistics
It is difficult to overestimate the central importance of Boas’ work. His contributions broke sharply with philological tradition, opening new horizons and establishing modern linguistic anthropology. Boas saw languages, like cultures, as diverse products of diverse histories, each an essentially unique configuration at a given time. He found in language a model of the way in which the traditional and the habitual in human behavior become virtually automatic and unconscious in individual minds. As Boas saw it, the scientific problem of linguistics—the thorough understanding of languages and their historical development and the intricate role of language in human thought and culture—called for an immense research effort in the study of individual languages, and especially of unwritten languages ignored in traditional philology. He devoted himself untiringly to that effort throughout his life, recording and analyzing many languages himself, inspiring the participation of others by precept and example, and finding sources of financial support for linguistic research and publication.
American Indian languages took a large part of his attention; many were on the verge of extinction, and both in phonology and morphology their features challenged the preconceptions of traditional philology. Boas founded and edited the Publications of the American Ethnological Society, begun in 1906, the Handbook of American Indian Languages, begun in 1910, and the International Journal of American Linguistics, established in 1917. In 1925 Boas organized with Sapir and Bloomfield the Committee on American Indian Languages of the American Council of Learned Societies, which for many years centralized research in this field.
“Inner form.”
Boas’ empiricism—description and analysis of a language in its own terms—was directed by the conception of the “inner form” of a language, which he accepted from Heymann Steinthal, a nineteenth-century folk psychologist and linguist; the concept itself goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt. In Boas’ inductive approach, linguistic data are accepted as found, regardless of philological preconceptions. The effect of his approach was a breakthrough of traditional limits and the discovery of a wider range and diversity of linguistic phenomena in both phonetics and morphology than had been thought to exist. For example, such phenomena as words without vowels and unfamiliar principles of classifying nominal or verbal ideas were found. For discovering the “inner form” of a language, the limited phonetic and lexical data used by philology in historical reconstruction of genetic relationships were not enough; the process required description in a grammar “treated as though an intelligent [speaker] was going to develop the forms of his own thoughts by an analysis of his own form of speech” (1911a, p. 81). This requirement led Boas to stress the importance of native texts and the use of speakers who could be taught to write texts in their own language. Grammars of non-Indo-European languages, only occasional earlier, became after Boas an integral part of linguistic work in anthropology.
Boas maintained high technical standards in his own work in descriptive linguistics and contributed significantly to the development of modern linguistic techniques. His phonetic work laid the foundations for the development of modern phonemics by Sapir, as did his comparative morpho-logical studies for the development of structural linguistics.
Language and thought
It has been said that “with Boas almost the total scope of American linguistic anthropology until the present time became defined and adumbrated” (Hymes 1964, p. 9). Of signal importance is how his attempt to understand and compare the “inner form” of different languages led him into considerations of language and thought, of language and culture—a phase of his lifelong concern with the problem of the “relation between the objective world and man’s subjective world as it has taken form in different cultures” (Benedict 1943, p. 27). This approach has inspired the more recent work of others on what has become known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis of the determining role of language in human thought. Boas, it should be noted, demonstrated fundamental ways in which the structure of language influences the direction of thought of its speakers, but he took the position that culture influences language more than language influences culture.
Boas’ conception of linguistic phenomena as part of ethnological phenomena in general, subject to similar influences, led him, in historical linguistics, to challenge traditional naturalistic views of genealogical classification of languages. In American Indian languages he found distributional evidence that lexical, phonetic, and morphological borrowing had occurred, that languages can develop by convergence from diverse sources as well as, in the traditional view, by divergence from a common origin. Historical study therefore requires investigation not only “of the similarities of languages, but equally intensively” of “their dissimilarities”: “the problem … is not one of classification but… [of tracing] the history of the development of human speech. … Classification is only a means to an end” ([1920b] 1955, pp. 212–213). His conclusion —that “the whole theory of an ‘Ursprache’ for every group of modern languages must be held in abeyance until we can prove that these languages go back to a single stock and that they have not originated, to a large extent, by the process of acculturation” (ibid., p. 217)—has not been adopted in linguistics, although there are indications in Indo-European philology that the fundamental question it raises has not been finally settled (Boas 1929; Jakobson 1944).
Physical anthropology
In physical anthropology, as in other areas, Boas’ pioneer efforts opened up the modern field. His contributions to the study of human growth, hereditary and environmental influences in man, and race and the composition of human populations led physical anthropology from a static taxonomic field of anthropometric description and race classification into a dynamic science of human biology. Skilled in mathematics as no other anthropologist of his time, he devised techniques for handling problems that were innovations in statistics and biometrics (Howells 1959).
Race
Boas’ work on race is transitional between the nineteenth-century tradition of viewing races as readily classifiable natural subdivisions of the human species and the contemporary trend toward a denial that race is a meaningful biological concept in the study of man. Although he saw taxonomy for its own sake as barren, he did not reject the concept of race, but rather refined and limited its meaning, avoiding naturalistic assumptions and making it instrumental in the analysis of human genetic history. He found in the biological phenomena of human populations a complexity that traditional views failed to recognize. Human groups —“local or social varieties,” composed of “a series of individuals whose bodily form depends on their ancestry and environment”—cannot be scientifically described by subjective characterizations of type or by statistical averages alone; nor can groups be compared or classified by single features alone —like cephalic index—or by an arbitrary selection of a few features, even if the chosen features are stable and hereditary. Statistical description must include the variability of a group around the average, indicating its relative homogeneity or heterogeneity. And, since groups may be alike in one or a few features but different in others, Boas opposed a “cast-iron system” of selected measurements; more exhaustive description is an essential preliminary to the comparison and classification of groups (1899a).
Although Boas recognized that “the principles of biological science forbid us to assume a permanent stability of bodily forms,” he accepted in his early work the dominant view that “anatomical characteristics of the present races” have been permanent at least since neolithic times (1911b, pp. 41, 44). Impermanence of features primarily involves variations within a race (1899a). Several considerations later led him to recognize a larger influence of environmental factors upon human types, a greater biological plasticity of the species: (1) the consideration of man as a self-domesticated animal form; (2) the discovery that head form (cephalic index) changes significantly with changes of environment; and (3) the phenomena of retardation and acceleration in human growth, involving environmental as well as hereditary factors.
Modification of bodily forms
Boas credited the idea that man is a self-domesticated animal form to two German scientists, Johannes Ranke and Eduard Hahn (Boas 1938a, p. 109). He noted that the domestication of animals and the development of human culture involve similar changes in nutrition and mode of life and that the great variability found in domesticated animal types when compared to related wild forms occurs especially in features used in racial description and classification, namely pigmentation, hair, eye color, head and body proportions (1911b; 1938a, pp. 108–110). Boas suggested that the environmental conditions of human cultural life and its diversification—the self-domestication of man—had been a factor in modifications of human anatomy and physiology.
The changes in head form which Boas reported in “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” (1912) surprised him as much as other anthropologists and influenced his thinking as profoundly as it affected the discipline. Boas had defended the cephalic index as a measure of a stable, hereditary trait (1899a; 1899b), but the assumption of its stability was based on data gathered in Europe, where no environmental change was involved. In the New York study Boas compared children with their European immigrant parents and compared parent–child measurements in cases of children born before immigration with cases of children born in America after immigration. Some 18,000 individuals were studied— Bohemians, Hebrews, Sicilians, and Neapolitans— and stature, weight, and head measurements were taken. The results showed significant changes in measurements of the head and in the cephalic index calculated from them.
The impact of this study on anthropology cannot be overstated. It ended the obsessive reliance of anthropologists upon cephalic index as a key to genetic history and, as no other work, it compelled recognition of environmental influences upon human anatomy and physiology.
Initially Boas wrote that he had no adequate explanation of the changes but that they indicated “a great plasticity of human types” in response to changes of environment. Some of his remarks may have been overstatements, as Tanner has suggested, but the criticism aroused by publication of the study was directed indiscriminately both at his interpretations and at the validity of the study’s methods and results. However, the findings have been confirmed by later work and are not challenged today. Similar changes have been found in studies of other migrant groups—in Hawaii, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Seattle, New York, and Philadelphia (Shapiro 1939; Goldstein 1943; Boas 1916c, 1920a, 1928a; Spier 1929; Tanner 1959; Herskovits 1943). Boas’ own work on human growth clarified the meaning of the 1912 study, and he later wrote of a “limited plasticity,” meaning that the results do not involve genetic changes but show “that the type as we see it contains elements that are not genetic but an expression of the influence of environment” (Boas 1936, p. 523; Tanner 1959).
Human growth
The study of human growth was new when Boas entered the field, its cross-sectional data compiled from height and weight measurements of different individuals, wherever and whenever gathered. Although the importance of longitudinal studies—successive measurements of the same individuals over a period of years— had been suggested in 1874, it was Boas’ discoveries that made inevitable “the longitudinal studies which have been the chief characteristic of progress in the field in the first half of this century” (Tanner 1959, p. 107).
Boas began the first American longitudinal growth study in 1891, and in 1892 he questioned “in how far the results (of cross-sectional studies) have a physiological meaning and in how far they are purely statistical phenomena” (1892). He found that differences in the acceleration and retardation of individuals account for the increased variability at adolescence shown in cross-sectional data and for the distortion of the statistical curves from the “normal” or Gaussian form. Individuals differ in tempo of growth, and in later studies Boas showed that the variability at adolescence is greatly reduced when data on individuals are plotted by “time of peak velocity” of growth rather than by chronological age (1930b).
Boas’ concept of physiological or developmental age in these studies gained currency through its use by Crampton (1908) as well as by others, and its impact on the social sciences (especially education) has continued, though it has not been fully accepted. Retardation and acceleration occur in mental as well as physical development, but, as Boas showed, physical and mental development do not determine one another; they are linked through common causes. The retarded child may develop, even accelerate, both physiologically and psychologically. Intelligence tests developed by Binet and others, based on chronological age and cross-sectional data, largely disregarded these findings, primarily because they assumed that they were testing innate, inherited intelligence. Recent intelligence studies, using longitudinal methods, indicate the presence of tempo of growth in mental ability (Tanner 1959).
Heredity and environment
It has been erroneously asserted that Boas stressed the role of environmental factors in human biology at the expense of a recognition of heredity. The scientific problem, as he saw it, was to determine the relation between environmental and hereditary factors. He wrote: “… it seems justifiable to define racial characteristics as we do those of a variable plant, namely, by stating that under definite environmental conditions the bodily form of a race and its functioning are such as we observe, without prejudging … [the influence of environment]. The actual problem, then, would be to determine whether and how far the traits of the body may be so influenced” ([1922] 1955, p. 37). In pioneer studies in biometrical genetics Boas attempted to isolate the role of heredity in head form, face form, and other anthropometric traits (1899b 1903a; 1907). Stimulated by Johannsen’s work on beans, he analyzed populations into component family lines and showed that the variation of a population is composed of the variation of family lines (between-fraternity variance) and the variation of fraternities (within-fraternity variance) (Boas 1916a; Tanner 1959).
In this work Boas did not oppose Mendelian genetics, as is commonly thought. In his earliest effort, in 1894, he found in a bimodal distribution of face breadth in the offspring of French–Indian parents a “tendency to reproduce one of the ancestral types”—a phenomenon contrary to the traditional (Galton) conception of “blending” inheritance, which came to be known, after Pearson, as “alternating” inheritance (1894). This discovery pre-disposed Boas, after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900, toward a limited acceptance of Mendelian principles. He found that while the simple ratios of “classical” Mendelian inheritance, with their “unit” characters and evidence of dominant and recessive traits, do fit the genetic phenomena of some human traits, like eye color, they do not fit others, like stature. Actually, the apparent conflict between biometric studies of continuous variation, like stature, and Mendelian studies of discontinuous variation, like eye color, has been reconciled only more recently by developments in both biometrics and genetics (Tanner 1959).
Influence
Boas believed that truth, widely shared through publications and education, can serve to liberate the mind from traditional confusion, error, and prejudice. The findings of anthropology challenged traditional thinking at many points, and Boas spoke out boldly throughout his life against racism and race prejudice, against narrow nationalism and war, and for an internationalism based on “the common interests of humanity” (1928b; 1904–1943). Supplementing his own work on race and the situation of the American Negro, Boas stimulated or guided research by others, including the work of Klineberg on race differences, of Herskovits on the America Negro, and of Gilberto Freyre and Rudiger Bilden in their pioneer studies of race in Brazil. His influence was far-reaching; as Gossett has written: “It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history” (Gossett 1963).
As a teacher, Boas’ influence was profound. Between his years at Clark University and his retirement in 1936 he taught generations of anthropologists, including: A. F. Chamberlain, A. L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, A. A. Goldenweiser, R. H. Lowie, Frank G. Speck, Fay-Cooper Cole, H. K. Haeberlin, Paul Radin, Leslie Spier, Erna Gunther, J. A. Mason, Elsie C. Parsons, Ruth F. Benedict, Margaret Mead, G. A. Reichard, M. J. Herskovits, Franz Olbrechts, A. I. Hallowell, R. L. Bunzel, M. J. Andrade, George Herzog, Frederica de Laguna, M. Jacobs, Ruth M. Underbill, Giinter Wagner, Jules Henry, Rhoda Métraux, Marcus S. Goldstein, Alexander Lesser, G. Weltfish, M. F. Ashley Montagu, E. A. Hoebel, May M. Edel, Irving Goldman, as well as students in other fields who came to him for his teaching of anthropology. In his teaching Boas was consistently open-ended, moving from problem to problem in physical anthropology, linguistics, or ethnology, examining theoretical questions in the context of empirical data and handling data in the context of relevant theory (Mead 1959b).
Boas continued his scientific activity to the moment of his death at an anthropology luncheon on December 29, 1942. His contributions, besides six books, include more than seven hundred mono-graphs and articles (Andrews et al. 1943). He was honored during his lifetime throughout the scientific world by honorary degrees, by honorary memberships in scientific societies of many countries, by a Festschrift on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his doctorate (Boas Anniversary Volume … 1906), by membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1900, and by election as president of the American Anthropological Association from 1907 to 1909, the New York Academy of Sciences in 1910, and the American Association for the Ad-vancement of Science in 1931. His scientific legacy is the modern science of anthropology; his greater legacy the manner in which he changed our conception of man.
Alexander Lesser
[For the historical context of Boas’ work, see the biographies ofBastian; Putnam; Spencer; Tylor; Wundt. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see the biographies ofBenedict; Cole, Fay-Cooper; Goldenweiser; Herskovits; Kroeber; Lowie; Parsons; ElsieClews; Radin; Sapir; Speck; Spier; and the entriesAnthropology; Ethnography; Evolution; Linguistics; Physical anthropology; Race.]
WORKS BY BOAS
1881 Beiträge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers. Kiel: Schmidt & Klaunig.
1885 Baffin-Land: Geographische Ergebnisse einer in den Jahren 1883 und 1884 ausgefiihrten Forschungsreise. Petermanns Mitteilungen, Vol. 17, Supplement 80. Gotha (Germany): Perthes.
(1887) 1955 The Study of Geography. Pages 639–647 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Volume 9 of Science.
(1887–1936) 1955 Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? A collection of papers written between 1887–1936. First published in book form in 1940.
1883 The Central Eskimo. Pages 399–669 in U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Sixth Annual Report, 1884–1885. Washington: Government Printing Office. ? A paperback edition was published in 1964 by the Univ. of Nebraska Press.
(1889) 1955 The Aims of Ethnology. Pages 626–638 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in German.
(1891) 1955 Dissemination of Tales Among the Natives of North America. Pages 437–445 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Volume 4 of the Journal of American Folk-lore.
1892 The Growth of Children. Science 19:256–257, 281–282; 20:351–352.
(1894) 1955 The Half-blood Indian. Pages 138–148 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Volume 45 of Popular Science Monthly.
(1896a) 1955 The Growth of Indian Mythologies: A Study Based Upon the Growth of the Mythologies of the North Pacific Coast. Pages 425–436 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Volume 9 of the Journal of American Folk-lore.
(1896b) 1955 The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology. Pages 270–280 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Science.
(1899a) 1955 Some Recent Criticisms of Physical Anthropology. Pages 165–171 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the American Anthropologist.
l899b The Cephalic Index. American Anthropologist New Series 1:448–461.
(1902) 1955 The Ethnological Significance of Esoteric Doctrines. Pages 312–315 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Science.
1903?a Heredity in Head Form. American Anthropologist New Series 5:530–538.
(1903b) 1955 The Decorative Art of the North American Indians. Pages 546–563 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Popular Science Monthly.
1904 Some Traits of Primitive Culture. Journal of American Folk-lore 17:243–254.
(1904–1943) 1945 Race and Democratic Society. New York: Augustin. ? A collection of articles and lectures.
1907 Heredity in Anthropometric Traits. American Anthropologist New Series 9:453?469.
(1908) 1955 Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A Study in the History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in the U.S. National Museum. Pages 564–592 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum.
1909 The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island. Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Publications, Vol. 5, No. 2. Leiden: Brill; New York: Stechert.
191la Introduction. Part I, pages 1–83 in Franz Boas (editor), Handbook of American Indian Languages. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin No. 40. Washington: Government Printing Office.
(1911b) 1963 The Mind of Primitive Man. Rev. ed. New York: Collier. ? A paperback edition was published in 1965 by the Free Press.
1912 Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. American Anthropologist New Series 14:530–562. ? A partial summary of this article was published in Boas’ Race, Language and Culture.
(1913) 1955 Archaeological Investigations in the Valley of Mexico by the International School, 1911–1912. Pages 530–534 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Americanists.
1916a On the Variety of Lines of Descent Represented in a Population. American Anthropologist New Series 18:1–9.
1916b Tsimshian Mythology. Pages 29–1037 in U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Thirty-first Annual Report, 1909–1910. Washington: Government Printing Office.
(1916c) 1955 New Evidence in Regard to the Instability of Human Types. Pages 76–81 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
1920a Anthropometry of Porto Rico. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 3:247–253.
(1920b) 1955 The Classification of American Languages. Pages 211–218 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the American Anthropologist.
(1920c) 1955 The Methods of Ethnology. Pages 281–289 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the American Anthropologist.
(1922) 1955 Report on an Anthropometric Investigation of the Population of the United States. Pages 28–59 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
(1927) 1955 Primitive Art. New ed. New York: Dover.
1928a Family Traits as Determined by Heredity and Environment. National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings 14:496–503.
(1928b) 1962 Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton.
(1929) 1955 Classification of American Indian Languages. Pages 219–225 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan. ? First published in Volume 5 of Language.
(1930a) 1955 Some Problems of Methodology in the Social Sciences. Pages 260–269 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan.
1930b Observations on the Growth of Children. Science New Series 72:44–48.
1930c Anthropology. Volume 2, pages 73–110 in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
(1933) 1955 [Review of] G. W. Locher, The Serpent in Kwakiutl Religion: A Study in Primitive Culture. Pages 446–450 in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan.
1935 Kwakiutl Culture as Reflected in Mythology. American Folk-lore Society, Memoir No. 28. New York: The Society.
1936 The Effects of American Environment on Immigrants and Their Descendants. Science New Series 84:522–525.
1938a Boas, Franz (editor) General Anthropology. New York and Boston: Heath.
1938b An Anthropologist’s Credo. Nation 147:201–204.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrews, H. J. et al. 1943 Bibliography of Franz Boas. Pages 67–109 in Franz Boas, 1858–1942. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 61. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Benedict, Ruth 1931 Folklore. Volume 6, pages 288–293 in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
Benedict, Ruth 1943 Franz Boas as an Ethnologist. Pages 27–34 in Franz Boas, 1858–1942. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 61. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Boas Anniversay Volume: Anthropological Papers Written in Honor of Franz Boas. 1906 New York: Stechert.
Codere, Helen 1959 The Understanding of the Kwakiutl. Pages 61–75 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Crampton, C. Ward (1908) 1944 Physiological Age: A Fundamental Principle. Child Development 15:3–52.
Dewey, John 1932 Human Nature. Volume 7, pages 531–536 in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
Freeman, John 1965 University Anthropology: Early Departments in the United States. Kroeber Anthropological Society, Papers 32:78–90.
Goldschmidt, Walter R. (editor) 1959 The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Goldstein, Marcus S. 1940 Recent Trends in Physical Anthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 26:191–209.
Goldstein, Marcus S. 1943 Demographic and Bodily Changes in Descendants of Mexican Immigrants, With Comparable Data on Parents and Children in Mexico. Austin: Univ. of Texas, Institute of Latin-American Studies.
Goldstein, Marcus S. 1948 Franz Boas’ Contributions to Physical Anthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology New Series 6:145–161.
Gossett, Thomas F. 1963 Race: The History of an Idea in America. Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press.
Herskovits, Melville J. 1943 Franz Boas as Physical Anthropologist. Pages 39–51 in Franz Boas, 1858–1942. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 61. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Herskovits, Melville J. 1953 Franz Boas: The Science of Man in the Making. New York: Scribner.
Howells, William W. 1959 Boas as Statistician. Pages 112–116 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Hymes, Dell H. (editor) 1964 Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. New York: Harper.
Jacobs, Melville 1959 Folklore. Pages 119–138 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Jakobson, Roman 1944 Franz Boas’ Approach to Language. International Journal of American Linguistics 10:188–195.
Kluckhohn, Clyde; and Prufer, Olaf 1959 Influences During the Formative Years. Pages 4–28 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Kroeber, A. L. 1943 Franz Boas: The Man. Pages 5–26 in Franz Boas, 1858–1942. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 61. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Lowie, Robert H. 1947 Biographical Memoir of Franz Boas: 1858–1942. National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs 24:303–322.
Mason, J. Alden 1943 Franz Boas as an Archeologist. Pages 58–66 in Franz Boas, 1858–1942. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 61. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Mead, Margaret 1959a An Anthropologist at Work:Writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ? A critical study of Ruth Benedict, illustrated from her own writing.
Mead, Margaret 1959b Apprenticeship Under Boas. Pages 29–45 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Shapiro, Harry L. 1939 Migration and Environment: A Study of the Physical Characteristics of the Japanese Immigrants to Hawaii and the Effects of Environment on Their Descendants. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Smith, Marian W. 1959 Boas’ “Natural History” Approach to Field Method. Pages 46–60 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Spier, Leslie 1929 Growth of Japanese Children Born in America and in Japan. University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 1. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.
Spier, Leslie 1959 Some Central Elements in the Legacy. Pages 146–155 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wise.: The Association.
Stocking, George W. JR. 1965 From Physics to Ethnology: Franz Boas’ Arctic Expedition as a Problem in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1:53–66.
Stocking, George W. Jr. 1966 Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective. American Anthropologist New Series 68:867–882.
Tanner, James M. 1959 Boas’ Contributions to Knowledge of Human Growth and Form. Pages 76–111 in Walter R. Goldschmidt (editor), The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. American Anthropological Association, Memoirs, No. 89. Menasha, Wisc.: The Association.