Boas, Franz
Boas, Franz 1858-1942
Franz Boas is recognized widely as the “father of American anthropology” because at Columbia University he trained a generation of graduate students who transformed an assortment of classificatory schemes based on evolutionary hierarchies into a comprehensive four-field discipline that integrated linguistics and archaeology with biological anthropology and cultural anthropology. In addition, Boas was a pioneering public intellectual who used science to challenge ideas of racial inferiority and the barbarism of certain cultures by employing empirical research to demonstrate how racism, the environment, and the history of specific cultures can explain difference and diversity.
EDUCATION AND WORKS
Born in Minden, Germany, Boas attended universities in Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel. His first academic appointment was in 1888 at Clark University, where he initiated a comprehensive research program that began to challenge some of the basic assumptions of racial categories; those efforts culminated in a major project for the U.S. Immigration Commission and were published as Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1912). In that work Boas demonstrated that the environment plays a significant role in determining physical attributes, such as head size, that often were used at that time to demarcate racial difference.
During the late nineteenth century racial categories were classified by head size, body type, and skin color and were linked to behavior, language, customs, and morality. Boas asserted that body type and race are discrete modalities and are not linked to customs and belief systems. Furthermore, he argued, one could not demarcate distinct racial categories accurately and cultures could not be rank-ordered within the then-current terminology as savage, barbarian, and civilized. His most definitive treatment of these issues was in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911).
The foundation of that theoretical paradigm shift in the natural and social sciences was Boas’s understanding that cultures and languages should be evaluated in the context of their own complex histories and on their own terms as opposed to analyzing societies in terms of stages of evolution along a singular road to a civilization or an apex of culture. Much of Boas’s research and theory was grounded in empiricism, participant observation, and detailed transcription of grammars, myths, kinship terminology, and folklore, using the interpretive framework of the people he studied.
Opposed to imposing an analytical framework on a set of traits and tendencies to deduce laws of culture, Boas instead relied on the use of inductive methods to identify patterns in process and the diffusion of material culture or folkloric themes through time and between cultural groups. Most of his ethnographic fieldwork was focused on the complex indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest. To achieve such exhaustive empirical studies Boas relied on key informants who served as important collaborators. One of the most influential of those collaborators was George Hunt (Lingít), who was raised among the Kwakwaka’wakw near Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Hunt was instrumental in helping Boas develop his definitive work on the Kwakiutl language and kinship.
In 1896 Boas began to lecture at Columbia University, and in 1899 he became its first professor of anthropology. At that university he developed the distinctly North American four-field approach to anthropology. He also helped curate anthropological exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked from 1895 to 1905.
In addition to his ethnographic work Boas conducted detailed studies on the growth of children and the head sizes of immigrants. Between 1908 and 1910 he measured 18,000 adults and children, using the data to produce the study Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants (1912). Although there has been debate about the validity of his data, that study, among others Boas conducted, demonstrated that the physical metrics used to demonstrate the putative superiority and inferiority of racial groups and thus justify Jim Crow segregation and selective immigration restrictions were erroneous. African American intellectuals and early civil rights organizations welcomed the new science, and Boas actively supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and formed lasting working relationships with scholars such as Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) and W. E. B. Du Bois. Boas was also a champion of peace, academic freedom, and equal opportunity.
INFLUENCE
Perhaps Boas’s greatest contribution to the field of anthropology was inspiring and training a generation of students who shaped the field in enduring ways. Many were women, and several were people of color. The list of students and colleagues whom Boas influenced at Columbia is impressive. Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie established the anthropology program at the University of California at Berkeley, Edward Sapir (1884–1935) and Faye-Cooper Cole (1881–1961) developed anthropology at University of Chicago, Leslie Spier (1893–1961) brought anthropology to the University of Washington, and Melville J. Herskovits organized an anthropology program at Northwestern. Other notable students include Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston whose collective influence on American science and letters is much greater than his male students. Others included William Jones (1871–1909), a member of the Fox Nation and one of the first American Indian anthropologists; the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio (1883–1960); the African American ethnographer Eugene King (1898–1981); Elsie Clews Parsons (1875–1945); Gene Weltfish (1902–1980); Gladys Reichard (1893–1955); and Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940). Together they went well beyond Boas’s careful empirical studies to develop an understanding that cultures are dynamic and fluid, language is an integral aspect of culture that has internal structures and logics, history and ethnographic methods are central facets of anthropological research, and racial categories are scientifically untenable bases of analysis.
SEE ALSO Anthropology, Biological; Anthropology, U.S.; Benedict, Ruth; Culture; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Ethnography; Ethnology and Folklore; Herskovits, Melville J.; Hurston, Zora Neale; Jim Crow; Kroeber, Alfred; Lowie, Robert; Mead, Margaret; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Race
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY WORKS
Boas, Franz. 1911. The Mind of Primitive Man; A Course of Lectures Delivered before the Lowell Institute, Boston, Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910–1911. New York: Macmillan.
Boas, Franz 1912. Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. New York: Columbia University Press.
SECONDARY WORKS
Baker, Lee D. 1994. The Location of Franz Boas within the African American Struggle. Critique of Anthropology 14 (2): 199–217.
Baker, Lee D. 2004. Franz Boas Out of the Ivory Tower. Anthropological Theory 4 (1): 29–51.
Bashkow, Ira. 2004. A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries. American Anthropologist 106 (3): 443–458
Bunzl, Matti. 2004. Boas, Foucault, and the “Native Anthropologist.” American Anthropologist 106 (3): 435–442
Cole, Douglas. 1999. Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858–1906. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Darnell, Regna. 1998. And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.
Kuper, Adam. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London and New York: Routledge.
Lewis, Herbert. 2001. The Passion of Franz Boas. American Anthropologist 103 (2): 447–467
Stocking, George W., Jr. 1968 Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stocking, George W., Jr., ed. 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lee D. Baker